Middle East escalation fears despite US insistence Iran not linked to Hamas attacks

The carnage unfolding in Israel has two focal points. The first is the murderous horror inflicted by Hamas on scores of Israeli civilians over the weekend and Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza. But a second pressure point exists 1,000 miles away in Tehran.

While Iran ghoulishly applauded the Hamas attacks, its diplomats on Sunday strenuously denied that the Islamic Republic’s extensive military machine had any involvement in the preparation or implementation of the carefully-planned onslaught that erupted across Israel’s supposedly impregnable border with Gaza.

Importantly, Washington has indicated that – for now – it does not disagree. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said on Sunday that while there is “certainly a long relationship” between Iran and Hamas, the jihadist faction which has governed Gaza since 2007, he had “not yet seen evidence” that Tehran was behind this weekend’s mass terrorist incursion into Israel.

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With a US Navy carrier group on course to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of American strength and support for Israel, such distinctions could yet prove crucial as the world waits to see whether the bloodshed visited on southern Israel and Gaza escalates into a wider conflagration with the potential to draw in regional players and the West.

Certainly, there are many in Israel who suspect Tehran’s guiding hand in the actions of Hamas and its gunmen. Responding to claims of recent meetings between the Palestinian group’s leaders and the Iranian regime to sign off the Hamas assault, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations this weekend said “it’s easy to understand that [Iran] tried to co-ordinate the military, the terror armies, the terrorists, the proxies of Iran in our region”.

Israel has repeatedly shown itself to be unafraid to strike directly – and surgically – at Iran, in particular in its efforts to hobble and delay Tehran’s ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.

But, for now at least, a conflict between Israel and Iran seems unlikely. Israeli diplomats indicated this weekend that while Israel is clear-eyed about Tehran’s decades-long sponsorship of proxies such as Hamas in Gaza and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, a direct confrontation is not on the cards.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military yesterday echoed Washington’s position, saying it had no indication of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack.

While that may offer some measure of assurance against an imminent and dangerous escalation, there is equally concern that the ramifications of this weekend’s events cannot be restricted to Gaza. Hopes of a deal that would lead to the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are now firmly on ice, at least for now.

As one Western diplomat put it: “This changes the regional geometry. Hamas cannot mass murder its way to a Palestinian state, quite the opposite. But what it can do is polarise the neighbourhood and make any rapprochement between the big players in the Middle East and Israel much, much harder.”

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The diplomat added: “No one wants this get any more out of control than it already is. Given the scale of the security breach for Israel, it will not be looking for a head on clash with Iran while it gets Gaza back under control. And that will not be a quick process – Hamas has proven itself to be resilient, no matter how many times Gaza is turned to rubble.”

Potential remains for the violence originating from Gaza to spread to the West Bank and for concerted clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, especially if Israel’s seemingly inevitable ground offensive in Gaza results in heavy civilian losses and further humanitarian tragedy. But experts argue the main ramification of the Hamas atrocities is to end a strategy by Israeli governments to effectively seal off the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as an intractable but somehow manageable feature of Middle Eastern geo-politics. The result is a grim paradox whereby the importance of the Palestinian situation is both reasserted and made even more difficult to resolve.

Tobias Borck, a Middle East specialist at the RUSI think-tank in London, said: “This escalation of violence will make finding a way to make progress towards a sustainable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict even more difficult. But it also highlights that ignoring it is something no-one can afford – least of all the Israelis and Palestinians, but also not policymakers in London, Washington or European capitals.”