Israel claims to have
wiped out Hamas and Hezbollah leadership but has not stopped from expanding the
conflict deep into Lebanon. The conflict
in West Asia has taken a turn for the worse with Israel firing a barrage of
missiles at Iran Saturday 26 Oct in retaliation to a similar attack by the
latter on October 2. Tehran’s attack, in the first place, was in response
to Tel Aviv killing multiple Iranian officials, accusing them of involvement in
terror strikes in Israel.
It would be overly optimistic to interpret
Saturday’s incident as the closing act of a chain of events where two
countries carried out spectacular missile attacks that caused limited
damage on the ground. Sure, Israel did not hit Iran’s nuclear installations and oil fields
but claimed to have targeted the latter’s missile production sites. And leaders
of both countries undertook attacks and counterattacks to emphasise the
legitimacy of their regimes as ones that protect their citizens in the face of
a threat from the “enemy”. But, it is hard to see Tehran not responding to
Saturday’s event. The actors in this
conflict may think that the action can be restricted to a defined geography,
but a war can’t be a choreographed event. A miscalculation regarding the
terms of engagement can change the contours of the conflict, widen the war, and
push the world into an abyss.
Israel claims to have
wiped out Hamas and Hezbollah leadership and has levelled Gaza in response to
last October’s terror attacks but has not stopped from expanding the conflict
deep into Lebanon. Tel Aviv hasn’t spared even UN agencies involved in relief
work. Which is why the global powers need to intervene with Israel. There are
no winners in this war.