US, Israel brace for Iran response following Haniyeh killing

Intelligence officials in Washington told Axios that Iran is planning to retaliate against Israel for Haniyeh’s killing, though they anticipate it will take Tehran and its proxies some time to coordinate a response. Top officials from Iran met on Thursday with representatives of its allied groups in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen to discuss their retaliation, Reuters reported. Washington is taking a similar approach, with officials coordinating a plan mirroring its response to Iran’s April attack against Israel. “We expect a few rough days,” one official told Axios.

There was hope that diplomatic efforts would prevail to bring about a ceasefire after more than 10 months of war in Gaza, The Washington Post’s foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote. But this week’s events have upended those prospects, and it seems more likely than ever that the region is headed towards a full-scale war. “We are in a situation where many red lines have been crossed,” Sima Shine, head of the Iran program at the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies, said. Officials have said that the only route to de-escalation is an immediate ceasefire, but the continued tensions have made that less likely.

There are two distinct paths forward for Hezbollah following the killings of one of its senior commanders and two top Hamas officials: The militia could add the assassinations to the “long list” of grievances it has with Israel and strike in the future, wrote Hanin Ghaddar, an Arab politics expert with The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Or, Hezbollah might plan a strike on an Israeli military target in the near-term. But “nothing has drastically changed in Hezbollah’s calculations. The group still cannot afford all-out war with Israel,” Ghaddar added.