Decapitated

In the space of several hours, two major leaders of armed, Iranian-supported militias confronting Israel were killed by precision air strikes. Tel Aviv, as is its usual practice, has not formally claimed responsibility for the two spectacular attacks.

Last Tuesday, a drone strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut supposedly killed Fu’ad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most senior military official. This attack happened after a missile attack in the Golan Heights killed about a dozen teenagers playing in a soccer field.

Shukr serves as military adviser to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. He is generally considered Nasrallah’s right-hand man. The US has put up a $5-million bounty for anyone providing information about the whereabouts of the militia leader.

Nasrallah had earlier threatened to launch missiles at Tel Aviv should Israel strike Beirut, where senior leaders of this militia are based. Hezbollah has more sophisticated guided missiles than their cohorts in the Hamas. The missiles were supplied by Iran.

Because of Nasrallah’s threat, there is now fear that a full-scale war involving Israel and Lebanon has become inevitable. The US Navy has moved warships close to the Lebanese coast for any eventuality.

Hezbollah is not the Lebanese government. It is an unwelcome Palestinian militia that sits in Lebanese land with the government in Beirut unable to do anything about it.

Israel has performed precision strikes against Hezbollah leaders in Beirut in the past. But the strike against Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is unprecedented. That strike took out Haniyeh and a bodyguard. Hours before the strike, Haniyeh participated in ceremonies installing Iran’s new president.

Several weeks ago, an Israeli operation in Gaza killed Haniyeh’s sons, all of them Hamas militants. Haniyeh had a remarkably stoic reaction to the deaths of his sons and several other relatives.

It is believed Haniyeh is the key player in the ceasefire and hostage negotiations between Hamas and Israel, conducted through several international mediators. He is officially in charge of Hamas’ international relations, regularly shuttling between the group’s offices in Qatar and his home in Tehran. He was struck at his home.

Hamas quickly acknowledged the death of one of its key leaders, condemning Israel for the treacherous manner the attack was conducted. This sounds strange, considering Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre of over a thousand Israeli civilians.

The precise details of the strike in Tehran are not yet known. It is assumed that the strike was carried out by a smart bomb launched from a warplane.

Israel’s conduct of a precision strike at the heart of its own capital should be an embarrassment for Iran. Recall that a few months ago, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles into Israel. Most of the devices were intercepted en route and none caused much damage on Israeli soil.

In retaliation, Israel launched a precision missile strike at an Iranian military facility in the south of the country. There was no follow-up action after that successful strike. It was as if Tel Aviv was content to demonstrate it could strike targets in Iran at will, evading layers of Iranian air defenses.

If, by any chance, Iran remained unconvinced by that earlier demonstration of Israeli air power, the strike that killed Haniyeh right in the middle of Tehran should remove any doubt Tel Aviv could strike at will. The most obvious strategic targets of future Israeli strikes are the nuclear facilities where it is believed Iran is trying to fabricate offensive weapons.

The Iranian leadership exploded with angry rhetoric after the strike at Tehran. Their overloaded rhetoric, however, cannot cloud Tel Aviv’s central message here: Tehran itself is vulnerable to precision munitions should Iran continue its menacing actions.

I do not share the alarmist view that these two precision strikes in Beirut and Tehran has tilted the situation towards full-scale war in the world’s most volatile region. Much less is this the beginning of World War III.

Everyone understands that the two precision strikes were intended to decapitate the two radical militias threatening Israel. They were calculated to cause maximum damage to the morale and organizational capacities of these two radical groups without unnecessarily providing enough ground for escalation.

Nonetheless, we could expect more intensive military activity along the Israel-Lebanon border. Hezbollah will try to retaliate for the death of one of its most senior commanders. Israel will reply in kind. But in the end, Iran is not convinced it could win a full-scale war. An exchange of missile fire with Israel could only lead to the destruction of its nascent nuclear arms capability – thereby eliminating a major pillar of its regional power projection.

A few years ago, when Trump was president, US forces targeted the revered commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in a precision strike in Baghdad. Tehran raised a howl but otherwise accepted the fact. All it could do was release a steady stream of anti-US rhetoric and not much else.

Iran has invested a huge fortune arming radical militias around the region to build a crescent of resistance from the Houthis in Yemen, the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Their combined strength will not be enough to close Iran’s technological deficiency in strategic armaments.

Beyond chanting hateful slogans, Iran’s proxies cannot frontally challenge Israel’s military capabilities. They will simply suffer tactical decapitation strikes.

The situation in the Middle East is surely tense. But it is not explosive.