De-escalation in the Middle East now depends on Iran

• Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was a major escalation.
• Nasrallah was one of Iran’s most important allies.
• Iran’s response could defuse the conflict or trigger a wider war involving major global powers.

Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah for more than 30 years, is a major escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.

De-escalation now depends on Iran.

Nasrallah has been Iran’s most trusted proxy in its conflict with Israel and its power struggle with Saudi Arabia and the United States. A senior Iranian commander working with Nasrallah was also killed in the attack, Iranian state media confirmed on Saturday.

Israel last assassinated an Iranian commander in April when it struck an Iranian consulate building in the Syrian capital of Damascus, killing several military officers, including Brig. General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In the days after the attack, Iran telegraphed its response before launching hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in an unprecedented retaliation. Israel, with the help of the United States, intercepted almost all of these missiles.

Iran probably anticipated that these missiles would be largely intercepted, experts said at the time, indicating its desire to avoid a wider war with Israel that could leads to conflict with the United States.

But as Israel shows no sign of ending its campaign to dismantle Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the whole world is now waiting to see how Iran might respond this time – and whether a wider war involving major powers is on the horizon.

“One might expect this to be the ultimate moment for Iran to step up or step back,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow and director of conflict resolution at the Middle East Institute, a nonprofit think tank with headquarters in Washington, DC, for Business. Insider. “Iran huffs and puffs, but it is, in fact, powerless. This impotence is due to a simple fact: Iran does not want war with Israel, which is the same as war with the United States, which would probably topple the Islamic Republic. .”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a statement released on Saturday, said Iran stands with Hezbollah but did not threaten any military response.

However, Israel, anticipating a response from Hezbollah and other proxies in the region, and possibly Iran, has ordered its citizens to avoid large gatherings. Air raid sirens sounded continuously in central Israel throughout Saturday evening local time.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Saturday they had intercepted a missile fired from Yemen by the Houthis, a proxy of Iran that has reached new levels of notoriety by attacking Red Sea shipping lanes and launching drones and missiles at Israel, as it calls for a termination fire in Gaza.

“It’s a precarious position for Tehran,” Jonathan Panikoff, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Business Insider. “Failure to do so risks undermining his legitimacy in the eyes of his proxies across the region and for supporters of the revolution in Iran. But engaging in a broad and lethal response would trigger a regional war that, after April, Tehran likely recognizes it could use. to inflict damage on Israel, but it almost certainly does not have the military capacity to come out of the conflict any better than it went into it.”