Middle East conflict: will it escalate?

Several countries are urging their nationals to leave Lebanon due to growing fears that the country will be drawn into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Recently, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said that Iran had a “duty to take vengeance” for the death of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas who was killed in Tehran last week. 

Meanwhile, Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese terror group has said it will strike back after the assassination of a senior commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut. Any attack on Israel by a combination of Hezbollah and Iran is likely to engulf Lebanon. Some sort of response is “all but inevitable”, says The Economist. Yet the extent and nature of it is “impossible to predict”, especially whether it will target both civilian and military targets, and whether it will be a direct strike or one made through its proxies. 

There are hopes that Iran and Hezbollah “are not looking for all-out war”, especially as those in Tehran will be aware that provoking further Israeli attacks “will not endear the regime to a population already suffering from frequent power cuts and water shortages”. For its part, Hezbollah also seems “wary” about inviting any more “destruction” to descend upon Beirut.

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Regional tensions in the Middle East

It’s true that all sides want to avoid an all-out war, and so Iran may limit itself to conducting a “symbolic strike”, such as against alleged Israeli intelligence facilities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, says Samer Al-Atrush in The Times. 

Similarly, Hezbollah “could choose to calibrate a strike on Tel Aviv or other cities in a manner that would cause the least damage and be more easily intercepted by Israel”. This would allow both sides to return to low-level “tit-for-tat cross-border strikes”. Yet with the Gaza conflict fuelling regional tensions, “the risks of miscalculation continue to grow”. 

All this uncertainty only underlines the fact that Iran’s ability to plunge the Middle East into “chaos” has only grown since the terror attacks of last October, says Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. Iran is now arguably the “region’s pre-eminent power”, with its self-styled “axis of resistance”, embracing “militant Islamist groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen”, all of which are “ever more openly backed by China and Russia”. 

Iran’s power has also been boosted by “the unprecedented, self-destructive antics” of Israel’s governing coalition, which has pursued a maximalist position that has “alienated traditional supporters in the West and outraged the Muslim world”. All this raises the question of “what the US can do to tamp things down”, says Richard Haass in the Financial Times. 

It “should not back away from calls for a ceasefire in Gaza”, and should also press Israel “to remain open to a diplomatic approach to the situation in southern Lebanon”. However, if Iran is to be deterred from making things worse, it is equally “critical” that Tehran is made to understand “that US backing for Israel is strong and that armed escalation on its part, or that of its proxies, will not achieve the desired ends”.

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