Is the Middle East on the brink of all-out war?

Hezbollah murders 12 Israeli kids, and two high-profile figures - one Hezbollah, one Hamas - are assassinated within hours of each other. What's next?

Some big events have occurred in quick succession around here over the course of just a few days. Here’s a rundown of what’s happened and a quick bit of reckless forecasting.

1. Saturday, July 27: Hezbollah launches a rocket attack on the village of Majd al-Shams in the Golan Heights that kills 12 Israeli children and teenagers and injures many more. The rockets landed on a soccer field while a game was in progress.

What makes this massacre of Israeli civilians unusual is that the 12 slaughtered Israeli kids were not Jews. They were Druze, and the Druze are Arabs. That’s why Hezbollah rushed to publish their bald lie that they had nothing to do with the attack. (The rockets were launched from Lebanon. Hezbollah controls the rockets in Lebanon. The rockets were of Iranian origin and of a type that Iran only supplies to Hezbollah. So yeah, save it. Hezbollah did this.)

This attack was part of Hezbollah’s incessant rocket assault on Israel’s north that began on October 8, 2023 and has not stopped since. Hezbollah’s ten-month-long war on the Israeli north has resulted in the internal displacement of some 100,000 Israeli citizens and the burning to the ground of whole communities, the incineration of forests, and the murders of yet more Israeli civilians beyond those slaughtered on October 7.

With regard to the question of war breaking out in the north, note that as far as Hezbollah is concerned, it’s already at war with us and has been for quite some time. It has been conducting massive, highly consequential acts of warfare against Israeli civilian communities ever since Hamas committed the barbaric invasion of October 7. Try to remember that when (or if) we finally get around to responding to this intolerable situation in a conclusive way.

The village of Majd-al-Shams, which was struck in the attack that killed the 12 Israeli kids, is, as noted, a Druze community. The Druze are Israeli citizens. They are Arab but not Muslim. Their men serve, with great distinction, in the Israeli army, and they made heroic contributions - and suffered tragic losses - on October 7. Their commitment to their Israeli nationality and Israeli brethren could explain why the wails of anguish and furious protests that generally arise around the world when Arabs die by violence in this neighborhood have been so conspicuous by their absence.

As usual, the overall global response to this atrocity was not a chorus of condemnation of Hezbollah for wantonly massacring 12 soccer-playing kids but a frenzy of finger-wagging at the Israelis. Israel was ordered from all sides to refrain from a forceful response because the situation might spiral out of control. In other words, not only should Israel tolerate the vast destruction of Israeli property in the north, the forced evacuation of entire communities with no prospect of return on the horizon, the burning of huge tracts of Israeli forests, and Israeli civilians being killed by rocket strikes while driving their cars in their own neighborhoods, but it should also tolerate Israeli children being killed and maimed while playing soccer.

2. Tuesday evening, July 30 (yesterday): Israel decides not to follow this advice. It assassinates Fuad Shukr (Sayyid Muhsan), the Hezbollah commander who was behind the attack that killed the 12 children, in an airstrike in Beirut. According to the IDF, Shukr was Sheikh Nasrallah’s right-hand man and the person managing the day-to-day of the attacks on Israel that have been conducted non-stop since October 8. He was head of Hezbollah’s strategic division and commanded Hezbollah’s precision missile project. He has also been wanted by the US since 1983 for his role in the Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American military personnel.

The assassination of Shukr occurred two weeks after the assassination of Habib Maatouk, a senior Hezbollah commander in the elite Radwan force. His unit was responsible for the constant barrages of rockets, missiles, and explosive-carrying drones aimed at the Ramim Ridge area in northern Israel. He was elevated to this position following the killing of Ali Ahmed Hussein, who was killed in April.

These assassinations appear to be the strategy Israel has chosen to avoid all-out war. They are certainly degrading Hezbollah - though Iran of course has a large supply of personnel to step in where needed. To the naked eye, the killings - together with the tit-for-tat firing that occurs pretty much daily across the border - seem to constitute Israel’s entire response to Hezbollah’s ten-month war on the north. For the time being.

Iran is threatening some unspecified sort of terrible retaliation for Shukr’s death. We’ll have to wait and see.

3. 2:00 am, July 31 (this morning): Almost simultaneously with the Shukr airstrike, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh is assassinated in Tehran. Haniyeh was in Iran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the killing.

Haniyeh, a protegee of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, rose through the ranks to become head of Hamas’s political bureau. For decades, he was a key orchestrator of terrorist violence against Israel and its allies, which led to his being placed on the Specially Designated Global Terrorist list by the US. On October 7, Haniyeh was filmed smiling and laughing at live footage of the mass slaughter, rape, mutilation, torture, and incineration of Jews by Hamas terrorists. He was a vile human being and a terrorist of the first order.

Haniyeh was the biggest of the Hamas big cheeses to live in splendor in Qatar on a combination of Qatari largesse and appropriated aid money. He was thus emblematic of the fat cat class of Hamas leaders who rake in cash and savor their creature comforts in Doha while the old guard military leadership class, exemplified by Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, stay on the ground in Gaza (well, except for the 25 years Sinwar spent in an Israeli prison, and we think - just think, mind you - that Deif is now history).

Along with being committed throughout his career to the killing of as many Jews as possible, Haniyeh was a critical factor in the immiseration of Gaza’s Palestinian population, through both theft and the forced imposition of a political strategy expressly designed to prevent their emergence from decades of hopelessness and stagnation. It is grimly amusing to see the pieces now being written about him describing him as a moderate. Haniyeh was fully and vocally committed to the total destruction of the State of Israel and the genocide of its Jewish population, and he couldn’t have cared less how many Palestinians died in the process. He may have differed on occasion with Sinwar on tactics, but he is - sorry, was - absolutely of one mind with Sinwar with regard to the extermination of Israel and the Jews, and the expendability of Palestinian civilians in service to that end.

The losses of both Haniyeh and the aforementioned Deif, who appears to have been killed in Gaza two weeks ago, put quite a dent in Iran’s hydra-like terrorist proxy structure. Deif was (is?) at the top of Hamas’s military hierarchy and a legendary figure among the Palestinians, both for his transformation of Hamas from a rag-tag gang of terrorists into a military force to be reckoned with and his ability (until recently?) to elude Israeli targeting.

Haniyeh was in charge of the Hamas side of the negotiations to free the hostages dragged by Hamas into Gaza 298 days ago - negotiations that have never made it out of the starting gate. The main reason for this is that Hamas - i.e., Haniyeh - has never wavered in its insistence that any hostage release be accompanied by a 100% removal of all IDF presence from all of the Gaza Strip as well as international guarantees that the IDF never return.

This is a complete nonstarter. Consider just the Philadelphi Corridor, which lies between Gaza and Egypt. In that area alone, the IDF discovered dozens of tunnels through which Hamas has been smuggling in weapons, equipment, and much else for years. The idea that after fighting this brutal war, the IDF will withdraw from Gaza completely and forever, and allow whatever remains of Hamas either to police itself or be assisted in its reconstitution by international institutions and NGOs that have proven themselves over decades to be hostile to Israel, is ridiculous. Israel will have to maintain some kind of military presence in Gaza for some time at least (which would be a form of occupation, yes, but not an annexation, and it would not be permanent). This will be necessary to ensure that both Israel and the Palestinians can finally move forward rather than stay locked in the same cycle of pain and death to which they have been consigned by leaders like Haniyeh.

An interesting side note to the Haniyeh killing, by the way, is that a senior guy from Palestinian Islamic Jihad was in the same building but on a different floor, and he’s fine. It sounds as though this one was meticulously targeted, which implies strong intelligence on the inside. One hopes that gives the mullahs at least one sleepless night.

Iran is again threatening terrible retaliation. Hezbollah has issued condolences.

So what does this all mean?

A few things.

First: As long as Hamas continues to insist on impossible conditions for the hostages’ release, Israel will keep fighting, and that will continue to include targeted assassinations. The corollaries to this are that the hostages are not coming home any time soon (it pains me more than I can say to write that), the Palestinians of Gaza will continue to suffer the cost of Hamas’s refusal to offer viable conditions for the hostages’ release, and Hamas will continue to be degraded by Israel until such time as either Sinwar decides he’s had enough or Iran decides for him.

Second: Nasrallah is almost certainly not happy that Hezbollah has paid a serious price in the north for Sinwar’s atrocities in the south. In an effort to punish Israel for those losses, Tehran could give Hezbollah the green light to take action against Israel that is even more serious than the incessant rocket barrages - something like invading the north, for instance. (Note that in the small-scale fighting that occurred up there on October 7-8, Hezbollah terrorists were carrying handcuffs and rope as well as weapons, so they were planning on doing some kidnapping of their own. They also have their own huge tunnel network under the northern border [for God’s sake - where was the IDF over the 18 years that two elaborate tunnel networks were being built by terrorist entities on our borders??]. Hezbollah is much better equipped than Hamas, even after expending rockets, missiles, and attack drones on a daily basis for ten months, and it is capable of dramatically turning up the volume.)

But does Hezbollah want to do this? Does Iran? Hamas is decimated. Is war in the name of vengeance for a largely vanquished quasi-ally (Hezbollah and Hamas are on the same side vis-a-vis Israel, and they’re both Iranian proxies, but these people do not exactly love each other) really worth the cost? Hezbollah would have to use up a significant chunk of its materiel, and Iran likes having those 120,000 missiles (more than are possessed by many countries) aimed at us as a means of deterring action against their nuclear program. I’m not at all sure that either Nasrallah or Khamenei really wants an all-out war in the north, no matter how much they may bloviate in press releases. I could be kidding myself, but that’s my sense.

Third: That doesn’t mean they’re not going to respond, as two major hits within hours of each other is a serious slap in Tehran’s face (particularly as one of them occurred on Iranian territory). They’re going to do something, but we don’t know what. The mullahs and the IRGC senior staff are rational people, so they will game out their response — as well as our likely response to their response — very carefully. As I say, I don’t think they’re going to go for all-out war, but whatever it is, it’s going to hurt. I suggest that my fellow Israelis buckle up.