While no small number of esteemed experts have expressed their opinion that the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s politburo, will only make matters worse for Israel, Graeme Wood is not so sure. First, he looks at the admittedly real possibility of a widening of the conflict:

Iran is naturally mortified that it could not protect its vassal even in Tehran, and it will seek revenge. But it has tried to avoid all-out war for years. To start one now would be an extreme gamble, at a time when Israel has just given Iran reason to doubt that fortune favors it.

It seems in this case that Israel found a middle way, by attacking an Iranian ally, on Iranian soil, in such a way as to prove to the other allies that Iran cannot protect them. It implies that the link between the backer and the backed might not be as reliable as either assumed. If that message is received as intended, Haniyeh’s assassination will have de-escalated regional tensions rather than ratcheted them up.

As for the hostage negotiations, he writes:

The likely effect of the death of Haniyeh on the war in Gaza is less than one might imagine. Haniyeh was a political leader, and over the course of ten months he delivered almost nothing in the way of political compromise.

To the contrary, whoever succeeds Haniyeh (likely his predecessor, Khaled Meshal) might feel much more motivated to produce a hostage deal acceptable to the Israelis. After all, the death of the last person to fail at your job can have a clarifying effect. And if it is true, as Wood asserts, that Hamas’s leaders in Doha have little leverage to force a deal on a reluctant Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, then there is all the more reason to kill the rest of them.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.