In the space of just over 24 hours, Israel said three top leaders in militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas were confirmed killed in Gaza and the heart of the Lebanese and Iranian capitals.

For 10 months, the region has been entrenched in some of the bloodiest violence we have seen in recent times. Everything escalated when news broke on Wednesday of the Israeli-claimed killing of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in south Beirut and then the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which was also blamed on Israel. On Thursday, Israel confirmed it killed the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif – the architect of the 7 October bloody attack on southern Israel – in an airstrike on Khan Younis, Gaza earlier in July.

The announcement of these killings – so close to each other – pushes the region towards a terrifying and murky precipice. Iran’s supreme leader and Hamas vowed revenge against Israel. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned there are “challenging days ahead”.

The United Nations secretary general and Qatar called it a “dangerous escalation.” Japan’s deputy UN representative Shino Mitsuko said the region was “on the brink of all-out war”.

Considering the Middle East’s current state – from Israel’s unprecedented razing of Gaza to the empty ghost towns of northern Israel, from the charred remains of bombed south Lebanon to the recent history of drones and missiles flying across Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Iraq – we are already in the grips of a wider conflict.

“It seems everyone is waiting for an official declaration of regional war. People are not understanding the gravity of what this is,” says Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at left-wing publication +972 Magazine and an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

“We have been in the midst of it already, even if it’s a lower-level war of attrition.

“There is a kind of egotistical, unstable dance that all these actors are making with missiles and with people’s lives, while trying to explain it as calibrated responses.”

Everything hinges on a ceasefire for Gaza, Mr Iraqi adds. “We are at a very very dangerous point.”

Amos Harel, an Israeli journalist and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings think tank, says that while there is “the old cliche” that no side is interested in a regional escalation, “it is an upward spiral” and could become inevitable.

“It continues, and there’s so much space for miscalculation and disasters. It gets even harder to stop.”

On Wednesday, Israel confirmed an Israeli airstrike killed Shukr, who had a $5m US bounty on his head for his role in Hezbollah’s 1983 attack in Beirut, which killed 241 US service personnel.

Just a few hours later, Israel was accused of killing Haniyeh, probably the most internationally recognisable leader of Hamas, in a dawn raid in the Iranian capital a day after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian. Israel has so far declined to comment on the killing.

Then on Thursday, Israel said their intelligence assessment confirmed that Mohammed Deif had been killed in a 13 July Israeli airstrikes on south Gaza. Israel said Deif, the commander of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, initiated, planned and executed the 7 October massacre in Israel, during which Hamas killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage. Since then, Palestinian health officials say Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people, the majority of them women and children.

Haniyeh, who for the last few years had been based in Qatar, was known as a pragmatist compared to hardline Gaza-based leaders like Deif. He was also part of the Palestinian negotiators for a ceasefire, which just a week ago had looked promising. A truce is essential for civilians in Gaza, where famine stalks the population as well as Israel’s weapons that have killed tens of thousands of people. Desperate families of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza have also been pushing for a prisoner swap ceasefire deal to bring their loved ones home.

The talks for a much-needed truce are another casualty of the assassinations. “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” asked Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in an unusually blunt message on X/Twitter.

Rather than serving a strategic purpose, analyst Amjad Iraqi believes the killing of Haniyeh – who, in exile in Doha may not have even been party to the organisation of Hamas’s 7 October attacks – sends a political message to Hamas and Iran (which is contending with this embarrassing security fiasco) as well as the Israeli public.

“Even though Israel’s war is decimating much of Gaza, by most standards, this is not a hard success against Hamas. Hamas is obviously taking a huge beating with the massive destruction of infrastructure but lately, the Israeli army is finding itself in a bit of a quagmire,” he says. News of multiple assassinations, including one deep inside Tehran, may serve to curry favour with Israelis back home.

Israeli dissent and the calls for a ceasefire have been largely directed at Mr Netanyahu – who has been accused of putting his personal interests first with a never-ending war that could save his political career.

“He was always quite cautious about using military force. But this is another Netanyahu,” warns Harel. “After these last few years of constant elections [and] this crazy alliance that he has with the radical right, it’s much harder to trust his motives.

“Most people are suspicious. It is no longer only a question of Israel’s security or strategic interests".

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A Double-Barreled Blow to Iran’s Axis

 Israel—Just before sundown on Tuesday, an Israeli strike killed senior Hezbollah military chief Fuad Shukr in the Lebanese terror group’s stronghold in southern Beirut. By sunrise Wednesday, more than 900 miles away in the Iranian capital of Tehran, another blast had killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh just hours after his meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The twin attacks—the latter of which Israel has yet to take responsibility for—swept the region into uncharted waters. Amid an ongoing multifront conflict with Iran and its proxies, Israel’s decapitation of senior terrorist leaders signals its willingness to go on the offensive against the militants waging war on its borders.

The targeted strikes followed the deadliest day for Israeli civilians since October 7, when an Iranian-made Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children last week in the Druze village of Majdal Shams. Israel’s military announced that it had targeted Shukr, the alleged orchestrator of that lethal attack and Hezbollah’s chief of staff, shortly after the operation in Beirut on Tuesday evening. As the mastermind behind a Beirut suicide bombing that left 241 U.S. military personnel dead in 1983, Shukr also had a $5 million bounty on his head courtesy of the U.S. government.

“This is a person who has been a part of pretty much every major terror operation Hezbollah has conducted since its founding. This is somebody with a lot of American blood on his hands, not just Israeli blood,” said Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Shukr’s assassination also sends a message to his boss, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah: “Israel’s ability to reach into Beirut, into the neighborhood where Hezbollah’s leadership is headquartered, and to take out an individual of this level, certainly must have Nasrallah watching his own shadow.”

The retaliatory strike was nothing if not expected following the Majdal Shams massacre. But there was more to come. “Tonight, we have shown that the blood of our people has a price, and that there is no place out of reach for our forces to this end,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement following the Beirut strike, in a possible presage of what was to come.

Hours later, an explosion of unknown origin killed Haniyeh, Hamas’ Qatar-based leader in exile who was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. After attending a swearing-in ceremony that included chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” Haniyeh was assassinated in the capital city of the Islamic Republic, on the heels of a meeting with the ayatollah.

“It is a humiliation for the Iranians, because it is an assassination in their capital, on a very important day, and two hours after Haniyeh met with the supreme leader,” Meir Litvak, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University’s Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, told The Dispatch. “The supreme leader feels like this is a personal insult, an act of defiance against him.”

Though Israel is likely behind the strike, its methods remain a mystery. Early reports indicate that Haniyeh was killed after a rocket struck the apartment where he was staying, but no details on how the missile was delivered have yet emerged. Nor has the possibility of a covert ground operation been ruled out. Whether the U.S. had advance knowledge of the strike is also unclear. In an interview Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed that Washington was neither involved nor given notice of the attack.

Regardless, the successful strike marked a catastrophic security breach for Iran—and the latest demonstration of Israel’s ability to execute operations using pinpoint intelligence. Haniyeh joined a growing list of top Hamas leaders killed since October 7, a list includes the terror group’s West Bank commander, Saleh al-Arouri, and its military leader in Gaza, Mohammed Deif.

The assassination was also one in a string of covert operations on Iranian soil. In 2020, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency carried out an elaborate hit against Iran’s top nuclear scientist using a remote-control operated machine gun. More recently, following a largely thwarted Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel in April, an Israeli weapon struck an air defense radar near a sensitive nuclear site in the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

But with the region on the brink of a broader escalation, the dual attacks on Haniyeh and Shukr could push Israel’s simmering multifront conflict into an all-out war. Khamenei vowed to retaliate for the former after it took place on Iranian soil. “The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our house,” Khamenei said in a statement Wednesday, “but it also prepared the ground for a harsh punishment for itself.”

Hezbollah—Iran’s most important proxy, with a trained fighting force and arsenal of more than 200,000 rockets and missiles—is also likely to respond following the killing of its chief of staff. Such a response could involve using new weaponry, like precision-guided munitions, or striking deeper into Israel than it has over the last 10 months.

A coordinated aerial attack by multiple of Iran’s militias in the region including Hezbollah, which could overwhelm Israel’s air defense systems, is another scenario Israeli officials are now preparing for. Israeli President Isaac Herzog encouraged Israelis to “show responsibility and diligence, and adhere to instructions and orders” on Wednesday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to “challenging days ahead” in a speech later that day. 

A direct Iranian attack—which could resemble the one in April that used more than 350 missiles and drones to target Israel following its killing of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member in Damascus, Syria—may also be under deliberation in Tehran. Iranian officials told the New York Times Wednesday that Khamenei had ordered a direct military response, but what form it might take is not yet known.

“Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones are all on the table,” Goldberg, a former National Security Council official, told The Dispatch. “What we have learned over the last few months is not to underestimate Iran’s willingness to cross previous, imagined red lines in its own escalation. The regime has paid no price for crossing red lines in various domains.”

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Lebanon's residents face down their fears after a week that could change everything

I hear a child's voice say, "On est arrivès au Liban” — we have arrived in Lebanon. I can picture the kid's smiling face peeking through a window as the Transavia flight touches down in Lebanon's capital, Beirut.

I am on the same plane. It’s mid-July, and it’s packed with families. Most of the passengers on board are Lebanese who emigrated to Europe, eager to return to their home country for summer holidays. But many things have changed since.

"We are here for 10 days to see our relatives, we also travelled to Europe. We are really good where we live now," says a young woman in her thirties, born in Tripoli and now living in Australia.

When asked if she left because of the ongoing tensions at the border, she adds, “It's a mix of things. The country's financial situation is a big part of it.”

Nobody was prepared for what would happen a few days later. The situation changes by the day, and developments are hard to keep up with.

Last Saturday, a rocket attack on the Druze town of Majdal Shams in Northern Israel killed 12 children, triggering Israel’s harsh response. Hezbollah was blamed, but the militant group denies any responsibility; many outsiders, including the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, calling for an independent investigation.

The following Tuesday, Israel retaliated with a strike targeting one of Hezbollah’s top commanders, Fuad Shukr. The strike hit Beirut’s southern suburbs, specifically the area of Haret Hreik, known as Hezbollah’s stronghold.

Hundreds of flights in and out of Beirut have been cancelled in the last week, and embassies of different countries have issued warnings advising their citizens not to travel to the Lebanese capital.

I was already out of the country before flight disruptions kicked in, although I think of the family I met on that plane.

Will they be able to return safely to Australia? Where are they now?

'It's not a game, it's a serious situation'

It's about 8pm in Beirut, and I call my friend Mariam, who works in the capital as an Arabic language teacher.

“I am fine”, she told me, “but one of my uncles got injured in the explosion. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

At least five people have been killed in the attack on Haret Hreik, and several others are injured. Hezbollah has not yet confirmed the commander’s death, only that Shukr was in the building that got struck.

“After 20-25 years of non-stop military exchanges between Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel and others, they are aware now that this doesn't solve anything. None of them wants a full-fledged war,” says Rami Khouri, a fellow at the American University of Beirut.

But what if a wider war is being provoked by accident? “if Israel attacks Iranian positions, and the Iranians push back,” adds Khouri, “then you would have a wider and more dangerous confrontation. But I don't think it's going to happen."

"We saw a glimpse of that a few months ago when Iran attacked Israel. It was like a negotiated response, a very controlled one. Very few people died.

"It's not a game, it's a serious situation,” explains Khouri, also a journalist and author, ”but it's a theatrical one. It may or may not continue, but right now we are still in that phase in which we have scripted responses agreed upon by both sides.”

Fighting back memories of destruction and pain

I left Beirut a few days before Saturday’s attack in the Golan Heights with a very clear impression of how people, mainly residents and business owners, felt at the prospect of having to go through another war.

Their resilience, their sense of community, and their ability to live according to what each passing day brings were impressive.

But will they continue to feel this way? Always trying to strike a balance between past and present, fighting back the memories of the destruction and pain caused by previous wars?

Khouri believes that if the conflict expands across the region, there won’t be “a full war that destroys infrastructure and civilians like it happened in 2006”.

But anything can happen in such a fast-moving scenario.

A few hours after the attack in Southern Beirut, Hamas confirmed that its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had been killed in an Israeli attack in Tehran. In a matter of hours, two leaders in Iran’s network were targeted and gone.

Even before sifting through all the analysis pieces explaining the impact of what had happened, it was clear that the killing of Haniyeh in Iran was a tipping point.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei promised “harsh punishment” for Israel, with the UN holding an emergency meeting — this just after a rise in optimism that Israel and Hamas were close to a ceasefire deal.

Suddenly, the situation started escalating.

“The prospect of not having a wider conflict is increasingly unrealistic. I say this because the actors have pushed themselves into a corner where, in order to preserve their deterrence positions, they have to act,” says Michael Young, an analyst specialising in Lebanon and an author.

“(Israel) would like to draw the US into a conflict with Iran,” he explains. “They tried to do it last April when they bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, creating a new dimension to the conflict.

"If the US intervenes, we must see how it will intervene. Will it do so in a defensive capacity, as we saw in April, or will it strike Iran and Iranian allies to prevent them from firing at Israel? This is where the risk lies."

According to Young, it’s almost impossible for Israel to fight Iran and its allies alone. They need the US. Yet, as he points out, “the US administration has no influence over Israel anymore. All I see is disarray in Washington.”

A full-out war could effectively destroy Lebanon, he warns. “It won’t be just economic; it will destroy society itself, and it would be very difficult to put the country back together again.”

'All we want is peace'

Having endured a 15-year civil war and a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, Lebanon is used to juggling multiple crises. More recently, the country has been struggling to gather itself after the gargantuan port explosion that hit Beirut in 2020.

Lebanon is now facing one of its worst ever economic crises, one that has been exacerbated by the knock-on effect of the war in Ukraine. The country's GDP has fallen by 50%, and poverty now affects 80% of the population.

Pegging the value of the local currency to the US dollar as a much more stable currency partly eased inflation, but it’s now affecting the livelihoods of people who are paid in Lebanese pounds.

Tourism, traditionally one of the country’s leading economic sectors, has been badly hit.

I recall a taxi driver telling me, “There are no more tourists; they are gone.”

That pretty much mirrored the general mood I perceived when strolling around the city's well-known bohemian street, Rue Gouraud. Located right in the capital's historic centre, it is home to some of the best-known dining institutions in Beirut.

One of them is “Le Chef”. François Bassil opened the restaurant in 1967, and since then, it has become a living testimony of Lebanon’s history. It survived the 1975-1990 civil war and, not that long ago, the deadly port blast.

Charbel Bassil, François' son, who has taken over the business, greets every customer entering the restaurant.

It’s lunchtime, and the place is full. “We live by the day, and thankfully, we rely on the local clientele,” he says, “but all we want is peace and for tourists to come back. The business is now down by 80%.”

Lebanon's resilience on full display

As I leave “Le Chef”, I see a young model posing in front of the camera. She says she works as an influencer, and is 20 years old. Her name is Fatima and she is all smiles.

“The economic crisis is what really bothers us,” she says, ”but we carry on with our lives, we are resilient.”

The story of Joseph, whose bakery “Levant” only recently opened, shows a different side of the crisis. He started his business last autumn, just a few weeks before the war in Gaza began, having moved back to his native Lebanon after spending many years in France.

“At no point in time have I thought about reversing my decision, and I am aware of the risks,” Joseph says, adding that some of his employees have lost their homes and relatives to bombings in the south.

"The sense of community in Lebanon is something else,” he adds.

It’s true that the mix of cultures and different religious communities living together is among the country’s main attractions and charms, but political stability is a different story.

Not being able to overcome differences is what prevents the creation of a government that is credible to all Lebanese.

And now the prospect of an achievable truce in Gaza seems to have faded away. “We are paying the price for Netanyahu wanting to survive politically,” says Young. “He doesn’t want a ceasefire in Gaza; he has never wanted one.”

'See you in Beirut, whatever happens'

The focus this past Thursday, just a few hours after the killing of Hamas' top leader, Haniyeh, was on a speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Behind his coded message might be the key to understanding the response of both Iran and Hezbollah to Israel’s latest attacks.

And the message could not be clearer. Many noticed a major shift from Nasrallah’s usual low-key tone over the past few weeks.

“Be happy for a short while and you will cry for a long one,” he said, addressing Israelis. “We have entered a new phase in all the fronts.”

Nasrallah emphasised that in his view, the attack on Beirut’s Southern suburbs was an act of aggression by Israel, not simply a “response”.

Some of his statements could be interpreted as hints at a plan to strike Israel in the same way Israel has hit Lebanon and Iran.

I immediately called Mariam and asked her whether the mood among her over the past few hours had changed.

“Yes,” she says confidently. “People are worried now, I am not going to lie.”

It seems that people are now on edge — and this is when I recall my exchange with Joseph, and his resilience and newfound happiness in Lebanon.

He told me that he would like the country to be remembered one day for something other than conflict. But most of all, the sticker at his café’s entrance comes to mind: “See you in Beirut, whatever happens.”

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