(Bloomberg) -- US officials are still pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza but concede it’s harder than ever after a suspected Israeli strike killed a top Hamas leader in Tehran, according to people familiar with the Biden administration’s thinking.
The viability of the months-long US effort to secure a pause in the Israel-Hamas war and free Israeli hostages was thrown into question after a missile strike in Tehran on early Wednesday killed Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s political chief and a key representative during rounds of so-far futile negotiations.
“This attack, while justified, will be a setback for talks,” said Emily Harding, former director for Iran on the US National Security Council and now an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Israel has been under tremendous pressure to bring home the remaining hostages, so they must have calculated that the operational benefit of killing Haniyeh was greater than the prospect of successful hostage exchange.”
Key Arab nations involved in the cease-fire talks also said the killing complicates efforts to secure a truce between Israel and Hamas, which the US has designated a terrorist organization.
Egypt, which has acted as a mediator, said the timing and lack of progress on the talks indicate “the absence of Israeli political will to calm the situation.” The prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, posted on X: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”
Israel hasn’t officially claimed responsibility for the killing of Haniyeh. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has vowed to eliminate every Hamas official since the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war in Gaza.
Pursuing a cease-fire deal has been the Biden administration’s policy for months, and the administration doesn’t appear to have an alternative path.
“I can tell you that the imperative of getting a cease-fire — the importance that that has for everyone — remains,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with Channel News Asia on Wednesday, adding that the US wasn’t informed of the strike in advance. “We will continue to labor at that for as long as it takes to get there.”
John Kirby, spokesman for the US National Security Council, told reporters that “we’re obviously concerned about escalation,” although “we don’t believe that an escalation is inevitable, and there’s no sign that an escalation is imminent.”
“It’s too soon to know what any of these reported events could mean for the cease-fire deal,” he said, adding it “doesn’t mean we’re going to stop working on it.”
The administration’s position “will be fundamentally unchanged,” said Jonathan Lord, a former Pentagon official and director of the Middle East security program at the Center for a New American Security. “It is going to doggedly pursue a deal, continue to tactically limit any escalatory response from Iran and its proxies and partners and support Israel’s ability to defend itself.”
Limiting the risks of wider escalation will be a challenge. The killing came just hours after an Israeli strike that killed one of Hezbollah’s top leaders in Beirut, increasing the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East.
On Wednesday, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke of retaliation, vowing that Israel has “prepared the ground for its severe punishment.”
Talks ‘Frozen’
The talks between Israel and Hamas will probably be “frozen for the time being” as the militant group will wait “to see what happens with Iran and Hezbollah first,” Ryan Bohl, a Middle East and North Africa analyst at RANE, a risk consultancy for investors, said to Bloomberg Television.
In April, after Israel killed two Iranian generals in the Syrian capital Damascus, Tehran fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, its first direct attack. Israel and allies including the US blocked most of the incoming fire.
The latest assassinations are likely to further fuel criticism in the US and elsewhere that Israel’s leaders are avoiding a truce for domestic political reasons.
“The assassination of Haniyah is likely to put an end to the current state of negotiations,” said Dan Mouton, a former National Security Council official and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
“Ending negotiations may be politically advantageous for some inside Israel who do not want to grapple with the need to form a post-conflict government or the inevitable independent investigation into the Oct. 7 attack,” Mouton said.
--With assistance from Michelle Jamrisko, Raeedah Wahid and Joumanna Bercetche.
(Updates with comment from analyst at RANE.)
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