Is the Middle East About to Explode?

Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah's options are limited in response to Israel's assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran—presumably by Israel, who does not acknowledge it—the same week Israel killed Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr with an admitted missile strike in Lebanon. Many media accounts frame these attacks as raising fears of an escalatory spiral. But while the assassinations are significant events, worries about what follows are overrating the individual personalities involved. The larger dynamics haven’t changed enough to cause or prevent a ceasefire in Gaza, and while risks of a wider war have increased, the fear-focused frame is overblown.

Iran

One big takeaway is that Iran failed to guarantee security for allied leaders on its own territory.  Haniyeh was in Tehran for the new Iranian president’s inauguration.

Haniyeh was based in Doha, and Israel trying to kill him in Qatar’s capital would entail serious risks. In 1997, Israel tried to kill senior Hamas figure Khaled Mashal by poisoning him in Jordan, and the Jordanian government got Israel to give Mashal the antidote by threatening to break off relations, recently established in a 1994 peace treaty.

Qatar could provide security for Haniyeh diplomatically; Iran was supposed to provide it by force (military, deterrence, intelligence, police). The failure to protect Haniyeh makes Iran look weak, including to its proxies, who will probably refrain from open travel to Iran for a while.

This wasn’t a major attack on Iran, but it was quite embarrassing. Iran’s Supreme Leader has vowed “harsh punishment.” But options for retaliation are limited.

Iran already took an unprecedentedly large shot at Israel this spring, and that sets a baseline for their response now. On April 13, Iran fired over 320 projectiles—a mix of kamikaze drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles—and failed to do any significant damage. Israeli air defenses, with help from the U.S., U.K., and France, plus Jordan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, stopped nearly all of it.

Arab states defending Israel is also unprecedented. It shows that the anti-Iran coalition in the Middle East is real.

Iran’s April launch, like much of their actions towards Israel, appeared to be trying to make a point while avoiding escalation to war. They must’ve been disappointed in the results. Instead of showing they can penetrate Israel’s air defenses, they showed the opposite. Israel’s limited response used a stealthy weapon to destroy a radar station deep in Iran, near a nuclear facility. Iran downplayed that strike and let the military exchange end there.

In response to the Haniyeh assassination, Iran could try to outdo the April launch and hope to overwhelm air defenses. But that risks the wider war Iran’s behavior keeps showing it wants to avoid. And a bigger launch might fail anyway, then prompt an Israeli retaliation that gets through.

The April launch was in response to Israel bombing an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria in broad daylight, killing Iranian military commanders. That was an attack on the Iranian state, an escalation in the longrunning Israel-Iran shadow war. The Haniyeh assassination is neither. He wasn’t Iranian government, and Israel has conducted unclaimed targeted killings in Iran before, most notably against nuclear scientists.

Iran needs to save face—to tag back—but doesn’t want open war with Israel, let alone the United States. An uneasy U.S.-Iran balance has held since February. When rocket fire from an Iran-backed militia killed three American soldiers, the U.S. limited retaliation to militias in Iraq and Syria, and Iran told its proxies there to curtail their fire (which they did).

A large Iranian response to the Israeli assassinations is possible. But their record and current incentives indicate it’ll more likely be something smaller, perhaps less overt, rather than a big escalation.

Hamas

Hamas’s options are more limited. It’s unlikely there’s a significant military capability they could use against Israel that they aren’t already using after nine months of intense warfare.

But the disruption of losing Haniyeh should be minimal. They’ve already announced that former Israeli target Khaled Mashal is taking Haniyeh’s place as Hamas’s political leader in exile. It’s a bureaucratized organization, not a cult of personality, and will carry on with little interruption.

The only move Hamas has—besides hoping for outside allies to enter the war in earnest, which is unlikely—is the same one they’ve been using for a while: Keep Gaza leaders in hiding, hold Israeli hostages, negotiate but make absolutist demands, and wait as mounting Palestinian death and suffering increases international pressure on Israel to concede Hamas control of Gaza.

In the short term, Hamas will likely call off ceasefire negotiations—they have to do something—but the war hasn’t changed, and talks will resume soon enough, or continue on back channels. Haniyeh was reportedly more interested in a ceasefire than Gaza-based leader Yahya Sinwar. But claiming to want a deal and needing concessions to bring the group along is a standard negotiating tactic. Either way, Haniyeh hadn’t delivered a ceasefire. That status quo continues.

Diplomats say they’re close to a deal when one’s actually close, and also when they hope to make it so. If you thought an Israel-Hamas ceasefire was about to happen, Israel killing Haniyeh probably disrupts it. But if you thought the same incompatible goals that hindered previous negotiations would persist, then Mashal replacing Haniyeh as political leader won’t change it. There’s a chance the assassination creates a jolt of fear that prompts Hamas leaders to cut a deal, but I doubt the officials successfully hiding in Gaza tunnels have changed their minds.

However, if Israel manages to kill Sinwar in addition to Haniyeh, it could give the Israeli government an opportunity to claim victory.

They won’t have achieved their declared war aim of completely eliminating Hamas, but that’s impossible. Hamas is, at some level, an idea. And the devastation of the Gaza war means it’ll have a pool of willing recruits for years. But Israel has dislodged Hamas from open control of Gaza, and severely degraded the group’s military capabilities. Killing the men who led Hamas on October 7 could be enough to sell the Israeli public on ending the war, especially if it comes with an agreement releasing hostages, which 70 percent of Israelis want Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to try harder to secure.

But with Sinwar and other senior Hamas officials alive and defiant in Gaza, Mashal becoming political leader, and Netanyahu worried about his fate after the fight with Hamas ends—plus knowing he’d get more support for whatever he wants to do if Donald Trump becomes the next U.S. president—the war will likely continue.

Hezbollah

Of the three allied anti-Israel forces, Hezbollah is in the best position to retaliate. The Lebanon-based group is stronger than Hamas, with about 150,000 rockets in range of Israel, and unlike Iran, faced a direct attack on its leadership. Hezbollah’s ongoing cross-border exchanges of fire with Israel since October 7 have killed dozens, and caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

Hezbollah has the ability to escalate, but probably doesn’t want to, especially if Iran would prefer they don’t. The months of tit-for-tat with Israel appears to be both sides communicating “I don’t want a big fight, but don’t think you can push me around.” That could spiral into war, like the one Israel and Hezbollah fought in 2006, but it hasn’t thus far, and Israel killing Fuad Shukr—along with five others, including two children—doesn’t change the underlying dynamic.

Israel’s attack in Beirut came in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 children in the Golan Heights. Hezbollah denied it, indicating concern with the public reaction, but the rocket and location of launch leave little doubt. 

Shukr is a longtime militant leader with a lot of blood on his hands, and Hezbollah, the organization he helped found in 1982, is bureaucratic, not a cult of personality. A deputy will replace him and operations will continue.

In that way, the Shukr and Haniyeh killings are reminiscent of the U.S. killing Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 after he helped orchestrate a mob attack at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran retaliated by launching at a base in Iraq, injuring over 100 American personnel but not killing any. Iranian air defenses also accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet. The military exchange ended there, but shadow war activity continued, such as occasional militia rocket fire at U.S. bases. 

After the U.S. killed Soleimani, there was an uproar and a response, but no massive Iranian retaliation, and virtually no lasting impact on Revolutionary Guard activity.

The aftermath of Israel’s two assassinations could be similar. Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran will try to play it to their advantage with domestic and international opinion, and keep fighting Israel in the ways they have been. One or more might retaliate, aiming for big enough to be noticed, yet close enough to existing bounds to avoid retaliatory escalation, such as a somewhat larger rocket launch from Hezbollah. But an attack so big it prompts a big Israeli retaliation and a spiral to regional war would go against their behavior and evident priorities, both long- and short-term.

As long as the Gaza war and Israel-Hezbollah border exchanges continue, there’s a heightened risk the Middle East spins out of control. But targeted killings with plausible rationales, as with Shukr and Haniyeh, isn’t the thing that’ll do it.