Since October 7, Israel has had one geostrategic imperative: to reinstate deterrence. In the Middle East – and increasingly in Ukraine and further afield – states live or die on the strength of their ability to cow their enemies, and none more so than the Jewish one.
This morning, as the dust settles over the former safe house in Tehran in which the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was living in luxury until death came upon him from the skies, that deterrent is well on the way to being restored.
The Iranian regime is in a state of shock. The last time Israel targeted a terrorist perceived as too high in value to tolerate, Tehran unleashed a night of 300 projectiles on the Jewish state, only one of which hit the target. The west united to play defence, but the Israeli response was surgical and designed to send a message of fear, not pain.
This is a move of a different order. The humiliation suffered by the Iranians is profound. The paranoia spreading through the upper echelons of the regime is tangible. If Israel – Jerusalem has not claimed responsibility but let us work on that assumption – can reach a figure like Haniyeh in a place like Tehran, nowhere and nobody is safe.
According to Iran experts like Kasra Aarabi, director of Iranian Revolutionary Guard research at the respected United Against Nuclear Iran thinktank, last night’s assassination will only deepen the regime’s fear of Benjamin Netanyahu. They have watched while the Israeli leader has withstood unprecedented pressure both internationally and domestically, pressing Hamas to the brink of destruction.
They know his views on Iran. He has been vocal about the threat for years, memorably brandishing a visual aid of a cartoon nuclear bomb in a speech at the United Nations, and has put cunning and steel behind his concerns. In 2018, when the Mossad pulled off the audacious theft of Iran’s nuclear archive from a nondescript commercial district on the outskirts of Tehran, Bibi was at the wheel.
Two years later, when Israeli spies carried out the remarkable assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the “father of the bomb”, whose fingerprints were found all over the archive, as a Mossad source told me, Bibi was once again in office. Fakhrizadeh was killed, as I revealed at the time, by way of a one-ton automated gun that was smuggled into the country piece-by-piece by a 20-plus team of Israeli and Iranian spies. The myth of Israel’s superhuman espionage was assured.
These are different times. Even as war rages and Netanyahu is on the ropes, however, he has shown that when it comes to Iran, even the 300 projectiles in April were not enough to dent his resolve. Haniyeh is dead; Tehran is in a state of panic and embarrassment; just hours earlier, Fuad Shukr, a veteran Hezbollah commander close to leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in another precision Israeli strike, dying with a $5 million American bounty on his head, cleverly wrapping the White House into the equation.
The Iranians are boxed in. The law of the region dictates that they will need to mount a response. But dare they provoke Netanyahu further?
There will be those within the Ayatollah’s high command who are baying for blood. With the election of Donald Trump in November looking like a distinct possibility, the window of American weakness may be closing. In acknowledgement of this, Iran has been accelerating its progress towards a nuclear weapon, which may lie just “one or two weeks” away, as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confirmed in Aspen two weeks ago. The hawks will argue that now is the time to make a dash for nuclearisation, which would redraw the balance of power in the Middle East.
These same voices – including, apparently, that of Masoud Pezeshkian, the new president, who set aside the “moderate” mask that fooled the west by vowing to “make the terrorist occupiers regret their cowardly act” – will be urging the Ayatollah to hit back hard. This may yet unfold, but today it seems more unlikely than likely. In the old world, when Trump was in office and the deterrent was strong, even the killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was met with no escalation from Iran. Despite the war in Gaza, the memory of that dynamic will be conjured today. There will inevitably be some retaliation from the regime, but, as Aarabi told me, this is more likely to take the form of a terror attack on an Israeli embassy overseas than another night of rocket fire on Israel.
So the rounds of violence continue. Right now, there is no end in sight. The killing of Haniyeh will almost certainly cause chances of a hostage deal to fade, which will heap more domestic pressure on the Israeli leader. In Jerusalem, however, there will be a sense of quiet satisfaction that the name Netanyahu strikes fear into the heart of the Ayatollah once again.