Iranians follow a truck, centre, carrying the coffins of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard during their funeral ceremony at Enqelab-e-Eslami (Islamic Revolution) Square in Tehran, Iran, on Aug. 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Iran on Tuesday (August 13, 2024) rejected Western calls to stand down its threat to retaliate against Israel for the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran late last month.

The Islamic republic and its allies have blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s killing on July 31 during a visit to the Iranian capital for the swearing-in of President Masoud Pezeshkian. Israel has not commented.

Iran has vowed to avenge the death, which came hours after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed a senior commander of Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon.

Western diplomats have scrambled to prevent a major conflagration in the Middle East, where tensions are already high due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

In a statement on Monday (August 12, 2024), the United States and its European allies urged Iran to de-escalate.

The White House warned that a “significant set of attacks” by Iran and its allies was possible as soon as this week, saying Israel shared the same assessment.

The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group and a guided missile submarine to the region in support of Israel.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani criticised the Western call for restraint.

“The declaration by France, Germany and Britain, which raised no objection to the international crimes of the Zionist regime, brazenly asks Iran to take no deterrent action against a regime which has violated its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said in a statement.

Far-right minister opposes talks

The United States and its European allies also called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with difficult talks set for Thursday on halting the conflict.

The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Militants also seized 251 people, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 39,929 people, according to a toll from the territory’s Health Ministry, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.

International mediators have invited Israel and Hamas to resume negotiations this week on a ceasefire and hostage release deal, an invitation Israel has accepted.

Far-right parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition strongly oppose any ceasefire in Gaza, a point rammed home by firebrand National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on a visit to Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound that was swiftly condemned by its custodian Jordan.

Defying longstanding rules that allow Jews and other non-Muslims to visit the compound but not to pray there, Ben Gvir led hundreds of Israelis in singing Jewish hymns and performing Talmudic rituals, images posted on social media networks showed.

In a video filmed inside the compound, Mr. Ben Gvir renewed his opposition to any let-up in the Gaza war.

“We must win and not go to the talks in Doha or Cairo,” the Minister said, referring to the truce talks planned for Thursday (August 15).

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said Mr. Ben Gvir’s visit “deviated from the status quo”. It said Israel’s policy on the Temple Mount remained unchanged.

Hamas has urged mediators to implement a truce plan earlier presented by U.S. President Joe Biden instead of holding more talks.

Analyst Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said Iran was considering how to retaliate against Israel without derailing the ceasefire talks.

“The renewed push for a ceasefire offers Iran a way out of this escalatory cycle,” Mr. Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think-tank, told AFP.

“Iranian officials still feel obliged to hit back at Israel, but they must do so in a way that doesn’t derail the prospects for a ceasefire summit.”

‘Who will take care of her now?’

Pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza has grown since emergency services in the Hamas-run territory said an Israeli air strike on Saturday (August 10, 2024) killed 93 people at a school housing displaced Palestinians.

Israel said it targeted militants operating out of the school and mosque.

In the latest Gaza violence, an Israeli strike killed 10 members of one family in the territory’s southern district of Khan Yunis, leaving only one survivor — a three-month-old girl, a medic said.

“Ten members of the Abu Haya family were killed in an Israeli strike on Abassan in east Khan Yunis,” the medic from Nasser Hospital told AFP on condition of anonymity.

“There is only one survivor from the family, a baby girl named Rim. She is just three months old,” he said, identifying the 10 other members of the family — two parents and their eight children.

The girl, wrapped in a black cloth, stirred strong emotion in the courtyard of Nasser Hospital, a place now known for grieving families searching for dead or wounded loved ones.

“This little girl was pulled out of the rubble. Her whole family is dead. Who will take care of her now?” asked Ibrahim Barbakh, a resident of Khan Yunis, as he held the baby.

Only a ceasefire deal in Gaza stemming from hoped-for talks this week would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on its soil, three senior Iranian officials said.

Iran has vowed a severe response to Haniyeh’s killing, which took place as he visited Tehran late last month and which it blamed on Israel. Israel has neither confirmed or denied its involvement. The U.S. Navy has deployed warships and a submarine to the Middle East to bolster Israeli defences.

One of the sources, a senior Iranian security official, said Iran, along with allies such as Hezbollah, would launch a direct attack if the Gaza talks fail or it perceives Israel is dragging out negotiations. The sources did not say how long Iran would allow for talks to progress before responding.

With an increased risk of a broader Middle East war after the killings of Haniyeh and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, Iran has been involved in intense dialogue with Western countries and the United States in recent days on ways to calibrate retaliation, said the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

In comments published on Tuesday, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey confirmed Washington was asking allies to help convince Iran to de-escalate tensions. Three regional government sources described conversations with Tehran to avoid escalation ahead of the Gaza ceasefire talks, due to begin on Thursday in either Egypt or Qatar.

“We hope our response will be timed and executed in a way that does not harm a potential ceasefire,” Iran’s mission to the U.N. said on Friday in a statement. Iran’s foreign ministry on Tuesday said calls to exercise restraint “contradict principles of international law.”

Iran’s foreign ministry and its Revolutionary Guards Corps did not immediately respond to questions. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the U.S. State Department did not respond to questions.

Looming conflict

“Something could happen as soon as this week by Iran and its proxies… That is a U.S. assessment as well as an Israel assessment,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Monday.

“If something does happen this week, the timing of it could certainly well have an impact on these talks we want to do on Thursday,” he added. At the weekend, Hamas cast doubt on whether talks would go ahead. Israel and Hamas have held several rounds of talks in recent months without agreeing a final ceasefire.

In Israel, many observers believe a response is imminent after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would “harshly punish” Israel for the strike in Tehran.

Iran’s regional policy is set by the elite Revolutionary Guards, who answer only to Khamenei, the country’s top authority. Iran’s relatively moderate new president Masoud Pezeshkian has repeatedly reaffirmed Iran’s anti-Israel stance and its support for resistance movements across the region since taking office last month.

Meir Litva, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, said he thought Iran would put its needs before helping its ally Hamas but that Iran also wanted to avoid a full-scale war.

“The Iranians never subordinated their strategy and policies to the needs of their proxies or protégées,” Mr. Litva said. “An attack is likely and almost inevitable but I don’t know the scale and the timing.”

Iran-based analyst Saeed Laylaz said the Islamic Republic’s leaders were now keen to work towards a ceasefire in Gaza, “to obtain incentives, avoid an all-out war and strengthen its position in the region.”

Mr. Laylaz said Iran had not previously been involved in the Gaza peace process but was now ready to play “a key role.”

Iran, two of the sources said, was considering sending a representative to the ceasefire talks, in what would be a first since the war started in Gaza.

The representative would not directly attend the meetings but would engage in behind-the-scenes discussions “to maintain a line of diplomatic communication” with the United States while negotiations proceed. Officials in Washington, Qatar and Egypt did not immediately respond to questions about whether Iran would play an indirect role in talks.

Two senior sources close to Lebanon’s Hezbollah said Tehran would give the negotiations a chance but would not give up its intentions to retaliate.

A ceasefire in Gaza would give Iran cover for a smaller “symbolic” response, one of the sources said.

Israel launched its assault on Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capturing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to the health ministry.

April missiles

Iran has not publicly indicated what would be the target of an eventual response to the Haniyeh assassination.

On April 13, two weeks after two Iranian generals were killed in a strike on Tehran’s embassy in Syria, Iran unleashed a barrage of hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles towards Israel, damaging two airbases. Almost all of the weapons were shot down before they reached their targets.

“Iran wants its response to be much more effective than the April 13 attack,” said Farzin Nadimi, senior fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East policy.”

Nadimi said such a response would require “a lot of preparation and coordination” especially if it involved Iran’s network of allied armed groups opposing Israel and the United States across the Middle East, with Hezbollah the senior member of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” that along with Iraqi militias and Yemen’s Houthis have harried Israel since Oct. 7.

Two of the Iranian sources said Iran would support Hezbollah and other allies if they launched their own responses to the killing of Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr, who died in a strike in Beirut the day before Haniyeh was killed in Tehran.

The sources did not specify what form such support could take.

Thousands of fighters from Iran-backed groups in the Middle East are ready to come to Lebanon to join with the militant Hezbollah group in its battle with Israel if the simmering conflict escalates into a full-blown war, officials with Iran-backed factions and analysts say.

Almost daily exchanges of fire have occurred along Lebanon’s frontier with northern Israel since fighters from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip staged a bloody assault on southern Israel in early October that set off a war in Gaza.

The situation to the north worsened this month after an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Hezbollah military commander in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah retaliated by firing hundreds of rockets and explosive drones into northern Israel.

Israeli officials have threatened a military offensive in Lebanon if there is no negotiated end to push Hezbollah away from the border.

Over the past decade, Iran-backed fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan fought together in Syria’s 13-year conflict, helping tip the balance in favour of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Officials from Iran-backed groups say they could also join together again against Israel.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Wednesday that militant leaders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other countries have previously offered to send tens of thousands of fighters to help Hezbollah, but he said the group already has more than 1,00,000 fighters.

“We told them, thank you, but we are overwhelmed by the numbers we have,” Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah said the battle in its current form is using only a portion of Hezbollah’s manpower, an apparent reference to the specialized fighters who fire missiles and drones.

But that could change in the event of an all-out war. Nasrallah hinted at that possibility in a speech in 2017 in which he said fighters from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan “will be partners” of such a war.

Officials from Lebanese and Iraqi groups backed by Iran say Iran-backed fighters from around the region will join in if war erupts on the the Lebanon-Israel border. Thousands of such fighters are already deployed in Syria and could easily slip through the porous and unmarked border.

Some of the groups have already staged attacks on Israel and its allies since the Israel-Hamas war started October 7. The groups from the so-called “axis of resistance” say they are using a “unity of arenas strategy” and they will only stop fighting when Israel ends its offensive in Gaza against their ally, Hamas.

“We will be (fighting) shoulder to shoulder with Hezbollah” if an all-out war breaks out, one official with an Iran-backed group in Iraq told The Associated Press in Baghdad, insisting on speaking anonymously to discuss military matters. He refused to give further details.

The official, along with another from Iraq, said some advisers from Iraq are already in Lebanon.

An official with a Lebanese Iran-backed group, also insisting on anonymity, said fighters from Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, Afghanistan’s Fatimiyoun, Pakistan Zeinabiyoun and the Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen known as Houthis could come to Lebanon to take part in a war.

Qassim Qassir, an expert on Hezbollah, agreed the current fighting is mostly based on high technology such as firing missiles and does not need a large number of fighters. But if a war broke out and lasted for a long period, Hezbollah might need support from outside Lebanon, he said.

“Hinting to this matter could be (a message) that these are cards that could be used,” he said.

Israel is also aware of the possible influx of foreign fighters.

Eran Etzion, former head of policy planning for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a panel discussion hosted by the Washington-based Middle East Institute on Thursday that he sees “a high probability” of a “multi-front war.”

He said there could be intervention by the Houthis and Iraqi militias and a “massive flow of jihadists from (places) including Afghanistan, Pakistan” into Lebanon and into Syrian areas bordering Israel.

Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military spokesman, said in a televised statement this past week that since Hezbollah started its attacks on Israel on October 8, it has fired more than 5,000 rockets, anti-tank missiles and drones toward Israel.

“Hezbollah’s increasing aggression is bringing us to the brink of what could be a wider escalation, one that could have devastating consequences for Lebanon and the entire region,” Hagari said. “Israel will continue fighting against Iran’s axis of evil on all fronts.”

Hezbollah officials have said they don’t want an all-out war with Israel but if it happens they are ready.

“We have taken a decision that any expansion, no matter how limited it is, will be faced with an expansion that deters such a move and inflicts heavy Israeli losses,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Kassem, said in a speech this past week.

The U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, and the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force deployed along Lebanon’s southern border, Lt. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro, said in a joint statement that “the danger of miscalculation leading to a sudden and wider conflict is very real.”

The last large-scale conflict between Israel and Hezbollah occurred in the summer of 2006, when the two fought a 34-day war that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 140 in Israel.

Since the latest run of clashes began, more than 400 people have been killed in Lebanon, the vast majority of them fighters but including 70 civilians and non-combatants. On the Israeli side, 16 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed. Tens of thousands have been displaced on both sides of the border.

Qassir, the analyst, said that if foreign fighters did join in, it would help them that they fought together in Syria in the past.

“There is a common military language between the forces of axis of resistance and this is very important in fighting a joint battle,” he said.

Officers stand near the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden in January, 2024. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

Iran is recruiting members of Swedish criminal gangs, some of them children, as proxies to commit “acts of violence” against Israel and other states and groups in Sweden that Tehran considers a threat, Sweden’s intelligence agency said on May 30.

The announcement came two weeks after nighttime gunfire was reported outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm and three months after police found an unexploded grenade lying on the grounds of the Israeli compound.

“The Swedish Security Police notes that the Iranian regime is using criminal networks in Sweden to carry out acts of violence against other states, groups or people in Sweden that it considers a threat,” the intelligence service, commonly known as Sapo, said in a statement.

It cited in particular “Israeli and Jewish interests, targets and operations in Sweden”.

“Iran has previously used violence in other countries in Europe in a bid to silence critical voices and perceived threats against its regime,” it said.

“Our assessment is that this is a regional conflict that has spread globally and now also includes Sweden as an arena for this conflict,” the head of Sapo’s counterintelligence service Daniel Stenling told a press conference.

He said “very young individuals, even children, can be used to carry out Iranian activities that threaten security in Sweden”.

The Scandinavian country has struggled to contain surging gang violence in recent years, with shootings and bombings now weekly occurrences across the country.

The gang violence was originally linked to control over the drugs market.

Sapo said it was collaborating with the police, military and international allies “to meet the threat from Iran”.