Tehran lashed out at existential threat

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Picture: AFP

On hearing last week that Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s charismatic and corrupt leader, had been killed, a deeply shaken Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, assembled key lieutenants at his home in Tehran to discuss the calamity.

Hezbollah was the linchpin of the “axis of resistance” that the Islamic Republic has built to harry Israel and burnish its credentials as self-appointed leader of the Muslim world.

It was the one force whose arsenal of rockets and proximity to Israel’s borders Tehran had counted on as insurance against direct Israeli strikes on Iran.

Nasrallah’s killing, after a series of shocks including Israel’s explosive weaponisation of pagers and walkie-talkies, had shattered the air of invincibility around Hezbollah, leaving Tehran exposed. Was the survival of the regime at stake?

Iran appears to have believed so. It confirmed that Tuesday night’s missile barrage was in direct response to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, ending the paralysis that seemed to have struck the regime since the attack in Tehran in July that killed Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Tensions in the region have been high ever since. Coming as that attack did, on the inauguration day of the new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, it left the government in Tehran struggling to speak with one voice.

Those who gathered at Khamenei’s house ran the gamut of official opinion from Pezeshkian to the hardliner he defeated for the job, Saeed Jalili. The Iranians were in a state of shock and mourning, but not agreement. Pezeshkian had come fresh from his inaugural address at the UN general assembly, where he had said Iran was “ready to lay down its arms if Israel lays down its arms”.

Even before Nasrallah’s killing, plenty of Iranian hardliners were scoffing at his dovishness. That night at Khamenei’s house, there was no consensus. Hardliners argued for a swift, decisive response against Israel before it struck Iran.

Those in Pezeshkian’s corner warned that Iran was, perhaps for a second time, walking into a trap set by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to provoke a wider regional war.

Khamenei announced five days of official mourning for Nasrallah but issued no order to avenge him. That was for Hezbollah to choose, he suggested. “It will be Hezbollah, at the helm of the resistance forces, that will determine the fate of the region,” he said.

On Tuesday, it became clear that was another bluff. Without Hezbollah as insurance, Iran’s regime saw itself staring at an existential threat, and with little apparently left to lose, lashed out.

The Times