On January 8, the Islamic Republic’s military fired two missiles at a Ukrainian airliner over Iranian airspace, killing everyone aboard. On Tuesday, the Canadian government released an official report on the incident, which caused the deaths of 55 of its citizens. The report makes repeated calls for “accountability,” but Terry Glavin doubts that those responsible will ever be held accountable.

The Iranian government, from the moment Flight PS752 . . . tumbled from the skies above Tehran in a ball of flame, until today, has been lying through its teeth about what happened.

For three full days following the event, the regime’s various official mouthpieces insisted that something must have gone wrong with the plane, that they had no idea what had happened, and only admitted to shooting down the plane when it became absolutely impossible to deny. And they’ve been covering up evidence and withholding evidence ever since. But what should anyone expect in the way of “accountability” from Khomeinist Iran?

Iranian airspace was left open and Iran’s skies were alive with civilian flights throughout the time that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was lobbing rockets at U.S. targets in Iraq in retaliation for Washington’s drone strike on the IRGC major-general Qassem Suleimani, commander of the IRGC’s terror-exporting Quds Force.

A recorded conversation between a Canadian victim’s relative and the Iranian senior investigator, Hassan Rezaeifar—a conversation that might be best described as a threatening phone call from the regime—contains what can only be understood as Rezaeifar’s candid admission that Iranian airspace was deliberately left open to conceal the IRGC’s retaliatory missile strikes on American targets. This would place the victims aboard Flight PS752 in the role of human shields. This was no human error.

Yesterday, the head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal security service—was in Washington meeting with officials from the State Department, CIA, and the White House itself. Among the topics no doubt discussed are rising tensions with Iran and the possibility that the latter, in order to defend its nuclear program, will instruct its network of proxies in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Yemen to attack the Jewish state. Oved Lobel explores the history of this network, which, he argues, predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution—when Shiite radicals in Lebanon coordinated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s movement in Iran:

An inextricably linked Iran-Syria-Palestinian axis has actually been in existence since the early 1970s, with Lebanon the geographical fulcrum of the relationship and Damascus serving as the primary operational headquarters. Lebanon, from the 1980s until 2005, was under the direct military control of Syria, which itself slowly transformed from an ally to a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The nexus among Damascus, Beirut, and the Palestinian territories should therefore always have been viewed as one front, both geographically and operationally. It’s clear that the multifront-war strategy was already in operation during the first intifada years, from 1987 to 1993.

[An] Iranian-organized conference in 1991, the first of many, . . . established the “Damascus 10”—an alliance of ten Palestinian factions that rejected any peace process with Israel. According to the former Hamas spokesperson and senior official Ibrahim Ghosheh, he spoke to then-Hizballah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi at the conference and coordinated Hizballah attacks from Lebanon in support of the intifada. Further important meetings between Hamas and the Iranian regime were held in 1999 and 2000, while the IRGC constantly met with its agents in Damascus to encourage coordinated attacks on Israel.

For some reason, Hizballah’s guerilla war against Israel in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s was, and often still is, viewed as a separate phenomenon from the first intifada, when they were in fact two fronts in the same battle.

Israel opted for a perilous unconditional withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, which Hamas’s Ghosheh asserts was a “direct factor” in precipitating the start of the second intifada later that same year.