Long-understood rules governing balance of deterrence between militant group and Israel have been blown away
Iranians participate in a Tehran rally to condemn the Israel i air strike in Lebanon that killed Hassan Nasrallah and several Hizbollah commanders. Photograph: Majid Saeedi/Getty Imagesleader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike on an underground headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs marks the most alarming escalation in almost a year of war between the Shia militant organisation and Israel .
For much of the early months of the conflict with Hizbullah, which began on October 8th – a day after Hamas’s attack from Gaza – it was understood Israel would not assassinate the militant group’s most senior members. But in recent months those “red lines” have increasingly been rubbed away. On the Israeli side in the past fortnight, however, evidence has been building that a case was being made for a significant escalation.
While it may take several days to understand the full import of the fallout from Friday’s strike, Netanyahu and his military chiefs have taken an enormous gamble, not simply regarding the situation in Israel’s north, where tens of thousands have been displaced by the fighting, but with the wider region and with the country’s relationships with its international partners.
Most significantly, the strikes represent a direct challenge to Tehran, for whom Nasrallah represented its most important strategic regional ally, whose tens of thousands of Iranian-supplied missiles aimed at Israel have long been seen as a key strategic foil preventing an Israeli attack on Iran itself.
Then there is the most important question: whether Iran can accept the strike against Nasrallah, or whether it too could be drawn into a widening conflict, and whether the strike is intended by Israel as setting the conditions for a strike against Iran.
Lebanon Hizbullah Israel-Hamas-Conflict Binyamin-Netanyahu
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