On Wednesday, Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, shortly after he attended the inauguration of the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian. According to the New York Times, Haniyeh was likely killed with a bomb smuggled into the state guesthouse where he was staying. The bomb was detonated remotely, possibly with help from US Big Tech. The night before, Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in south Beirut, with a precision strike. The strike killed seven civilians, along with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Iranian intelligence insists that Haniyeh was killed with a missile attack (as reported by AP and Al Jazeera). The leaks coming from Israel, and shared by the New York Times and Axios, seek to establish that a bomb had been “planted for months,” perhaps to portray the attack as an intelligence operation within a shadow war rather than a military aggression. (The New York Times reported that Israeli officials are secretly admitting that Israel carried out the assassination.)

Israeli officials were quick to celebrate. Retired general Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate, said on Wednesday night that the attacks were “two quality operations of Israel Defense Forces [IDF] against two top terrorists, one in Beirut and one in Tehran.”

Thousands have mourned Haniyeh in Tehran, which held a funeral for him on Thursday, having declared three days of mourning. His body was flown to Qatar’s capital, Doha, where today, like many Palestinian leaders before him, he was buried in exile. Haniyeh was born a refugee in the al-Shati refugee camp near Gaza City. His parents were refugees from the Nakba, who fled from a destroyed Palestinian village near what became the city of Ashkelon in Israel. Israel had already targeted and killed over sixty members of Haniyeh’s family in Gaza, including three of his sons, at least four of his grandchildren, and his sister and her family. Haniyeh consistently stated that his life or the lives of his children are no more precious than those of other Palestinian children.

Iran has vowed revenge. Following Haniyeh’s assassination, Tehran raised the “red flag of revenge,” while Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has reportedly ordered a direct attack on Israel in retaliation, saying that Iran had a “duty” to avenge its slain guest. President Pezeshkian said that his country would defend its territorial integrity and honor. Iran’s UN special envoy called the assassination an “act of terrorism,” adding: “The response to the assassination will in fact be a tougher special operation aimed at instilling deep regret in the preparator.” In a speech during the funeral of Shukr on Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah also vowed to retaliate.

The Palestinian UN representative, Feda Abdelhady-Nasser, condemned Haniyeh’s killing, saying, “Violence and terror are Israel’s main and only currency. There is no red line for Israel. No law it will not breach, no norm it will not trample. No act too depraved or too barbaric.” Even Jordan, a close US ally, is now calling on the UN to curb the “rogue state of Israel.”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave an address on Wednesday evening, celebrating the strike in Lebanon, which Israel has officially claimed. He preemptively threatened that Israel would “exact a heavy price” if Iran sought revenge. He vowed to continue Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, saying: “For months, not a week has gone by without people, at home and abroad, telling me to end the war. I didn’t give in to those voices then, and I won’t give in to them today.” He boasted of assassinating Hamas leaders and occupying the Egyptian border with Gaza. He praised himself for having “created the conditions to both return all our abductees and achieve the goals of the war.”

Yet the assassination of Hamas’s top political leader is clearly meant to destroy the cease-fire negotiations, in which the pragmatist Haniyeh played a key role. Both Egypt and Qatar, who have played primary mediative roles in the talks, warned that Haniyeh’s killing would set back negotiations. Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani stated, “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”

The assassination of Haniyeh comes amid upbeat statements by US officials that progress was being made in the monthslong negotiations for a truce in Gaza. The assassination clearly undermines US diplomatic efforts to reach a cease-fire deal that would include the release of hostages, in an attempt to prevent the war in Gaza from spreading into a wider regional conflict that could rapidly spiral out of US control. US secretary of state Antony Blinken was quick to deny any US role in the assassination, saying on Wednesday that Washington had not been “aware of or involved in” Haniyeh’s killing and asserting that a cease-fire deal for Gaza remained vital. US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has urged for diplomacy. Even former Israeli general Amiram Levin admitted that the assassination of Haniyeh was “madness.”

The assassination of the Hamas leader on Iranian soil is a ploy by Israel to drag the United States into a regional war. Seeking such escalation, Israel has attacked five different countries since October. According to analyzed data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), Israel has conducted over seventeen thousand attacks in these countries over the past ten months, including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. It has bombed Lebanon as far as Beirut, following a strike on the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights, which killed at least twelve young people.

In a bizarre attempt to exploit a Syrian tragedy to attack Lebanon, Israel has been bombarding Lebanon under the false flag of avenging its citizens, though the people of Majdal Shams are Syrian Arabs who have rejected Israeli citizenship over the years, who have long resisted Israeli occupation, and whose leaders have adamantly refused to meet with Israeli officials following the attack, as they accuse Israel of carrying out the strike. (Hezbollah has denied responsibility.) According to the BBC, Israel has carried out over sixty-five hundred strikes on Lebanon since October, killing more than six hundred people.

Last month, Israel bombed Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah, killing at least six people. The Houthis in Yemen, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been defying Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The Yemeni group has been targeting Israel-linked ships in what they say is an effort to help bring an end to the war on Gaza, saying it has a duty and obligation under international law to prevent a genocide and effectively imposing on Israel the only economic sanctions that are actually working. The United States has responded by bombing and imposing further sanctions on Yemen. (The United States has imposed decades-long sanctions on Iran, which have been as devastating as futile.) The United States retaliatory attacks on Yemen have only compounded its genocidal complicity.

Both the Houthis and Hezbollah have pledged to put down arms if Israel ends its war on Gaza. But instead of ending the war, or at least reaching a cease-fire, Israel has chosen to fight all these groups, emboldened with a bottomless supply of US weapons. According to Channel 12, Israel has told Lebanon and Iran through diplomatic channels that it is ready for an all-out war.

Meanwhile, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran have now all vowed to retaliate against recent Israeli attacks. Even Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hinted that Turkey could intervene militarily in Gaza. In response, Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, has threatened to kill Erdoğan through a US-in-Iraq-style intervention, thus meting out to him the same fate the United States inflicted on Saddam Hussein. Katz posted photos of Erdoğan and the former Iraqi leader before he was executed, adding: “Just let him remember what happened there and how it ended.”

Israel’s assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders are borne of desperation and the desire for sowing chaos. They betray weakness rather than victory.  While they are unlikely to shift the geopolitical conditions in the region, they mark a new phase of regional escalation. If history is any guide, these reckless acts of wanton killing will only embolden Palestinian resistance, radicalize Hamas, and push the new Iranian leadership to be more hard-line.

Israel has a long history of carrying out assassinations inside Iran, mostly targeting nuclear scientists. It has targeted members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), sometimes with US help. Four years ago, former US president Donald Trump ordered US drone strikes that killed the head of the IRGC Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, along with the deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Last December, Israeli forces assassinated Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser to the IRGC in Syria, in an air strike near Damascus. In April, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, killing seven of its military advisers, including three senior commanders. In 2008, the Mossad and CIA joined forces in assassinating Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, in a car bombing in Damascus.

According to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, author of Rise and Kill First, “Since World War II, Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.”

Israel also has a long history of assassinating Palestinian leaders, including Hamas founder and spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, who was quadriplegic and nearly blind. Last January, Israel assassinated Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy leader of Hamas, in Beirut, along with six civilians. On Thursday, Israel claimed it had killed Mohammad Deif, Hamas military commander in Gaza, in a strike it carried out in Khan Younis last month — at the draconian cost of massacring nearly one hundred Palestinian civilians. But the killing of Haniyeh will prove the most nihilistic yet.

Unlike Deif or Yahya Sinwar, who operate from Gaza, Haniyeh was the political and diplomatic face of Hamas. He did not command military operations in Gaza since he left for exile in 2019. He led the diplomatic efforts to secure a cease-fire that included the release of all hostages. Known as moderate and pragmatic, he supported a permanent peace deal with Israel and championed Palestinian unity. The hard-liner Khaled Meshaal, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Jordan nearly three decades ago, is likely to replace Haniyeh as the new Hamas leader.

While the region boils and risks descending into chaos, the United States continues to operate in a state of denial, with the White House national security spokesperson John Kirby insisting: “We don’t believe that an escalation is inevitable. … And there’s no signs that an escalation is imminent.” (Both Iran and Hezbollah leaders have said that attack on Israel is “inevitable.”) US politicians have been stoking tensions with Iran, while emboldening Israel along the way.

The assassination of Haniyeh in the Iranian capital comes days after US presidential candidate Trump, upon meeting with Netanyahu in Mar-a-Lago, called to “wipe out Iran off the face of the earth.” (The anti-Iran mania has risen to such a level that some US media outlets rushed to blame the Trump assassination attempt on Iran.) It comes days after US vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris declared that “Israel has right to defend itself” against Iran and Hezbollah, and barely a week after US lawmakers gave Netanyahu a record number of standing ovations in Congress as he lashed at Iran’s “axis of terror” and demonized US antiwar protesters as “Iran’s useful idiots.”

Mentioning Iran twenty-eight times, and inciting Congress with the warmongering “Our Enemies Are Your Enemies,” Netanyahu, a genocidal war criminal wanted by the top international criminal court for his war crimes in Gaza, was basking in the safety of US bipartisan support, while asking for more funds and weapons, unconditional diplomatic cover, and a renewed license to kill Palestinians with impunity.

It appears the Biden administration’s solution is not to curb Israel, but to boost US military presence in the region — despite recent reports in the Israeli media that US officials have warned Israel that Iran’s response will be larger in scope, as it will likely involve Hezbollah, making it harder for the United States and its regional defense coalition to stop a new Iranian attack on Israel. According to the White House, Biden and Harris discussed with Netanyahu on Thursday efforts to send new defense US military deployments to the region to “support Israel’s defense,” as part of “ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region [!].”

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported, citing a Pentagon official, that the Biden administration has deployed twelve warships to the Middle East, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, amphibious assault teams, and over four thousand Marines and sailors.

Yesterday marked day three hundred of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, with no end in sight. Despite Israel’s unending atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, coupled with its unhinged and reckless assaults across the region, US officials keep parroting “Israel’s right to defend itself,” a platitude that has become a license for committing genocide and a recipe for an all-out regional war that could drag the United States in. If US politicians are sincere about avoiding a regional war, in which the United States has neither interest nor control, they should rein in their genocidal proxy, condition US military and financial support for Israel, and push for an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza, which is the only road to de-escalation in a region on the verge of explosion.