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, have found a better way to respond to embarrassing Israeli strikes in a way that could both warn Israel off another attack, yet also 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 since 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-occupied 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 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.
For weeks, the concern among regional leaders and experts was less that Iran and Hezbollah wanted war, and more that their best option for a dramatic retaliation was by deploying a coordinated regional show of force with other Iran-backed militant groups in Yemen and Iraq. Such a move could have resulted in a far less predictable outcome than intended by those who would have carried it out— such as hitting a site with a large number of civilians, which would have spurred Israel to jump further up the escalation ladder.
Hezbollah, branded a terrorist group by Washington and the most powerful militia supported by Iran, would have been critical to any such coordinated response.
Hezbollah’s move to act first and alone signals that option was likely ruled out, regional experts said. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said in a speech after Sunday’s attack that “people can take a breath and relax.”
For Hezbollah, risking all-out war had a high political cost: with Lebanon still reeling from a devastating economic crisis and a yearslong political vacuum, it faces intense pressure from other segments of society not to drag the country deeper in crisis. And tens of thousands of Hezbollah’s own supporters in southern Lebanon have been driven from their homes by near daily Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah’s critics mocked the response, sharing photos of Israeli firefighters extinguishing a fire at a chicken farm that was struck. “Sayyed Hassan has set a new equation for the Zionist enemy: We will respond to the killing of every Hezbollah fighter with the killing of a chicken,” one Twitter account posted, referring to Mr. Nasrallah.
Regardless of how Hezbollah’s response is assessed in Tehran, regional diplomats pointed to several recent comments by Iranian leaders, released shortly before and after Hezbollah’s strikes, that hint at an impending, but probably a targeted and limited retaliation.
Last week, when Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, visited pilgrims who were chanting slogans to avenge Mr. Haniyeh’s death, he replied, “You will hear good news about revenge, God willing.”
Shortly after Hezbollah’s strikes, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told students at a gathering that a response “does not always mean taking up arms; rather, it means thinking correctly, speaking properly, understanding things accurately and striking the target with precision.”
Experts say, however, that these recent comments hint that Iran’s response will look less like what it did in April — though that cannot be ruled out — and more like a targeted attack.
Tehran’s main calculation is finding a response that does not risk pulling in the United States, whose warships have deployed around the region.
“The Iranians got cold feet,” said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations. General McKenzie said that Iran would possibly retaliate by striking “a soft target” — one not heavily protected — such as an embassy or other facility in Europe, Africa or South America.
And Iranian leaders are also likely to delay any response as long as talks are ongoing to broker a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, some U.S. officials said.
Some regional experts also pointed to intense diplomatic efforts over the prospect of negotiations on lifting sanctions.
“Iran is very pragmatic and of course has been wondering how to capitalize on this” effort by Western diplomats, Maha Yaya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said in an interview.
Mr. Khamenei, in comments viewed as underscoring a desire to renew talks with the West, said on Tuesday that there was “no barrier” to renewing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
Mr. Shabani, the Iran analyst, said that by showing pragmatism and regularly projecting their thinking in advance, both Mr. Nasrallah and Mr. Khamenei may ironically have dulled their main edge against a nation far superior in its intelligence prowess and military might.
“The problem for both Khamenei and Nasrallah is that the Israelis know they are logical now,” he said. “When you give away that you are not so unpredictable, it contributes to Israel’s escalation dominance.”
Some regional diplomats, however, acknowledge that even as Hezbollah and Iran look weaker today, there are ways in which Iran and its allies have already imposed a heavier toll on Israel.
By appearing to signal they have let the Gaza cease-fire negotiations take precedence — talks widely seen as being stymied by Mr. Netanyahu — they could find an opportunity to erode relations between Israel and its Western allies, diplomats warned. Like the Lebanese in the south, Israel’s own citizens, too, are unable to return home — and are growing increasingly frustrated with their government.
“For 75 years, we were the ones being displaced and the Israelis remained in their colonies,” Mr. Nasrallah told his followers last month. “Our homes were demolished, their colonies remained; our factories were burned, and their factories remained. Now, that has all changed.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
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