Hamas appoints mastermind of October 7 attack as political chief; Hezbollah and Israel trade fire

Hezbollah and Israeli forces again exchanged fire on Tuesday as tensions rose with the Lebanese militant group and its sponsor Iran threatening to attack the Jewish state more forcefully.

Iran faces a dilemma over how to deliver a meaningful blow to Israel without prompting a war that could engulf the Middle East.

Hamas says leader Yahya Sinwar will also become political chief

Hamas appointed Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s top target and the mastermind behind the militant group’s 7 October assault, as its political leader.

The decision came after former political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in a strike in Iran’s capital. Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union, and Iran have blamed Israel for the killing. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied taking part in the attack.

Hezbollah and Israeli forces exchange fire as tensions rise

Hezbollah and Israeli forces again exchanged fire on Tuesday as tensions rose with the Lebanese militant group and its sponsor Iran threatening to attack the Jewish state more forcefully.

Hezbollah fired several drones at Israel’s northwestern Galilee region on Tuesday and several civilians near the coastal town of Nahariya were injured. The Israel Defense Forces said early indications suggested they were hurt by an Israeli interceptor missile as it hit the ground, rather than the Hezbollah projectiles.

If confirmed, that would be a rare instance of Israel’s air-defence missiles injuring its own population in that manner.

Hezbollah said it launched the drones at military facilities in response to Israel targeting the group in the south of Lebanon this week. Hezbollah said four of its fighters were killed.

Tensions between the Shiite organisation and Israel have soared in the past two weeks. Israel blamed Hezbollah for a rocket attack that killed 12 children and teenagers at a soccer field in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights. It retaliated last week by striking and killing a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon’s capital of Beirut.

Hezbollah — designated a terrorist organisation by the US — said the death of the commander, Fuad Shukr, crossed a red line and it threatened to respond fiercely.

Hours after he was killed, senior Hamas figure Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, with the Palestinian group and Iran saying Israel was behind the move. Iran’s vowed to attack Israel and it may act in coordination with Hezbollah, the most important of its proxy militias in the Middle East.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied killing Haniyeh.

Hezbollah started firing on Israel soon after the Israel-Hamas war erupted in October. Hezbollah says it is acting in solidarity with Palestinians and Hamas and will stop once there’s a ceasefire in Gaza.

Israel and Hezbollah have mostly targeted military sites and facilities close to their border area. Still, many civilians have been killed in both countries and there are increasing fears that their skirmishes will escalate into a full-blown war.

Iran wants its Israel retaliation to hurt, but not start a wider war

Iran faces a dilemma over how to deliver a meaningful blow to Israel without prompting a war that could engulf the Middle East.

That challenge appears to be delaying an attack that was widely thought to be imminent days ago.

“Iran is stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Dina Esfandiary, a senior adviser on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. “It’s going to want to retaliate in a way that’s significant enough to deter Israel from increasing the escalation spiral. But it’s not going to want to do something to prompt a regional war that will drag the US in.”

Iran has said it wants to punish Israel for last week’s assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran, but not to the point of starting a region-wide war. It’s emphasised the need to re-establish “deterrence” against its archenemy.

Iran could choose to target military sites in Israel — similar to the rocket and drone barrage it carried out in April. That did minimal damage, partly because the move was effectively telegraphed in advance, helping the Israeli air force shoot down the vast majority of the projectiles with help from the US, UK, France and Jordan. Under pressure from the US, Israel responded with a limited strike on an Iranian airbase that meant tensions soon eased.

Another option is to use Iran’s network of armed proxies including militias in Iraq, Lebanon-based Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen to hit Israel with missiles and drones.

The aim would be “to overwhelm Israel’s air defence capabilities and disrupt military and, potentially, civilian infrastructure,” said Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute. “The assault could take place over a series of days.”

It might be hard to do so with real surprise, though. While ballistic missiles would take more than 10 minutes to cover the 1,200km from Iran, cruise missiles and drones could take hours. Israel and its allies would probably have time to detect the threats and mount interception strikes.

Within Iran, there was shock that Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader, was assassinated in the heart of Tehran in a government guesthouse.

“The Islamic Republic and its Axis of Resistance have no red lines when it comes to punishing” Israel, said Kayhan, a conservative newspaper in Iran, on Tuesday in an editorial, referring to Tehran’s network of non-state allies.

Middle East geopolitics have been upended since 7 October when Hamas swarmed into Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 people and taking 250 others hostage.

Israel’s subsequent offensive has killed more than 40,000 people, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave.

US, allies in frantic push to avert possible Middle East war

The US and its allies worked to head off an Iranian attack on Israel and avert a wider regional war as concerns grew that a strike could come at any moment in retaliation for the killing of Haniyeh.

The Biden administration moved additional forces to the region, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken conferred with top officials from Qatar and Egypt — the two countries helping lead negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas militants — on Monday, according to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

“It is a critical moment,” Blinken told reporters in brief comments on Monday in Washington. “We are engaged in intense diplomacy — pretty much round the clock — with a very simple message: All parties must refrain from escalation, all parties must take steps to ease tensions.”

The focus has been to prepare for and possibly blunt an attack by Iran, which has warned it will respond after blaming Israel for killing Haniyeh, in a government guesthouse in Tehran on 31 July.

The US push was only one element of a broader effort by officials who sought to head off tit-for-tat escalation between Iran and Israel that could lead to an all-out regional war.

Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, made a rare trip to Iran over the weekend, meeting Iran’s acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani. President Joe Biden also spoke to King Abdullah II of Jordan on Monday, according to the White House. Qatar, which has mediated between Iran and the US in the past, has also been in contact with the Islamic Republic, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The surge in tensions, almost 10 months into the war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, has scared many foreign airlines from the skies of Israel and neighbouring Lebanon, where Hezbollah holds sway. The Pentagon has beefed up its Middle East presence, including with missile-interceptor warships.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group is in the Gulf of Oman with an air wing that bristles with F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets and other advanced aircraft. The carrier is accompanied by three destroyers capable of land attack and air defence — the USS Daniel Inouye, USS Michael Murphy and USS Russell.

Two additional missile defence destroyers, the USS Cole and USS Laboon, recently arrived in the Red Sea, according to a US defence official who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A second US defence official said the Air Force this week would deploy a squadron of stealthy F-22 Raptor fighters to the region. A squadron is comprised of between 16 to 24 jets.

With tensions running high, a rocket attack on Iraq’s Al Asad military base wounded several US personnel, according to a spokesperson for the US Defense Department.

Israel said its forces were on hair-trigger alert to carry out defensive and offensive missions.

Iran executes protester accused of killing IRGC officer

A man who was arrested after he took part in Iran’s nationwide 2022 uprising and later accused of killing a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) during the protests was executed on Tuesday, state-run Mizan Online reported.

Reza Rasaei, a 34-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who had joined protests in the city of Sahneh in northwestern Kermanshah province, was sentenced to death after a forensic scientist testified that the knife used to kill IRGC intelligence officer Nader Bayrami was the same as one owned by Rasaei, according to Mizan, which said that he’d confessed to the crime.

Rasaei was the tenth person to be executed by the Islamic Republic after being arrested for taking part in widespread protests that erupted in September 2022 after the death in custody of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini. Twenty-two-year-old Amini had been arrested by police for allegedly flouting Iran’s strict female dress code.

Some 551 protesters, including 68 children, were killed in a fierce crackdown by security forces between September and December 2022, according to a report by the United Nations published in March.

London-based rights group Amnesty International condemned Rasaei’s execution as arbitrary and said it was carried out in secret, without any prior warning to Rasaei’s family and while the world’s attention had been focused on Iran’s conflict with Israel.

“This execution lays bare once again how Iran’s criminal justice system is rotten to the core and highlights the Iranian authorities’ resolve to use the death penalty as a tool of political repression to instil fear among the population,” the organisation said in a statement, adding that Rasaei had been subjected to torture and sexual violence while in detention. DM

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