Why Iran and Hezbollah have not yet responded to Israel's assassinations

A tongue-in-cheek jab is circulating among Arab diplomats that no country in the region may be more eager for the US’s flagging efforts to secure a Gaza ceasefire to succeed than its foe, Iran.

“Iran desperately wants an off-ramp,” an Arab diplomat from the Gulf told Middle East Eye on condition of anonymity. 

US and Arab officials believe if a ceasefire is reached it would lower regional tensions, giving Iran and its allies space to back down from their vows to avenge a pair of Israeli assassinations that have pushed the region to the brink. 

Hezbollah and Iran both pledged to retaliate for the killings of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and senior Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.

But with ceasefire talks flailing and more than three weeks having passed since the killings, some wonder if Iran will respond at all.

“The language coming out of Iran suggests it is trying to dodge this,” Mohanad Hage Ali, deputy director of research at the Carnegie Center in Beirut, told MEE.

To date, neither has matched their tough talk with action. And there are signs that they may not, anytime soon.

On Wednesday, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesman Ali Mohammad Naeini said “time is on our side, and the waiting period for this response might be prolonged”.

He also suggested Iran was looking for new ways to retaliate, saying: “Iran’s response will not be a repeat of previous operations. The quality of the response, scenarios and tools are not always the same.”

The delay is a departure from how Iran handled previous rounds of escalation.

When the US killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Iran responded within five days, firing missiles at the US’s Ain al-Assad military base in Iraq. Iran’s unprecedented direct attack on Israel in April came 12 days after its consulate in Damascus Syria was bombed.

If Iran doesn't respond, it could impact the Middle East for years to come.

For Iran hawks in the US and Israel, Tehran’s vacillation is already being interpreted as confirmation that the Islamic Republic and its allies are weaker than they were believed to be before 7 October when the war on Gaza broke out after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. 

'The delay reaffirms the reality that Iran's options for retaliation range from bad to catastrophically bad'

- Ali Vaez, International Crisis Group

Netanyahu’s willingness to conduct the two brazen assassinations has in effect reshuffled the deck in the Middle East, taking some attention away from besieged Palestinians in Gaza and putting it on the Islamic Republic, whose so-called "axis of resistance" includes Hamas, along with militias in Iraq, Yemen’s Houthis and Hezbollah.

Under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran prioritised arming these proxies to keep its fight with Israel outside the country’s borders. But Iran’s support for the axis of resistance is not backed by all of the country, whose economy has been battered by sanctions.

“What we knew before the assassinations of Haniyeh and Shukr has become even clearer. Hezbollah and Iran cannot afford all-out war with the US and Israel because they are weaker,” Thomas Juneau, an Iran expert at at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, told MEE. 

'Bad to catastrophically bad'

In April, Iran tried to thread the needle between reestablishing deterrence and avoiding an all-out war with Israel.

Iran showed it was willing to attack Israel directly - a first since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979 - but telegraphed the assault to the US’s Arab partners, as Washington moved military assets into place.

“Iran’s attempt to calibrate a response in April completely failed. Israel showed its defences were very strong,” Juneau said. 

Having shown its cards in April, analysts say it is now having a hard time finding the right formula for a new response. 

“The delay reaffirms the reality that Iran's options for retaliation range from bad to catastrophically bad,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, told MEE.

“For Iran, symbolic action is risky and clearly doesn't pay off, while substantive action is likely to invite a more devastating Israeli, or potentially US counter-strike." 

Intelligence failures and firepower

Haniyeh was killed in a guesthouse controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard after attending Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swearing-in ceremony, while Shukr was assassinated in Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold of Dahiyeh, allegedly after being called on the phone to the top floor of his apartment building.

The strikes not only embarrassed Iran but sparked a counter-intelligence purge for spies. If Iran decides to retaliate, it will likely face logistical challenges, putting military assets in place and communicating with proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.

“Both of these assassinations show serious intelligence penetration by Israel,” Arash Azizi, an Iran expert and author of Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran's Global Ambitions.

'Hezbollah and Iran are at bone-level deterrence. Israel can go wherever it wants and kill them'

- Mohanad Hage Ali, Carnegie Center Beirut 

In recent years, Iran struck blows against US partners in the region and paid little price. In 2019 the Iran-backed Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities. Analysts say the attack and subsequent strikes on the UAE and Saudi Arabia by the Houthis in Yemen created a sense of security for Iran.

Now, observers say Iran may be on the back foot thanks to the Biden administration’s degree of unconditional support for Israel. The same goes for Hezbollah, which fought a bloody 2006 war with Israel that saw the US stay on the sidelines of active combat.

Since 7 October, the US and Israel have sparred over post-war plans for Gaza and Palestinian casualties. The war has also split the Democratic Party ahead of the US presidential election. But those divisions have not impacted the regions’ battlefields,

In April, the US demonstrated how far it would go to defend Israel when it led a coalition of states to successfully counter more than 300 missiles and drones fired by Iran. US officials worked through grumbling among Gulf states to use bases in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to launch fighter jets, MEE revealed.

With the Middle East on a knife's edge again, the Biden administration is doubling down.

Last week, it moved forward with a $20bn weapons sale to Israel that will include mortars, tank ammunition missiles, military vehicles and by 2029, F-15 warplanes.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had already dispatched a guided missile submarine and the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier. Then on Wednesday, US Centcom announced that a second aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, equipped with F-35s, had arrived in the region.

“The level of US support for Israel is something we haven’t seen in the history of the relationship going back to the 1973 war,” Hage Ali, at the Carnegie Center in Beirut, told MEE.

“This firepower does matter. I think Hezbollah understands that given US support for Israel right now, a war with Israel would also entail the US, and they are not willing to risk that.”

The same concern that retaliation could provoke a US response applies within Iran experts say.

“The fact is that very significant figures in Iran have argued against responding,” Azizi told MEE. “By their narrative, Netanyahu wants to burn the region down and pull the US into a wider war. Why should Iran fall into the trap?”

Bone-level deterrence

Besides their public promises to hit back at Israel, Iran and Hezbollah may not have the luxury of dodging retaliation.

If they don’t strike back, they risk looking weak, not just in the eyes of their proxies, but among powerful Gulf states and US officials advocating for a tougher line on Tehran.

On Wednesday, Israel struck what it said were Hezbollah weapons storage facilities in Lebanon’s heartland, the Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah fired drones at Israel’s north, where the two have exchanged fire since 8 October.

Hage Ali said the disparity in the Bekaa Valley strikes was “symptomatic” of Hezbollah’s inability to constrain Israel, following the killing of Shukr.

“Hezbollah and Iran are at bone-level deterrence. Israel has shown it can go wherever it wants and kill them. They have achieved escalation dominance and have the upper hand in this conflict.”

'Hezbollah and Iran cannot afford all-out war with the US and Israel because they are weaker'

- Thomas Juneau, Iran expert

The question for analysts and diplomats is whether Israel’s ability to bomb Hezbollah and Iran at will marks a paradigm shift for the region.

Israel’s killing of Shukr and Haniyeh has not eliminated Hamas from the Gaza Strip or freed the remaining hostages there. Hezbollah has also taken the fight to Israel in an unprecedented way, driving almost 90,000 Israeli civilians out of northern Israel.

Israel is also more isolated on the world stage than before 7 October. Normalisation with Saudi Arabia is on hold and the International Criminal Court is deliberating whether to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to press its strategic goal of evicting US troops from Syria and Iraq. It has forged a closer military partnership with Russia, to become a formidable arms exporter and is pushing ahead with its nuclear programme, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in July could yield Iran enough fissile missile material to produce a nuclear weapon in “one or two weeks". 

“I don’t think you can say Israel has achieved a strategic win,” Juneau said.