The Killing of a Hamas Leader Is Part of a Larger War

Matthew Duss Nancy Okail

The assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Tuesday — presumably carried out by Israel — has likely halted Gaza cease-fire talks and a hostage deal for the time being. It has also brought the region one step closer to an all-out conflagration. Indeed, within hours, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared his intention to attack Israel.

The almost certain escalation from the Haniyeh assassination signals a fundamental flaw in President Biden’s Gaza policy: the hope that the Gaza war could be contained to Gaza. The possibility of regional conflict has always been Mr. Biden’s real red line. But for months, the war has already been spreading — to Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and now, to Iran. The fact that it hasn’t yet erupted into even more widespread and intense conflict is the result of both diplomatic skill and a lot of luck, the latter of which appears to be running out.

Some in the U.S. foreign policy establishment argue that since neither the United States nor Iran desires full-scale war, cooler heads will prevail. But once uncorked, this kind of violence usually cannot be controlled. It’s important to understand that even if we are able to step back from the brink now, as we all must hope, this policy is both a moral and strategic failure, with consequences and costs in human lives, to U.S. credibility and to the so-called “rules-based order” we haven’t begun to comprehend.

The current precarious moment is the result of a series of false assumptions that U.S. policy was built on since well before the war began. On Oct. 6, the United States was heavily focused on stitching up an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, premised in part on the idea that the Palestinian people could simply be caged in perpetuity, with a few upgrades here and there to the military occupation they have endured for nearly six decades, and a few nominal commitments to someday, maybe, end that occupation. The Oct. 7 attacks showed this to be a fantasy.

In the months after, the Biden administration delayed calls for a cease-fire, in the face of large-scale global and domestic protest and internal government dissent, while emboldening Israel’s right-wing government with both the sale of arms and political support. At the same time, regional conflict steadily spread.

Rocket fire from Lebanon began almost immediately after Oct. 7, driving tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in the north and leaving some 60,000 internally displaced with no prospect of when they might return. Attacks by Yemen’s Houthi forces on shipping routes in the Red Sea imposed a burden on the global economy as freight costs more than doubled in January. Attacks by Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq on U.S. interests culminated in a drone attack on an American base in Jordan that killed three U.S. service members at the beginning of the year, to which the United States retaliated with strikes of its own.

An Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus, Syria, in April resulted in an Iranian drone and missile attack on central Israel in retaliation. Thankfully almost all of those drones and missiles were intercepted via a skillful U.S.-coordinated regional defense effort (a 7-year-old girl was seriously injured), but it was impossible to miss the significance of Iran directly striking inside Israel for the first time. Last month, a Houthi drone penetrated Israel’s air defenses and hit downtown Tel Aviv — to which Israel responded by striking Yemen for the first time.

On July 27, a rocket strike on the town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which Israel blamed on Hezbollah, killed 12 children and teenagers, to which Israel responded with an airstrike on southern Beirut, killing Hezbollah’s senior military commander and further widening the circle of conflict.

With each new redline crossed, the risk of escalation increases, and Washington should not underestimate either the willingness of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to drag the United States into a disastrous war, nor the potential for Iran to engage militarily or worse, to finally decide to commit fully to developing a nuclear deterrent.

And yet, rather than see a series of desperately close calls as evidence of the urgency to end the Gaza war, Washington chose to view it as proof of its ability to contain escalation. The Biden administration has consistently refused to leverage its continuing supply of arms to Israel to bring the fighting to a halt, even appearing to sidestep U.S. law to continue doing so.

Mr. Biden’s announcement in late May of a permanent cease-fire proposal was an important effort to try to secure a war-ending agreement, but that gambit was undermined by his continuing refusal to offer an ultimatum to Prime Minister Netanyahu. The Republican Party’s recent stunt of inviting the prime minister to address Congress, with which the Democratic congressional leadership irresponsibly cooperated, predictably further emboldened Mr. Netanyahu to continue stalling a cease-fire.

It is also essential to underscore that, as with previous assassinations of militant leaders in Lebanon, the precision with which Mr. Haniyeh was apparently dispatched shows that targeting Hamas leadership in Gaza might have benefited from an entirely different military strategy. While the effort to rout Hamas militants was of a broader scale, surely it could have been carried out without devastatingly widespread casualties and mass destruction of houses, schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure that will require a generation or more to rebuild.

It remains to be seen what the long-term consequences of the Gaza war will be. It’s already clear, however, that this catastrophe was enabled by Washington’s false belief in its ability to manage and control the spread of violence. Shattering this dangerous illusion is an essential step in crafting a U.S. foreign policy fit for this historical moment

At the time of this writing, a ground war in Lebanon, and devastating, sustained missile barrages may still be staved off, but to do so will require deft, immediate diplomacy and actionable changes on the pipeline of arms to Israel. That will necessitate more action than we have seen in the last ten months, leading us to worry that the conflagration may occur as much as the Americans would like to wish it away.

The time is late, but it is essential now for President Biden to finally apply real pressure to stop this war, by halting the supply of offensive arms, facilitating the return of hostages to Israel and enabling the provision of desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. The United States must state loudly and clearly that the country will no longer support this war. And then show that it means it.

Matthew Duss is executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He was foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Nancy Okail is president and C.E.O. at the Center for International Policy.