The mayhem, destruction, and killing of hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese people every day that the world has been witnessing for the last 12 months at the hands of the Israeli army have long been delinked from the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.

The whole Middle East shook again on 28 September when the Israeli army confirmed that the massive aerial attacks on the headquarters of the Lebanese group Hizbullah on 27 September had killed the group’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah together with other leading figures from Hizbullah and a representative of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The targeting of Nasrallah was not a surprise. Before 17 September when Israel started a campaign to decimate the leaders of Hizbullah, a minister in the Likud Party-led ruling coalition government in Israel had warned that Nasrallah was in the sights of the Israelis and that they would kill him if they decided to do so. Israel then started a string of assassinations of some of Hizbullah’s leading commanders that culminated with the assassination of Nasrallah, the successor of the group’s founder, Abbas Musawi, in 1992.

Nasrallah oversaw the rise of Hizbullah as a political force to be reckoned with in Lebanon in addition to turning it into a powerful, well-resourced, and well-trained military force that was able to confront the Israeli army in a war between the two sides in 2006 that lasted for a month.

Hizbullah under Nasrallah fought the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon for 18 years from 1982 until 2000, leading to the eventual withdrawal of the Israeli forces. This was a great victory for a non-state military organisation that greatly enhanced the position and role of Hizbullah within Lebanon as well as its image across the Arab world.

Hizbullah has also been considered as a powerful pro-Iranian militia whose main mission has been to deter Israel from attacking Iran. Ever since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister for the first time in May 1996, his battle cry, which has never changed, has been that Iran is out to destroy Israel. Brandishing the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran, he has claimed that Iran poses an “existential threat” to Israel.

This explains Netanyahu’s efforts in 2015 to prevent the signing of the nuclear deal between the 5+1 Group, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, and Iran, which the US Trump administration withdrew from in May 2018.

Talking to the US channel ABC News’ This Week programme on 29 September, White House National Security Adviser John Kirby said that the command structure of Hizbullah has been “nearly decimated” and that thousands of its drones and missiles have been destroyed. Nevertheless, it is too early to predict how the situation in the Middle East will develop in the next few weeks in the wake of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah.

The Israelis have said that they still have various scenarios to choose from as far as Lebanon and Hizbullah are concerned and that they have not ruled out a “limited ground incursion” into Southern Lebanon in order to weaken Hizbullah further. An official US source confirmed this on 28 September, saying that the Israelis are planning to send their army into Lebanon for a brief period of time.

Upon his return to Israel from New York City where he addressed the UN General Assembly on 27 September, Netanyahu told the Israeli public that getting rid of Nasrallah would change the Middle East and help in releasing the Israeli hostages from their captivity in Gaza. This remains to be seen.

There are now three main questions hovering over the Middle East. The first concerns the Iranian reaction to the assassination of Nasrallah and the weakening of Hizbullah. The second is how far Israel will now go on its killing spree in Gaza and Lebanon. The third relates to the US position and its role in the Middle East at present.

Of course, we should not expect a clearly defined US position before the new administration takes office in January after the November presidential elections. On the other hand, needless to say we are not speaking here about how far Washington will go in shielding Israel from retaliation.

On the day the Israelis announced the assassination of Nasrallah US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin phoned his Israeli counterpart Yaov Gallant to assure him of US support. US President Joe Biden, commenting on the assassination of Nasrallah, said that “justice has been done” because the latter was responsible for killing Americans and Lebanese.

Israel will not hesitate to act militarily as it deems fit over the next three months before the next US president is sworn into office in January 2025. Until then, and probably also until the second half of next year, the Middle East will remain in turmoil and uncertainty as to the direction the winds of transformative change are blowing in the troubled region.

Regardless of the directions they could take, they should not blow at the expense of the Palestinian question. Under no circumstances should the Palestinians be dispossessed of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor should there be any tampering with the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem of the sort that the settler movement in Israel and the country’s extreme right have been trying to do over the last few months.

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 3 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly