Ceasefire hopes recede, after assassination in Tehran
U.S. scrambles again to try to avert wider regional war as Iran vows to retaliate.
Last Thursday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met President Biden at the White House, along with families of Israeli American hostages held by Hamas, several of the families, American officials and some observers thought there might be higher hopes for soon getting a hostage release/Gaza ceasefire deal over the finish line. That was in part because the Israeli Knesset was due to break on Sunday (July 28) for a few months, giving Netanyahu more political breathing room to strike a deal without immediate risk of his governing coalition collapsing, it was thought.
But six days later, the U.S. seems to be watching prospects for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal recede if not totally evaporate once again, after Israel was suspected of assassinating Hamas political chief and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, where he had been attending the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Iran has vowed to retaliate, and the U.S. is scrambling yet again to try to avert a wider regional war.
U.S. officials said that the United States was neither aware of nor involved in the assassination of the Hamas political chief, who resides in Qatar.
“First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with Channel News Asia in Singapore this morning (July 31).
“It’s very hard to speculate…so I can’t tell you what this means,” Blinken said. “I can tell you that the imperative of getting a ceasefire, the importance that that has for everyone, remains. And we will continue to labor at that for as long as it takes to get there.”
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged that a strike Israel claimed against a senior Hezbollah official in southern Beirut yesterday, as well as the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran early Wednesday, which Israel has not publicly claimed, make avoiding a bigger regional war harder.
“These reports over the last 24-48 hours certainly don't help with the temperature going down,” Kirby told journalists at the White House briefing today. “I’m not going to be pollyannish about it.
“We’re obviously concerned about escalation,” he said.
An Israeli American with a relative being held hostage by Hamas expressed anxiety for the fate of the hostages and a hostage deal, even as she expressed revulsion for Haniyeh.
“Ismail Haniyeh was a monster of terror who cared only about power,” Alana Zeitchik, a hostage family member and advocate, posted on Twitter tonight. “Yet, still, my first reaction to the news of Haniyeh was, what will happen to the hostages? What is they kill some of them now in response? How is David safer now? How does this get us a deal?”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said Iran was obliged to retaliate.
“Following this bitter, tragic event which has taken place within the borders of the Islamic Republic, it is our duty to take revenge,” Khamenei’s office tweeted.
Former Iran nuclear negotiator Abbas Araghchi, reported to be a leading contender to become foreign minister in the new Iranian administration, said that Israel “will pay a heavy price” for the assassination of Haniyeh. Israel would not succeed, he continued, in blocking the new Iranian administration’s goals.
“Undoubtedly, the Israeli occupying regime will pay a heavy price, and it will not achieve its ominous goal of putting obstacles in the path of Iran's new government at the outset of its endeavor,” Araghchi wrote on Twitter.
Iran’s envoy to the United Nations, meantime, at a UN Security Council meeting on the matter this afternoon, said the assassination of Haniyeh could not have happened “without the permission and intelligence support of the United States”—an assertion the United States deputy ambassador rejected.
“The United States was not involved with Israel’s response on July 30 in Lebanon,” US deputy ambassador Robert Woods told the Security Council, referring to the Israeli strike that killed a senior Hezbollah official in southern Beirut Tuesday.
“The United States was not aware of, or involved in, the apparent death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh,” Woods said.
Regardless of the facts, Iran currently perceives that the U.S. likely had some involvement in the action in Iran, said Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group. That is in part because the U.S. conducted what it called a defensive strike against an Iran-backed group in Iraq after the Iranian assassination of the Hezbollah official in Beirut, and before the suspected Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran.
“The Iranian perspective is that this was a joint U.S.-Israeli operation because they saw it as part of a string of attacks against high level Axis of Resistance figures and interests in the past few days,” Vaez said.
How do they not see that more likely, the U.S., which has spent months trying to negotiate a Gaza ceasefire/hostage release deal and thought it might finally be approaching the finish line, was in fact frustrated by the Israeli government action, which overnight potentially torpedoed a deal, and once again put the region on the course for another potential major escalation?
“I think you're right, but also, I think here, the administration only has itself to blame,” Vaez said. “At no point has this administration stood up to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempts at undermining its own national security objectives.”
The United States should publicly call out Israel if it thinks it is taking actions that cause the ceasefire talks to collapse, said Michael Hanna.
“The assassination of Haniyeh at this time and place is guaranteed to have … direct impact on the cease talks,” Michael Hanna, the director of the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group, wrote on Twitter.
“If the U.S. administration is serious about de-escalation, they will have to speak bluntly in public about what has happened and next steps,” he wrote. “Anonymous quotes about being ‘bewildered’ about the assassination in Tehran won’t cut it.
The U.S. and Iran will likely have to ramp up deescalation talks again, as they did following Israel’s strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria in April.
“The April model of crisis management may still work,” Iran analyst Abdolrasool Divsallar wrote on Twitter. “This seems to be the only option forward to prevent a regional war.”
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