After latest humiliation, Iran had little choice but to strike

On hearing that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s charismatic and corrupt leader, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, a deeply shaken Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, assembled key lieutenants at his home in Tehran to discuss the calamity.

For all the other partners and proxies Iran has assembled across the Middle East over decades, Hezbollah was the linchpin of the “axis of resistance” the Islamic Republic built to harry Israel and burnish its credentials as self-appointed leader of the Muslim world.

The stakes, as the Iranians could see it, were enormous. Hezbollah was the one force above all whose vast arsenal of rockets and proximity to Israel’s borders Tehran had counted on as insurance against direct Israeli strikes on Iran.

Now Nasrallah’s killing, the sucker punch at the end of a series of shocks including Israel’s explosive weaponisation of pagers and walkie-talkies, had shattered the air of invincibility around Hezbollah, leaving Tehran exposed. Was the very survival of the Iranian regime at stake?

Iran appears to have believed so. As its missile barrage on Israel began on Tuesday night, it looked of an entirely different order to the first ever direct strike on Israel that Iran launched in April when it dispatched 300 missiles and drones, only three of which got through Israel’s defences.

Iran confirmed that the attack was in direct response to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, ending the paralysis the regime seems to have found itself in since the stunning explosive attack in Tehran that killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Tensions in the region have been sharply raised since. But coming as that attack did, on the inauguration day of Iran’s new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, the government in Tehran has struggled to speak with one voice.

 

Those who gathered at Khamenei’s house in Tehran in the early hours of Saturday amid reports that Nasrallah may have been killed ran the gamut of official Iranian opinion from Pezeshkian to the hardliner he defeated for the job, Saeed Jalili.

As they gathered to mourn Nasrallah and force a response, the Iranians were in a state of shock and mourning — but not agreement.

Pezeshkian had come fresh from his inaugural address at the UN general assembly in New York where he had struck a conciliatory note, telling reporters that Iran was “ready to lay down its arms if Israel lays down its arms”.

Haniyeh’s killing, on the night of Pezeshkian’s inauguration in July, was the second audacious Israeli attack on Iranian interests in four months, after a strike in April on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killed several senior military commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which prompted Iran’s first direct attack.

 

Haniyeh’s killing fanned fears of a wider conflagration, with western powers certain Iran would be forced to respond. Messages zipped back and forth urging Iran to hold off on any retribution in the hope that a ceasefire could in the meantime be reached in Gaza.

Even before Nasrallah’s killing, plenty of Iranian hardliners were already scoffing at Pezeshkian’s dovishness, safe in their knowledge of the limited influence the president holds in the clerical system overseen by the ayatollah.

 

That night at Khamenei’s house, there was no consensus. Hardliners argued for a swift, decisive response to Israel before it struck Iran. Those in Pezeshkian’s corner warned that Iran was, perhaps for a second time, walking into a trap set by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to provoke a wider regional war.

Khamenei, who was reported to have given a — still unfulfilled — order for Iran to respond to Haniyeh’s killing, announcing five days of official mourning of Nasrallah, but issued no order to avenge him. That was for Hezbollah to choose, he suggested. “All of the forces in the resistance stand by Hezbollah,” Khamenei said. “It will be Hezbollah, at the helm of the resistance forces, that will determine the fate of the region.” On Tuesday night, it became clear that statement was yet another bluff. Without Hezbollah as insurance, Iran’s regime saw itself staring down existential threat, and with little apparently left to lose, lashed out.