Negligence to stop the fighting in Gaza lies at the heart of the most delinquent brutal cruelty in the Middle East. The killing in Tehran of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, will be honoured in Israel as just retribution for the 7 October atrocities. But hardliners in Iran and militant parties across the Arab world will notice it as further evidence of their opinion that the state of Israel is a threat that must be eliminated at all expenses.
The hostility, the violence and the discomfort will continue unhindered, and will in all likelihood worsen and spread. Just because this brutal cycle is familiar does not mean it cannot be. Few parts of the Middle East – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and Jordan – have fled the harmful fallout of the Gaza conflict. In Washington DC and the UK, domestic politics are disturbed by the anger and the grief. The UN’s impotence is customary, humiliatingly revealed. No one is resistant to this poison.
The man leading these assassinations, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and chief engineer of the continuing genocidal movement against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, should be compelled to answer for his offences. The ICC’s chief prosecutor is attempting to ensure that happens, despite US resistance. But there is little indication it will. More likely, given the standard he sets, is that Netanyahu will himself be targeted by killers.
The reported slaying of a senior Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukur, in an Israeli airstrike in south Beirut, will assist ensure the Middle East’s downward wave into destruction persists to accelerate. Once again, the Israel-Hamas fighting is the driving factor. The raid was in retaliation for an alleged Hezbollah missile strike in the occupied Golan Heights last weekend that extinguished 12 young people.
Yet the main cause Hezbollah is shooting missiles into Israeli-held parts now is Gaza. The organisation’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been somewhat restrained since 7 October, given the massive military resources at his disposal. Nasrallah declares cross-border attacks will stop when there is a truce in Gaza. Killing Haniyeh, a senior Hamas decision architect and negotiator, makes such a truce even less likely, at least in the short period. Killing Shukur is another dangerous impulse.
It is also worth indicating, amid the oftentimes overwhelming welter of daily atrocities, that two children were extinguished and 74 people injured in the Beirut airstrike, according to Lebanese officials. But then again, Israeli forces have been eradicating Gaza’s children with immunity for months.
The more comprehensive war Israel “prefers” to sidestep is, in fact, already steaming. Israel repeatedly attacked Yemen’s Red Sea port of Hodeidah this month after a drone raid on Tel Aviv by Tehran-backed Houthi Shia militants. Netanyahu, whose explanation for almost every problem is extreme brutality, boasted the bombing “makes it obvious that there is no place that the long arm of the state of Israel will not reach”. That said very much like a declaration of war on the entire territory. Yet it’s a war Israel cannot ultimately succeed.
