ACTUAL

The attacks heighten fears of a wider war in the Middle East and the US

The assassination of a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon and mysterious twin bombings in Iran are raising fears of a regional war that could involve the United States.

American, Israeli and Lebanese officials insist that few sides want Israel's war in Gaza to become a wider conflict that will engulf the Middle East.

But the assassination of a Hamas leader in Lebanon on Tuesday and the deaths of dozens in mysterious twin bombings in Iran on Wednesday threatened to push the Middle East — and the United States — closer to the brink of the kind of regional war the Biden administration has sought to avert since Hamas' deadly attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

Just hours after the explosion in Iran, the United States and 12 of its allies issued a written warning to another militia group in the region, the Yemeni Houthis, who have launched near-daily missile, drone and naval strikes against commercial vessels.

So far, the United States has refrained from retaliating against Houthi bases in Yemen, in large part because it does not want to undermine a fragile truce in Yemen's civil war.

But now Biden officials are signaling that their patience is running out.
"Let our message be clear: We call for an immediate end to these unlawful attacks and the release of the illegally detained vessels and crews," the White House said in a statement released Wednesday, a day after shipping giant Maersk announced the suspension of operations  in the Red Sea.
The Houthis, the statement continued, "are responsible for the consequences if they continue to threaten lives, the global economy and the free flow of trade in the region's critical waterways."
The warning, which was also signed by Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands, contained no threats of military strikes. Over the weekend, the U.S. Navy sank three Houthi boats, killing all crew members, when they fired on U.S. helicopters that were coming to the aid of a Maersk cargo ship.
On Monday, the Iranian Navy announced the deployment of a flotilla of warships in the waterway. On the same day, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian expressed "gratitude" to a visiting Houthi official in Tehran for supporting the Hamas group, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

A senior Iranian official said the dispatch of warships, joining an Iranian reconnaissance ship already in the region, was intended to signal Iran's support for the Houthis and raise the stakes. But the official said Iran has no plans for warships to engage in confrontations with U.S. Navy ships in the waterway.

President Biden has said he wants to avoid direct military attacks on the Houthis to avoid escalating the Middle East conflict.

"We remain extremely concerned about the risk of the conflict spreading to other fronts," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.

Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group, vowed that the killing of Saleh al-Aruri, the leader of Hamas, in a suburb of Beirut on Tuesday would not go unanswered. A key ally of Hamas, Hezbollah effectively controls the southern suburbs of Beirut where the blast occurred and has been escalating clashes with Israeli forces for months.

The circumstances surrounding the explosions at the memorial to former Iranian general Qassim Soleimani in Kerman, Iran, were more hazy. While Iran has been quick to blame Israel, European and American officials have said they doubt the Israelis carried out the strike: Most of their actions against Iran have been targeted, from eliminating the chief architect of Iran's nuclear program to blowing up specific nuclear weapons.

Three senior US officials and one senior European official said on Wednesday that the Islamic State or another terrorist group was the likely perpetrator. While there is some intelligence pointing to Islamic State involvement in the attack, officials cautioned that the assessment is preliminary and no final conclusions have been reached.
"It is entirely possible that one of the Israeli proxy groups allowed the attack to get out of hand," Ray Takeih, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who writes frequently on Iran, said on Wednesday.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, issued a statement Wednesday in which he blamed the attack on the nation's "vicious and criminal enemies," but did not name any group or country. Mr. Khamenei vowed that Iran's enemies should know that "this tragedy will have a strong response."
Two people familiar with internal discussions in Iran said the ayatollah had ordered Iran's military commanders to exercise "strategic patience" and avoid drawing Iran into a direct military confrontation with the United States.
Several US officials said it was too early to predict whether a wider war would break out. Israel would not have struck Mr. al-Aruri if it did not believe it could do so without escalating the conflict on the border with Lebanon, the officials said. But given that the explosions, whatever their cause, came so soon after the assassination, there was little doubt that the risk of a spillover conflict was beginning to be re-thought in the United States and Europe.

Israeli officials did not comment on whether their forces targeted Mr. al-Aruri, but Lebanese and American officials attributed the attack to Israel.

After the strike, Biden administration officials made plans to step up diplomatic efforts with officials in Lebanon as part of an effort to pressure Hezbollah not to escalate the conflict. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken is expected to travel to the Middle East in the coming days, where containing potential escalation will be one of his main goals.

"The probability of a regional war in the Middle East goes from 15 percent to 30 percent," said retired Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO commander. "Still relatively low, but higher than before, and certainly uncomfortably high."

But Biden administration officials and Middle East analysts noted that while Hezbollah and Iran have engaged in skirmishes and proxy attacks against Israel, they are not necessarily seeking to expand the conflict.

"Throughout the devastation in Gaza, Hezbollah has maintained that they will operate in a limited way" to tie up some Israeli forces near Lebanon, Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute, said in an interview. "It was absolutely clear that they were not joining the fight directly."
He and other analysts said that while Iran has helped plan and orchestrate some of the attacks taking place in the Middle East, including the Houthi missile attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, it has not directly targeted the United States or Israel.
After the October 7 terrorist attacks, Biden and his top aides sought to contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Pentagon has sent two aircraft carriers and doubled the number of US warplanes to the Middle East to deter Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq from expanding the war. Now that strategy is wearing thin. The Pentagon said this week that one of those carrier groups, led by the Gerald R. Ford, was leaving the area.
Iran-backed militias have attacked US troops stationed in Iraq and Syria on counter-terrorism missions 118 times since the Oct. 7 attacks, most recently on Monday. Several US service members were injured in the strikes, at least one critically, prompting the Pentagon to retaliate with airstrikes targeting the groups five times.

In recent weeks, the Biden administration declassified intelligence that indicated Iranian paramilitary groups were coordinating Houthi attacks by providing targeted information on commercial shipping passing through the waterway and the Suez Canal. Israel is heavily dependent on shipping in the Red Sea.

In response to the attacks, the United States established a multinational naval group to protect commercial shipping in both the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Pentagon officials have drawn up detailed plans to strike missile and drone bases in Yemen, as well as some sites that appear to be home to the speedboats used to attack the Maersk container ship. But there are concerns that such strikes would play into Iran's strategy of trampling Israel and its allies on multiple fronts.

But the most serious threat to contain the conflict in Gaza arose on Tuesday after the killing of al-Aruri .

"Losing someone so closely involved in both tactical operations and strategic diplomacy is a major setback for Hamas," Hanin Gaddar and Matthew Levitt wrote in an analysis for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "What remains to be seen is how the group's allies, especially Hezbollah, will respond to the attack."
Western leaders tried to ease tensions, which were growing rapidly. French President Emmanuel Macron said shortly after the strike that "it is important to avoid any escalation, especially in Lebanon."
In a telephone conversation with Benny Gantz, an opponent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who joined the country's wartime unity government, Macron said that “France will continue to convey these messages to all the players who are directly or indirectly involved in this region. ”, said the conclusion of the call from the President of France.

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