Rory Jones & Carrie Keller-Lynn
Apair of provocative strikes that killed enemies of Israel has pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider war the U.S. has worked hard to head off.
On Tuesday night, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed a top official with Hezbollah, setting off concerns the Lebanese militant group would feel compelled to respond. Hours later, after midnight, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a mysterious strike in Tehran, vastly complicating the calculus and raising concerns about a regional escalation to some of their highest levels so far in nearly 10 months of war in Gaza.
With Israel’s military eager to wind down its operations in the Gaza Strip as fighting intensifies on the border with Lebanon and tension rises with Tehran, the war threatened to be evolving into the sort of regional battle on several fronts that U.S. diplomats have shuttled around the region for months to prevent.
The strikes came as Iran used this week’s inauguration of its new president to show off the powerful collection of militias it has assembled around the Middle East. Representatives of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah all gathered in Tehran, where Hamas leader Haniyeh hugged new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian amid chants of “Death to Israel.”
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