Israel’s October 26 retaliatory hit on Iran indicates that there’s no going back. Though leaders on both flanks played down the possibility of future strikes, direct aggression between the two largest militaries in the region is now a fact of their feud. The battle that nobody wants is framing ever closer. In the latest escalation, Israel hit some 20 Iranian military sites, spread across three provinces. 

Tel Aviv and Tehran have repeatedly declared that they do not desire a full-blown war. Yet the intensifying aggression by both nations has problematized the prospects of defusing, de-escalating, or finishing the broader array of conflicts that pit Israel against Iran and its “Axis of Resistance,” a network of militias in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.  

Those disputes have increasingly crossed across the Middle East since Hamas overran Israel. A direct battle between Iran and Israel would commit the two largest militaries in the Middle East. Amid the escalation, there have been rare visible or viable off-ramps to stop the world’s most explosive region from getting worse. 

The escalations have transformed the longstanding algorithm of confrontation in the Middle East. That represents the baseline of uncertainty moving forward will be higher than it was before. With fighting in Gaza and Lebanon persisting and not close to being resolved, that conveys more cycles of violence. The risk now is of an unchecked escalation.

According to experts, two long-sought diplomatic agreements might help reduce the context of hostilities short-term: One would secure the release of more than 100 Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas for over a year in a swap for a ceasefire and more humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians in Gaza. The other would force Hezbollah further from Israel’s southern border so its residents could return safely to their homes in a swap for an end to Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

US diplomacy has been essential to both arrangements since Israel would almost certainly not assume either without broad American security guarantees. Tehran, however, has only increased angrier at Washington for its deployment of further materiel and personnel to defend Israel. The Iranian mission to the UN demanded that the United States was complicit in the Israeli incursion on October 26.