The deaths of two senior leaders of Iran-backed groups will broaden and deepen the conflict in the Middle East and increase the risks of all-out war.
World leaders and international diplomats have been working the phones in recent weeks, trying to prevent a surge in violence – but I doubt they could have contemplated events over the past 24 hours.
A strike which appears to have killed a Hezbollah commander known as Fuad Shukur in a densely populated part of Beirut – as well as the assassination of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, will change the parameters of this conflict as we know it.
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Brutal yet largely localised wars in Gaza – and the border area separating Israel and Lebanon – have been superseded as the conflict tips into a worrying new phase.
The death of Haniyeh in the centre of Tehran has been viewed as an attack on Iran itself and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has promised a forceful response.
“It is our duty to take revenge on Israel for the assassination in Iran, because the assassination was carried out on our soil,” he said.
The Israelis have chosen a different, yet equally provocative way to acknowledge his death – with the government press office posting and then deleting an image of Haniyeh on its Facebook page with the word “eliminated” stamped across his forehead.
Pic: Press office for the Israeli government, Facebook
Israel has not made a formal statement claiming responsibility for the death of the Hamas leader.
Note that Haniyeh’s assassination in the heart of Tehran will come as a major embarrassment to the Iranians. Security lapses do not come much bigger than this, particularly when the threat was well known.
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In recent years Israel has targeted Iranians as part of an indirect ‘shadow’ war waged across the region.
In April, an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killed eight members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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It seems inevitable that previous calculations used to prevent a major escalation will be discarded as Hezbollah and Iran vow to respond.
The rules in the Middle East have been jettisoned, it appears.