On Monday, Wissam al-Tawil — a commander of Hezbollah's Radwan unit — and an associate were killed in a strike in southern Lebanon. Israel has not taken credit for the strike, nor for one last week that killed a Hamas leader in the same region, but reporting by Reuters, the Associated Press, and others indicates the country was responsible for the attack that killed al-Tawil. Israel, for its part, admitted to an attack on a Hezbollah installation, and Hezbollah claimed it bombarded an Israeli observation post on Saturday.
The attacks have only increased fears that Israel's war in Gaza will broaden into a regional conflict involving not just Israel and Hamas, but each side's allies and adversaries, from Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shia militia group based in southern Lebanon, to the United States.
Israel and Hezbollah — who usually have some kind of tit-for-tat dynamic even without an active war — have been escalating attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. But matters seemed to intensify after a Hamas leader was killed in Beirut last week, and after Hezbollah's leader promised retaliation for that attack in a speech Wednesday.
"How can we avoid a larger regional war?" was a major question from the very beginning of Israel's Gaza operation. Increasingly, paths to avoiding a wider conflict seem limited.
Over the weekend, I reported on increasing attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels — like Hamas and Hezbollah, they are supported by Iran — against cargo ships in the Red Sea, despite a coalition led by the US military warning them to stop. And in Iraq, the US killed a leader of one of that country's Iran-linked militias, causing the prime minister to announce his intention to push US coalition troops out of the country.
The combination of all of these events, as Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me this weekend, shows that while we're not yet in a regional war, dangerous escalation is already happening.
"People think about escalation in the region as like a switch was flipped," but escalation isn't binary, Kavanagh said. "You actually see [regional escalation] happening already, which is just sort of a steady increase of violence, and tit-for-tat strikes get gradually more, and suddenly, you're at [an] intolerable level."
This week's provocations in the region suggest we're getting close to that "intolerable" level.
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