As rockets and missiles streaked across Lebanese and Israeli skies on Sunday, the moment people across the region lived in fear of seemed as if it might have arrived: all-out war.

But very quickly, Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah wrapped up their exchange, with both claiming victory and signaling that the fighting — for now, at least — was done.

That ambiguous result, however, revealed something: Neither Hezbollah nor its regional patron, Iran, has found a better way to respond to embarrassing Israeli strikes in a way that could both warn Israel off another attack, yet not provoke an even bigger war that could be devastating for them.

Iran’s response — if it comes — remains an unknown, and Tehran could still choose a course of action that regional observers have not predicted. But Hezbollah’s choice to stick to a limited attack is an option some regional experts now think may reflect plans from Iran, as it considers how to settle its own score with Israel.

“The Iranians keep dropping hints about striking a target with precision,” said Mohammed Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst and editor of an independent regional website, Amwaj.media. “Precision and proportion is now key to how we look at this.”

Just a few weeks ago, the region was — once again — in an extraordinarily precarious position, months after Israel launched its deadly Gaza war in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.

The latest round of Middle East brinkmanship began last month, when Israel blamed Hezbollah for a rocket that struck a soccer field and killed children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Hezbollah denied responsibility.

Then Israel launched a retributive escalation that quickly set the entire region on edge.

On July 30, Israel struck Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, to kill one of Hezbollah’s top commanders, Fuad Shukr. Hours later, an explosion killed Hamas’s top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

The Haniyeh assassination, which both Hamas and Iran blame on Israel, was an extreme provocation for Iran’s leaders.

“If Israel can get away with killing Iranian allies in the middle of Tehran, there is no safe haven for Iranian leadership anywhere. That signal of weakness to opponents, at home and abroad, is intolerable for Iranian leaders,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “Their dilemma was that there is no way that objective can be achieved at a low cost, and many ways in which it can backfire.”

Yet not responding, he said, is as much an existential threat as the risks of retaliation.

Part of what complicated any response for Iran was that it had already flexed its military muscle in response to an apparent Israeli strike in April that successfully targeted its embassy compound in Damascus, Syria. Back then, Tehran responded by firing a barrage of over 300 missiles and armed drones at Israel — but appeared to telegraph that attack well in advance, offering Israel and the United States an opportunity to prepare air defenses and down nearly everything that was fired.

Read more on original:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/world/middleeast/hezbollah-iran-retaliation-israel-risk.html