The Tehran assassination has changed the game: Analysis

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh has the entire Middle East on an absolute knife’s edge.

When we wrapped up our ABC News coverage on Tuesday night, Israel had just announced they had killed a senior Hezbollah leader in Beirut, their targeted response to the Golan Heights rocket attack.

The question was when and how Hezbollah would respond, but the overriding sense was that both sides were likely to find a way not to escalate to all-out war.

That’s now been completely upended.

An attack in Tehran, the heart of Iran, killed the political leader of Hamas not long after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president at the invitation of the country’s supreme leader. Haniyeh was in their care. This is a huge deal.

Israel hasn’t taken direct responsibility, but Iran’s supreme leader has said the attack came from the “criminal and terrorist Zionist entity.”

“With this act, [Israel] paved the way for a severe punishment, and we consider it our duty to avenge the blood of those who were martyred in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Ayatollah Khamenei.

But just what that response looks like and when it comes is anyone’s guess.

It could be another missile or drone attack from Iran like we saw a few months ago. It could be Iran hitting Israeli targets abroad. We know security is being stepped up at Israeli embassies worldwide. It could be both options, neither or something else entirely.

Does the Iranian response preclude a response from Hezbollah? Their leadership had promised to target Tel Aviv if Beirut was hit. Well, a Beirut suburb got hit. A salvo from Iran could be joined by a salvo from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah does as Tehran instructs.

For its part, Hamas has also vowed to respond, saying the attack won’t go unanswered and will only serve to prolong the conflict.

Israel Defense Forces has stepped up its security posture throughout the country, closing airspace within 50 miles of the border.

It’s worth noting that both the Beirut and Tehran attacks by Israel were targeted -- limited civilian casualties and what the IDF says were legitimate military targets.

There is uniform opinion from most Israeli analysts, including those ABC News has spoken to personally, that Iran isn’t going to go to war over the killing of a Hamas leader. They didn’t after Soleimani was killed after all. After all, they didn’t after the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a U.S. strike and Soleimani was far more important to Iran than Haniyeh.

But this was a strike right in their backyard at a time when they are trying to project strength throughout the region. It’s not only embarrassing, it’s also a security lapse that has caught them flat-footed.

Accordingly, their response could be severe, even if not intended to cause all-out war. But just because you mean for a response to be targeted and limited doesn’t mean something won’t go wrong or that the other side will see it that way.

So continues this extremely dangerous back-and-forth game between Israel and its enemies. It’s been kept in check so far, but few are sleeping easy in Tel Aviv right now.