Joe Biden says his priority is to avoid a regional conflict involving Israel and Iran. Withholding arms is his best lever
I recently returned from three weeks in Lebanon, where I found people braced for an incident that might escalate into a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah. The past week’s retaliations in the region look worryingly like exactly these kinds of clashes. Each strike and counterattack between Israel and its enemies increases the risk that its catastrophic war on Gaza could spiral into a regional conflict with Iran and its allied militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Joe Biden has said that his main priority is preventing such a war. The next few days, then, could prove critical.
On Tuesday evening, an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, whom Israel blamed for orchestrating a rocket attack days earlier which had killed 12 children. Shukr’s killing was overshadowed hours later by the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran early on Wednesday. That attack shocked and embarrassed Iran’s leaders, who were hosting Haniyeh and dozens of other allies for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
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