With red lines meaningless we stand at the brink of disaster…

The great, quite often articulated fear that has haunted the Middle East and the wider world since the shocking events of October 7th has been the possibility that the harrowing events we have witnessed these past ten months, particularly in Gaza, were but a prelude to something much, much worse; all-out war in the Middle East between Iran and its proxies and Israel along with the United States.

Events began to spiral out of control last Saturday when a rocket attack on the occupied Golan Heights saw twelve children killed. Hezbollah has denied they were the source of the missile, and some of their supporters have claimed the real culprit was a malfunctioning Israeli weapon, but such responses to atrocities in my opinion always ring hollow. While the ‘red lines’ between Hezbollah and Israel supposedly ruled out targeting each other’s civilians directly when you fire lethal weaponry at your opponent you always run the risk you’ll kill or injure someone you didn’t intend to and so Hezbollah’s denial of responsibility rings as true as Israel’s own denials regarding the civilian deaths their own weapons cause in Gaza.

With twelve dead children, a brutal Israeli response was inevitable and it was duly delivered on Tuesday in a strike on Beirut that targeted and killed Fuad Shukr. Not a name I would wager most people in the West are familiar with but he was an extremely senior member of Hezbollah, said to be the right hand man of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah himself. Israel held him personally responsible for the deaths in the Golan Heights.

Hezbollah apparently used back channels to communicate to Israel via intermediaries that whatever their response to what happened in the Golan would be, it should not involve a strike on Beirut as that would cross their ‘red lines’, with the implied consequence being Tel Aviv itself will become a target. In not only targeting Beirut anyway, but targeting one of the most senior members of Hezbollah there was, it seems Israel has consciously made the decision not to treat those red lines as a ceiling it could not go beyond but a floor it would need to exceed.

I went to sleep on Tuesday evening with a mounting sense of dread regarding the future. The entire region seemed on the brink of war. And then I woke up on Wednesday morning to the news that Ismail Haniyeh had been assassinated by Israel.

On Iranian soil. Suffice to say, dread gave way to despair.

Haniyeh is someone whom anyone watching the region would have been familiar with these past few decades. Emerging as a leader of Hamas following the assassination of his predecessors, he first came to global attention as Palestinian Prime Minister after Hamas won the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories. Later he left for exile in Qatar, where he has lived under Qatari protection (with tacit American acceptance). He has been the face of Hamas through multiple conflicts with Israel and he has been particularly pre-eminent during the current war as the chief negotiator for Hamas in Doha.

He was a big deal. Among the biggest of fish in this region.

And now he is dead. Assassinated by Israel in what domestically will be seen as and treated as a personal triumph for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only is one of the most senior leaders of the movement which perpetrated October 7th dead (an event which Haniyeh praised and marked by giving thanks to God) but the act was performed in the heart of the Iranian capital itself. Iran and it’s Revolutionary Guards stand enraged and humiliated.

Internationally though, the twin assassinations have simultaneously enraged Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. All red lines have been erased by all parties and the provocations each has delivered onto the others are too big to be easily ignored. Restraint in these circumstances would require a superhuman effort.

We stand on the very cusp of something very, very bad and it is not inconceivable that in but a few days, the retaliations of either Hezbollah or Iran (Hamas is now regarded as too degraded from the war in Gaza to mount any sort of reprisal by itself so it must rely on the graces of its ally and its patron) could see Israeli tanks invading southern Lebanon or worse, full-scale war with Iran itself. It is worth pointing out that Iran is essentially a de facto nuclear state at this point as outsiders acknowledge it could probably put a working atomic bomb together in a matter of days or weeks. The only reason it doesn’t is that it would suffer diplomatic consequences from doing so and thus the current situation, of being a breath away from nuclear capability (and thus gaining the deference nuclear states expect, and for an example of the restraint that confers in international politics look no further than North Korea) without the massive downsides suits it for the time being.

Calculations may change in the event of a war breaking out with Israel, which would inevitably drag in the United States on the Israeli side and see the biggest military conflagration in decades. We could see two powers uniquely hostile to each other going to war openly with each other, and both having nuclear weapons as their final guarantees.

The economic and political shockwaves of such a cataclysm beyond the Middle East have to be considered as well. A major war in this scale is the last thing anyone in the world needs. But it maybe beyond anyone’s power to prevent now.

And so we sit, we watch and we hold our breaths.

I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.