Iran-led axis likely to launch joint attack, but can’t reverse Israeli gains in Gaza

The question was how.

Several options were on the table, some of them pushed loudly by prominent officials. Israel could have opted to finally embark on the long-anticipated war on Hezbollah, seeking to drive the Shiite terror army from southern Lebanon and degrade its military capabilities.

Alternatively, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have opted for a limited air campaign across Lebanon, focusing on taking out key Hezbollah targets, both as punishment for the Golan Heights strike and to put Israel in a better position if and when war breaks out.

Or Israel could also have struck the Lebanese state itself, trying to compel it to rein Hezbollah in.

All of these options come with significant risks.

A war with Hezbollah would result in widespread damage in Lebanon, perhaps even hastening the slow dissolution of the state. But it would also extract a heavy toll from Israeli troops and the home front, not to mention go against the wishes of the United States and other Western allies.

A limited strike might not solve the Hezbollah threat on the northern border, leaving over 60,000 Israelis still refugees in their own country. Moreover, such an approach still risks potential scenarios that could lead to an escalation into the all-out war that Israel so far has avoided.

And a campaign against Lebanon’s state institutions and infrastructure would certainly spark condemnation in the West, while doing little to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities.

With the dual overnight Tuesday-Wednesday strikes on Hezbollah military leader Fuad Shukr and, allegedly, on Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, Israel seemed to reject all those options, at least for the time being. In killing Shukr, it removed an experienced commander and major asset for Hezbollah from the playing field. But it did not threaten any Hezbollah capabilities or harm large numbers of civilians, projecting strength while seeking to avoid forcing the terror group into a war.

Israel has not officially commented on the Haniyeh strike, which Iran and Hamas both blamed on the Jewish state. But the assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran could prevent embarrassment to Qatar, where Haniyeh was based, and which Israel still sees as a useful mediator in negotiations for a deal to free the hostages seized by the Palestinian terror group during the October 7 onslaught and end the war started by that attack.

“The leader of Hamas abroad, [hitherto] Haniyeh, plays a central role in the mobilization of resources for Hamas, in representing the organization, in political outreach, in building its military power,” said Meir Ben-Shabbat, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser. “In fact, this is what transforms Hamas from a local terrorist organization into a movement with regional influence.”

The strike also appeared to show the already paranoid Iranian regime how deeply Israeli intelligence penetrates the country, and Israel’s ability to carry out precision strikes far from its borders.

At the same time, the absence of a claim of responsibility and lack of harm to Iranian assets could offer Iran a way to avoid a significant escalation.

No choice

Still, Iran is sure to respond.

“Iran likely believes that it has no choice other than retaliating because it, first of all, has to deter further Israeli attacks on its soil,” said Ali Vaez, Iran Project director at the Crisis Group. “It has to defend its sovereignty. It has to preserve its credibility in the eyes of its regional partners.”

Iran, like Israel, doesn’t want a regional war. But, like Israel, it too faces the dilemma of how to respond.

The Islamic Republic and its proxies like to establish clear rules of the game, and to craft their retaliation so that it answers or mirrors in some way the attacks the Iran-led axis has suffered.

Shortly after the strike in Beirut on Tuesday night, US forces attacked a base south of Baghdad that killed four members of the Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization Force militias and wounded four others.

“Because this is the culmination of multiple high-profile assassinations and major attacks against axis of resistance forces throughout the region, conducted both by Israel and the US,” said Vaez, “and [as] there’s certainly a perception in Tehran that Israel and the US have acted in coordination and conjunction with one another, I think it is likely to prompt an axis-wide coordinated retaliation against the US and Israel.”

As part of that coordinated attack, Hezbollah could also seek to respond in kind to the Shukr assassination.

“It could target singular high-value assets like critical infrastructure in Haifa, an offshore gas rig, or the base from which Israel launched its attack,” said Jonathan Ruhe, director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “This would mirror how Israel just hit a high-value Hezbollah asset in Beirut for the first time since October 8.”

Ben-Shabbat said that Iran could well be planning for an assassination as “an eye for an eye,” but such an attack would take time to prepare.

“I estimate that they will respond directly from the territory of Iran and Iraq,” he said, “in addition to the expected response from Lebanon and the account that the Houthis in Yemen have not yet settled.”

However, Iran also has plenty of pressing reasons to keep it from a massive retaliation. In April, Iran was under pressure to respond to an Israeli airstrike on its Damascus embassy in which eight IRGC officers were killed. It hit back with a massive missile and drone attack, but it was a one-off event that seemed designed to avoid a major escalation.

Iran’s response to the killing of a Hamas leader is likely to be even more measured, predicted Yaakov Amidror, another of Netanyahu’s former national security advisers. “This is not the kind of attack to which they respond with 300 missiles,” he said.

Hamas’s apparent inability

While the world now waits to see how Iran and Hezbollah will react, there is little expectation that Hamas can launch a major response from the Gaza Strip, even though it was the terror group’s leader who was killed.

Hamas’s seeming inability to carry out a massive retaliatory attack is one of the most significant aspects of this episode, said Amidror, and a sign that Israel is grinding the terror group down in Gaza.

Hamas “will remain in Gaza,” he said, “but as a military organization Israel is slowly making it irrelevant.”

Even if Israel is picking off senior Hamas leaders and destroying much of its infrastructure, Yahya Sinwar still lives, and he controls the fate of dozens of hostages still alive in Gaza. Some slow progress was being made toward a deal in the weeks before the Haniyeh strike, and Hamas is unlikely to agree to anything in the near future.

But Haniyeh was only a mediator, while Sinwar made the ultimate decisions about what terms Hamas would accept in a deal. His core interests remain, and a deal with Israel is his best way to attain his personal survival and that of his organization in Gaza.

“Sinwar makes decisions more based on what is happening in Gaza,” mused Amidror, “than on what happens to a leader who spends his time in six-star hotels in Qatar.”