When will Israel, Iran's proxy war ignite? - opinion
Should force be required to stop an Iranian bomb, Israel would have to act and almost certainly act alone. That is how the long-standing Israel-Iran proxy war could assume a terrible reality.
On Wednesday, April 27, according to Syria’s Defense Ministry backed by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Israel launched a missile attack on positions near Damascus killing four Syrian soldiers. The Syrian state news agency claimed the missiles had been launched from Tiberias in north-eastern Israel. According to the head of SOHR, Rami Abdel Rahman, the missile attacks hit arms depots in several suburbs of Damascus used by Iran-backed groups. At least five separate sites were targeted.
The SOHR was established in 2006 to catalogue human rights violations by the dictatorial regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. Since the Arab Spring rebellion against the Assad regime in 2011, it has set up a vast intelligence-gathering network in every region of Syria and become an authoritative source of information about the effects on the civilian population of Assad’s ruthless conduct of the conflict, backed – as his forces are – by both Russia and Iran.
Israel issued no statement on the reported April 27 attack, nor about one reported on April 14 when several missiles hit Syrian army positions near Damascus. What Israel has said in the past is that any Iranian or Iranian-supported presence near its northern frontier is a red line and that it targets the bases of Iran-allied militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, which has fighters in Syria backing the Assad regime.
Israel has also said it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for the Iran-supported militias. For example, in December 2021, hours after the Israeli military reportedly struck arms shipped from Iran in Syria’s Latakia port, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said: “Israel will not allow Iran to stream game-changing weapons to its proxies and to threaten our citizens.”
Of the many conflicts in the Middle East, the ongoing proxy war between Iran and Israel is potentially the most explosive.
Built into the DNA of the Iranian Revolution from its start in 1979 is the aim of destroying Israel, as a preliminary step toward the destruction of Western democracy as exemplified by the United States.
In pursuit of this fundamental objective, Iran’s leaders have provided funding, weapons and training to groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which have carried out attacks on Israel and which have been designated terrorist organizations by many countries.
Because Israel perceives the Iranian regime as an existential threat to its very existence, it has consistently opposed Iran’s nuclear weapon and missile programs. It seeks also to downgrade Iran’s allies and proxies, and prevent Iranian entrenchment in Syria, another sworn enemy of Israel.
For years, Iran and Israel have engaged in a shadow war, quietly attacking each other – directly or by proxy – on land, by air and at sea. Escalation to all-out war has been deliberately avoided, and attacks usually remain either unattributed or plausibly denied.
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