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7 August 2024

Why Israel Escalates

Dalia Dassa Kaye

The ten-month-old war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip long ago escaped its local geography, triggering dangerous military escalations across the Middle East—deadly clashes on the Israeli-Lebanese border, Houthi assaults in the Red Sea and on Tel Aviv, attacks by Iranian-aligned militias against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, and even direct clashes between Israel and Iran. Then, within the space of 24 hours last week, Israel took responsibility for the assassination of Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander, in Beirut in retaliation for a Hezbollah rocket attack in the Golan Heights, and the country is assumed to be behind the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Tehran. This one-two punch made many observers fear the eruption of an even more catastrophic regional war.

Why is Israel now escalating in such a risky manner? To be sure, its latest attacks are not, on their own, unprecedented. The country has a lengthy record of assassinating Palestinian leaders and has killed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria. Israel has also long demonstrated intelligence capabilities that allow it to penetrate deep inside Iran. And previous rounds of escalation over the past ten months have not led to an all-out regional war. But eventual de-escalation and containment are never guaranteed; any state’s rational calculations favoring restraint can suddenly be overtaken by events on the ground, leading to miscalculations or even intentional strategic decisions to provoke a wider conflict. The tempo and nature of the latest Israeli strikes dramatically increase the risk of more serious escalation. Israel’s leaders undoubtedly understand that the back-to-back assassinations of Shukr and Haniyeh—and the fact that the methods of the killings maximized Iran’s humiliation—will likely trigger Tehran, and possibly the other armed groups it backs, to retaliate.

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