The audacious assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh risks a wider regional conflagration.
There is little doubt that Israel was behind the audacious assassination of Hamas’ hostage-deal negotiator and political head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday. By deliberately maximizing Tehran’s embarrassment—Haniyeh was killed only hours after the inauguration of Iran’s new reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian—the Israeli government also maximized the likelihood of Iranian retaliation. That is—at least in the view of a former Deputy Head of the Israeli National Security Council—because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to spark a larger war and drag the U.S. into it.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Though Israel itself would pay a high price in a region-wide war, it would serve Netanyahu’s interests in numerous ways.
Firstly, Haniyeh’s assassination kills the prospect of an imminent ceasefire deal. Netanyahu has consistently opposed a deal that would end the war. The Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that, in prior rounds of negotiations, he strategically leaked sensitive information to the media at crucial moments to sabotage talks. As President Biden told TIME when asked whether Netanyahu was prolonging the war for the sake of his political career, “There is every reason to draw that conclusion.” Netanyahu knows that a hostage deal will collapse his government and end his reign as Prime Minister. It would also likely mean the expedition of his ongoing corruption trial, which may very well land him in jail. Nothing kills these talks more effectively than ending the life of the negotiator on the other side of the table.
Secondly, Haniyeh’s killing may corner a future President Kamala Harris. While the Biden Administration has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure to reach a deal, there are signs Harris could take a different approach to Biden’s near-complete deference to Israel. “As I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” she said after he visited Washington last week, pinning the blame for the lack of progress at his feet. Her cold body language, her expression of empathy for the suffering of Palestinians, and her willingness to publicly point to Israel’s obfuscation were hard for Netanyahu to miss.
Read More: How Gaza Policy Could Change With Harris
Thirdly, killing Haniyeh also killed another line of potential negotiation: between the U.S. and Iran. The surprise election of Pezeshkian—who campaigned on a platform of restarting talks with the U.S.—created a small window for renewed diplomacy. But the escalation sparked by the assassination has severely undercut Pezeshkian’s prospects of creating political space in Tehran for such an outreach. This is particularly true since Tehran believes that Israel acted with the Biden Administration’s blessing. In a letter to the President of the U.N. Security Council, Iran’s U.N. ambassador wrote that the attack “could not have occurred without the authorization and intelligence support of the United States.”
Given Israel’s longstanding opposition to improved U.S.-Iran relations, choosing to assassinate Haniyeh around Pezeshkian’s inauguration is unlikely a coincidence.
Indeed, Netanyahu has for two decades sought to get the U.S. to go to war with Iran. The last four American Presidents have all at various times faced pressure from Israel to attack Iran. Though much focus has been on Iran’s nuclear program, the desire for a direct U.S. attack goes deeper than uranium enrichment. Israel sees Iran as threatening a regional arrangement that otherwise provides Israel with maximum maneuverability, including the ability to strike Syria and Lebanon with almost complete impunity. A nuclear deal that prevents Iran from building a bomb would not shift the regional balance away from Iran, the Israelis believe. In fact, through the sanctions relief that Iran was promised under Obama’s nuclear deal, Iran’s conventional capabilities would probably grow. Obama’s rapprochement with Iran edged the regional balance of power away from the Persian Gulf states and Israel. That balance of power cannot be sustained by Israel’s military capacity alone. It requires severe economic sanctions and American military action.
Israel’s apparent attack appears designed to elicit an Iranian response, one that could easily spiral into a larger war that draws in the U.S. In April, the Biden Administration prevented an uncontrollable escalation by helping choreograph an exchange of fire between Iran and Israel following Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus on April 1. Today the U.S. can still stop the region from descending into chaos, but only if it is willing to put clear and public red lines in front of Netanyahu.
