Middle East tensions: What’s behind the Israel, Iran and Lebanon conflicts? - The Front Page

Smoke from Israeli shelling rises above the Lebanese village of Khiam as tensions between pro-Iranian Hezbollah terrorists and Israeli forces escalate. Photo / Getty Images

A local expert on the brewing conflict in the Middle East believes the real damage could be done further down the track.

Tensions between Israel and neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon and Iran, have grown over the past week after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran last week.

The death of Haniyeh, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza, has seen Lebanon fire rockets towards northern Israel, while Iran’s foreign ministry has said stability in the region would only come from “punishing the aggressor”.

University of Otago professor Dr Leon Goldsmith, who co-founded Middle East and Islamic Studies Aotearoa, told The Front Page that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likely wants to see this conflict escalate.

“He doesn’t want to see a quick end to conflict, whether it be in Gaza or Lebanon or with the Iranians. I think that he knows that when the war finishes, he’s going to jail on serious corruption charges and probably a bunch of other things from his conduct in recent times,” Goldsmith said.

“So he personally is looking to orchestrate and instrumentalise things to maintain a sense of escalation and security risk to Israel, which means that people have to rally around and therefore he has some kind of impunity within that.”

He said Israel believes it has the upper hand at the moment, with US forces currently deployed in the region and aligned with Israel.

However, Goldsmith does not think there will be a major escalation in tensions at the moment and said Lebanon’s airstrikes in northern Israel are nothing new.

“They’ve been hurtling 30 to 40 to 60 rockets per day across there at various times. If there is going to be an escalation on the Lebanese border, it will be much more than this. The Lebanese Hezbollah has the capacity to launch hundreds if not thousands of missiles at Israel if they were basically cranking things up, if the order had been given to launch everything.”

He expects Iran will launch a limited strike soon to save face but won’t want to escalate anything at this stage, because they are aware they would struggle to win.

Instead, he thinks there will be a “strategic pause” on their side before a major escalation further down the track.

Goldsmith told the podcast he was in one of the Druze villages, which has been hit by rockets, last year and houses there have chemical weapon filters because such strikes are a concern.

“I think that the real response for these assassinations in recent days by the Iranians is going to come sometime down the track, and it’s going to come when it’s a surprise, something similar to what we saw on October 7, except it’d probably be something on a much more magnified scale than we saw on October 7 last year.”

Listen to the full episode for more on the backlash facing Netanyahu, the state of the war in Gaza, and how foreign countries such as New Zealand should respond.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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