Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran … how far could war in the Middle East spread?

The Guardian -Jan 7th2024

Attacks in the Red Sea. An airstrike in Baghdad. As the conflict with Hamas bleeds across borders, is wider violence inevitable?

Mohammad Atout, a Palestinian resident of the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, was eating with his children on Tuesday evening when the news broke across the Lebanese capital that Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, had been assassinated.

“Someone told me there had been an attack [in Beirut]. Moments later the television said it was Arouri. Then people came out in the streets. It hit them very hard. He was an important leader for us.”

In the coffee shop he owns, which opens on to a street decorated with Palestinian banners, his customers have been watching Al Jazeera footage of the war in Gaza.

“We never thought that the Israelis would dare to do this in Beirut,” Atout says. He believes the reason for Arouri’s killing was Israel’s failure to find and kill Hamas’s leaders inside Gaza, including the head of the movement, Yahya Sinwar.

He suggests Arouri, whose office was struck by missiles, was low‑hanging fruit – his assassination a cover for Israel’s slow progress in meeting its declared war aims.

“This step came out of anger over their lack of progress. They are trying to show they are achieving something,” he says – although he remains unconvinced that the growing escalation will lead to all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel.

That is the question that has dominated debate in Lebanon and the wider region in the days since Arouri’s killing, even as a tenuous normality has returned to Beirut’s sprawling southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, in wake of the attack. While streets that emptied in the immediate aftermath of the strike have become busy again, anxiety lingers. The mood was summed up by Lebanon’s outgoing prime minister, Najib Mikati, who on Friday talked of “the danger of attempts to drag Lebanon into a regional war … with serious consequences, particularly for Lebanon and neighbouring countries”.

On Saturday morning, as Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel, saying the barrage was only its first response to Arouri’s killing, Mikati’s warning took on an added resonance. The cross-border exchanges have highlighted the fact that, three months on, Israel’s war against Hamas is starting to bleed ever wider across the region.

Since 8 October, limited exchanges across the border – including airstrikes and drone attacks – have become a daily occurrence between Israel and Hezbollah, as well as other factions in Lebanon, inflicting casualties on both sides. Iran-backed groups in Iraq have stepped up attacks on US military bases, while Yemen’s Houthis – who, like Hamas and Hezbollah, have long enjoyed Iranian support – have launched long-range drones and threatened commercial shipping around key routes in the Red Sea. Last week, Islamic State claimed responsibility for two blasts which ripped through a crowd in southern Iran, killing at least 84 people, while a US airstrike in Baghdad killed the commander of an Iranian-backed Shia militia.

But it has been in Lebanon, above all, where the situation has become most dangerous, undermining a fragile understanding between Hezbollah and Israel that has persisted since the hugely destructive second Lebanon war in 2006.

Last week, as Hezbollah’s general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, made two nationally televised addresses in the wake of Arouri’s assassination, he referred specifically, and not for the first time, to the “rules” that have mitigated the sometimes performative violence between the two sides. Amid the threats and rhetoric, those rules have long defined how far either side has been prepared to go, either in targeting or retaliation, while remaining short of all-out war.

And across the region, in areas where the Gaza conflict has spilled over, Israel’s war with Hamas has served to energise already existing tensions.

In Lebanon, the issue has been the failure on both sides to implement the UN-mandated truce that ended the 2006 war and was supposed to bring a withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from the border.

What is clear is that Arouri’s assassination has pushed that mutual “equilibrium of deterrence”, to use Nasrallah’s framing, to the very brink, following the first Israeli strike on Lebanon’s capital since 2006.