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ISRAEL HAS ALL BUT DECLARED WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST – A CONFLICT IT
CANNOT HOPE TO WIN  
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Simon Tisdall
July 31, 2024
The Guardian
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_ The killing of Hamas’s political leader has raised tensions yet
again. Only a ceasefire in Gaza offers any prospect of peace _

A protester at Tehran University carries a picture of the dead Hamas
leader Ismail Haniyeh., Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA

 

Failure to halt the war in Gaza lies at the heart of the latest lethal
savagery in the Middle East. The assassination in Tehran
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Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, will be celebrated in
Israel as just revenge for the 7 October atrocities. But Islamist
hardliners in Iran and militant groups across the Arab world will see
it as further proof of their belief that the state of Israel is a
menace that must be destroyed at all costs.

And so the hatred, the violence and the misery will continue
unchecked, and will in all probability worsen and spread. Just because
this homicidal cycle is familiar does not mean it cannot accelerate.
Few parts of the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt,
Jordan – have escaped the toxic fallout of the Gaza
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and Britain, domestic politics are roiled by the fury and the grief.
The UN’s impotence is daily, humiliatingly exposed. No one is immune
to this poison.

It would have been preferable if Haniyeh, in common with Hamas leaders
based in Gaza, had faced trial at the international criminal court
(ICC) – and been made to answer for his crimes. That now cannot
happen. Instead, Israel has once again sought “justice” through
extrajudicial murder. Only in April, a covert Israeli strike
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Iran’s consulate in Damascus killed a top Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps general – and brought the region to the brink of
all-out war. There have been numerous similar killings.

The man overseeing these assassinations, Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel’s prime minister and chief architect of the continuing
genocidal campaign against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, should be
forced to answer for his crimes, too. The ICC’s chief prosecutor
is trying to ensure that happens
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despite US opposition. But there is little sign it will. More likely,
given the example he sets, is that Netanyahu will himself be targeted
by assassins.

Tuesday’s almost simultaneous, reported killing
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a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukur, in an Israeli airstrike in
south Beirut, will help ensure the Middle East’s downward spiral
into destruction continues to accelerate. Once again, the Israel-Hamas
war is the driving factor. The attack was in retaliation for an
alleged Hezbollah missile strike in the occupied Golan Heights last
weekend that killed 12 young people
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Yet the main reason Hezbollah
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Israeli-held territory now is Gaza. The organisation’s leader,
Hassan Nasrallah, has been relatively restrained since 7 October,
given the huge military resources at his disposal. Nasrallah says
cross-border attacks will stop when there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
Killing Haniyeh, a senior Hamas decision-maker and negotiator, makes
such a ceasefire even less likely, at least in the short term. Killing
Shukur is another dangerous provocation.

It is also worth pointing out, amid the frequently overwhelming welter
of daily horrors, that two children were killed and 74 people injured
in the Beirut airstrike, according to Lebanese officials. But then
again, Israeli forces have been killing Gaza’s children with
impunity for months. The UN puts the total at 15,000 dead. Two more
deaths barely register (except with parents and families
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It’s not that Israel is blind to the broader consequences of its
role in this endless, vicious cycle. But it says that everyone else is
to blame. “Hezbollah’s ongoing aggression and brutal attacks are
dragging the people of Lebanon and the entire Middle East into a wider
escalation,” a military spokesperson said
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“While we prefer to resolve hostilities without a wider war, the IDF
[Israel Defense Forces] is fully prepared for any scenario.”

The wider war Israel “prefers” to avoid is, in fact, already
raging. Israel repeatedly bombed Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hodeidah
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month after a drone attack on Tel Aviv by Tehran-backed Houthi Shia
militants. Netanyahu, whose answer to almost every problem is extreme
violence, boasted the bombing “makes it clear to our enemies that
there is no place that the long arm of the state of Israel will not
reach”. That sounded very much like a declaration of war on the
entire region. Yet it’s a war Israel cannot ultimately win.

Once again, the Houthis say the principal reason they are attacking
Israel, and shipping in the Red Sea – attacks that have sucked the
US and Britain into risky military action – is Gaza. If there’s a
ceasefire, they claim, their attacks will halt. This is hardly
radical. This is the same Gaza notional ceasefire backed
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in theory, by the US, Britain, the EU and the UN security council.
This is the same ceasefire millions of people in the Arab world,
Europe and the US have been demanding for months. This is the same
ceasefire that still – _still_ – doesn’t happen.

Will a humiliated Iran hit back directly over the Haniyeh killing?
Will Hezbollah escalate? Will a divided Israel, its reputation further
disfigured by the torture and alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian
detainees
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plunge deeper towards national disintegration as far-right zealots,
backed by Netanyahu’s ministers, storm army bases to free the
alleged abusers? Quite possibly. No outcome is off the table in a
region where the so-called rules of the game that hitherto prevented
an all-consuming conflagration are being burned page by bloody page.

People say the Middle East is complicated. It is. They say there are
no answers. This may be true. But despite the rockets, Gaza is not
rocket science. It’s not that complicated. Stop the war. Stop the
killing. Save the children. Agree a ceasefire and free the hostages.
And then all the other problems, while not going away, may become just
a little easier to manage.

_Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator_

* Israel-Gaza War
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* political assassinations
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* War Danger
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* Mideast
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