Israel's Unhinged Assassinations Are A Threat To Global Security

Israel's assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut, followed shortly after by the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Hanniyeh in Tehran, represent unhinged military operations which were undoubtedly green-lit by the United States. As the region now descends into further chaos, which could engulf the world, it is important to understand why this happened and what the US-Israeli strategy is.

Last Tuesday, Israel launched an attack on southern Beirut, the Lebanese capital, killing 7 and injuring 80 others, including 3 children and two women. The building the Israeli Air Force struck, using drones and missiles fired from fighter jets, was a civilian populated tower and was reduced to mere rubble. Tel Aviv's primary target was a Hezbollah military leader called Fouad Shoukr, one of the groups most prominent military leaders, and he was killed alongside an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) advisor in that building.

Only hours later, a shock report emerged from Iran. Ismail Hanniyeh, the head of the Hamas political wing, had been assassinated in a building located in Tehran, the Iranian Capital, after attending the inauguration of Iran's new President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hanniyeh, who had been advocating strongly for a ceasefire in Gaza and even announced that Hamas would be willing to lay down its weapons if a two-State solution was reached only months earlier, had been eliminated, and with him, perhaps the final hope at a peaceful solution.

What Led Up To This? 

In order to understand the thinking of the Israelis and to also comprehend what we are now seeing, we have to look at the situation through the cold lenses of strategy, robbing the situation of legal and moral interpretations.

Israel has failed to achieve its declared goal of its war in the Gaza Strip, vowing to completely destroy Hamas. If we take for instance the latest analysis published by CNN -- which combined the analyses of investigative journalists at the US media outlet with those of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project and the Institute for the Study of War -- only 3 out of 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza have been rendered combat ineffective, while 13 were degraded and 8 are still combat effective. Despite the Israeli military's denial of these conclusions, the facts on the ground appear to strongly back the conclusions published by CNN, and although Benjamin Netanyahu declared to Congress last month that "victory is in sight", his own military admitted that they couldn't defeat Hamas.

Keep in mind here, that the Israelis have, by their own admission, failed to destroy 80% of the Gaza tunnel systems that the resistance fighters use, despite attempting to flood them with water and fill them with chemical gas. On top of this, there are around a dozen Palestinian armed groups inside the Gaza Strip that are combating Israel's ground invasion and there is no sign that any of them have been completely defeated either as we still receive communiques and videos from them which feature their fighters launching attacks on Israeli military targets.

Israel is also lying about its military casualties in the Gaza Strip, as contradictory reports continually surface about how many injured soldiers there are, and the death toll is not consistent with what the video evidence suggests either.

Regardless of how you see the above, however, Israel has failed to defeat Hamas after 10 months of fighting in the Gaza Strip and their use of maximum firepower, with little to no concern for civilian life. The Israelis are also suffering from a significant problem in troop motivation, as their soldiers are tired and many have expressed no desire to continue fighting, while they additionally suffer from a shortage of tanks and armored personnel carriers that they need to fight on other fronts. Israel has also failed to free its captives held in Gaza, killing more of them than it has managed to actually recapture. This, as an internal Israeli crisis continues to plague their society, with a battle between secular and religious threatening to spiral out of control.

All this as Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands well that ending the war will cost him his far-right coalition and perhaps lead to further chaos, in addition to his arrest on charges of corruption if he was to lose the election that would inevitably follow.

It suffices to say that Israel is at a breaking point, 46,000 businesses have closed since October 7, while projections predict that this figure will rise to 60,000 by the end of 2024. The Israeli Port of Eilat has declared bankruptcy, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis remain displaced or have moved away from the surrounding settlements around Gaza or the Lebanese border. The blow that Hamas delivered to Israel's security, military, intelligence, weapons industry, and political elitists on October 7, has never been recovered from, as Hezbollah and Yemen's Ansarallah strike at will against Israeli targets.

The US-Israeli vision prior to the Hamas-led October 7 attack was to formally establish ties between Riyadh and Tel Aviv, paving the way for the construction of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which the Biden administration announced on September 9, 2023, during the G-20 summit hosted by India. US President Joe Biden announced the IMEC as a "really big deal", believing that all the chips were in place to initiate Saudi-Israeli normalization and begin creating the new trade route through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and then occupied Palestine.

In reality, Washington had completely ignored the plight of the Palestinians and assumed them to be a non-issue, proceeding to go ahead with the tunnel vision approach of pursuing a policy that was going to lead to catastrophe in West Asia. The plan was to form an "Arab NATO" that would be led by the Israelis, designed to combat Iran and to construct this new trade route that was designed to rival China's Belt and Road Initiative in line with the US' Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII).

Israel Had Two Options

Hamas shattered the dreams and aspirations of the US-Israeli alliance on October 7, putting the Palestinian cause for Statehood back on the map. Israel's response, backed fully by their US allies, was designed to make the Palestinians pay the ultimate price for daring to disrupt their West Asia agenda. Yet the further Israel took the conflict, the worse its own predicament got and the less likely it began to appear that the Israelis were going to achieve their war goals.

The whole world looked on in shock and horror at the genocide that was taking place inside the Gaza Strip, while every single organ of the United Nations worked overtime to point out how egregious Israel's crimes were, the record of which does not need to be mentioned here as it is so incredibly lengthy and publcailly acknowledged. However, the US government stood by Israel's side and refused to say no. No sane American voices emerged from Washington to deter the US-Israeli alliance from escalating and therefore the Israelis were given a free hand to continue their vengeance policy in Gaza.

Israel was left with two options:

1) Pursue an immediate ceasefire, which would end the war in Gaza and all the other fronts. A ceasefire which would have included a prisoner exchange to free captives on both sides and to then continue on to negotiate some kind of interim agreement that would pave the way to a meaningful two-State solution. Off the back of this there could have been the possibility of there still being a route to Saudi-Israeli normalization, and dialogue between Iran and the United States to revive the Iran Nuclear Deal, while the Israeli economy could slowly find its way to stability. From there, the Israeli domestic situation would begin to boil, yet there could have been methods of attempting to find middle-ground with strong influence from American Zionists and the US government.

2) Refuse to accept compromise, expand the war to other fronts with the hope that you can contain the situation to limited wars and battles, without triggering a full-scale regional conflagration. This strategy, as I have written about for The Last American Vagabond in the past, would include escalation on the Lebanese front specifically, so that Israel can claim to have confronted Hezbollah and end the conflict it causes in a stale-mate. After closing this war, they would then move on to annexing territory in the occupied West Bank and hold this up as a victory from the war.

Israel chose the latter strategy, which now comes at a major cost. Not only have the Israelis -- with US backing -- decided to enter into a new phase of conflict with regional actors, they have killed any possibility for peace in the future.

At this point, the situation can go one of two ways. Either their will be an all-out regional war that will wipe Israel off the face of the earth, or the situation will manage to quiet down after significant death and destruction on both sides.

Israel took a great gamble by carrying out these two assassinations. According to Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Israel committed three separate actions which deserve responses; the Israelis assassinated a Hezbollah leader, attacked the Lebanese Capital, and committed a civilian massacre. While the assassination of Ismail Hanniyeh destroyed the prospect of reaching an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, while also violating Iran's sovereignty and dealing a massive blow to Iranian security. Iran therefore officially informed the UN of their intention to respond in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Both the Israeli and American governments, who share equal guilt in this escalation that we are now seeing, are betting on being able to limit the scope of the war. If we are to assume that the Israeli-US alliance is not suicidal, because an all out war will wipe Israel off of the map, then we must interpret their actions as a desperate last ditch attempt to try and assert their dominance over the region.

If the Israelis can pull through a regional war, which does not transform into an all out battle to the death, then they can claim a small victory by simply surviving. Then, from there, they can bring in the United Nations to force an end to the war on all fronts, conclude a deal with Hamas in Gaza, before moving on to fixating on the West Bank. So, in their strategic thinking, they have pulled off a bold move, which could manage to salvage a stalemate and save them from a slow defeat. At the end of which they will hold up those they assassinated as trophies to their own people, before enacting a land grab.

To say the least, this is a risky and reckless strategy. It could also backfire, resulting in a situation in which Israel will collapse as a State. If the fall of Israel seems inevitable, they will have two options at this point also:

1) Fire nuclear warheads (AKA the Samson Option)

2) Allow for a multinational regional force to send its armies into Palestine/Israel in order to secure the territory. This could include the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Turkish armed forces, which would be used to hold territory and deter attacks from groups fighting Israel out of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. This would be a strategy employed to save Israel from losing its territory, while also providing a way for Israeli citizens to flee the country.

We have entered a dangerous period of war and this could easily escalate into a situation that spins out of everyone's control. Unfortunately, the US government has allowed this to happen and may involve itself in such an un-winnable war.