Cables From The Diplomatic Frontlines - Israel vs Hezbollah and Iran escalation: Netanyahu's objectives and calculations.

Israeli response to Hezbollah and how far can Netanyahu go.

• Following Saturday's rocket strike, Israeli military response was inevitable.

• Israel has now killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a suburb of Beirut (a long way away from Hezbollah strongholds in the south - a clear signal that Israel is willing to expand the war beyond the usual remits.) and the leader of Hamas’s political wing, Ismayil Haniyeh.

• Both assassinations are a significant escalation - but clearly, the killing of Haniyeh was a far more monumental event.

• First off, this was yet another demonstration and warning: that Israel possesses an incredible reach and can carry out assassination of high value targets right in Iranian capital with precision strikes.

• Also, the assassination of Haniyeh took place shortly after he attended the inauguration of the new President.

• The timing of his assassination is an additional show of disrespect to the Iranian regime.

• All of this means that Iran will now have to respond somehow.

• (side note: there is also of course a serious impact on Israel - Hamas negotiations. On the one hand, Israel just killed their main diplomatic interlocutor in Hamas. One can therefore assume that for Netanyahu, this was a neat way out of negotiations: kill two birds with one stone. On the other hand however, if the military wing leader Yahya Sinwar is killed too, then Netanyahu (or another Israeli PM) can claim a total victory and this would let Israel agree to a ceasefire without letting any serious Hamas leader “getting away” with it.)

• It will be tough to calibrate a response that is hard enough to appear sufficient and yet weak enough to not create a pretext for further significant Israeli strikes and a potential full-on war.

• At this point it is also worth mentioning that for Iran, the threat to its regime can come from many directions.

• We usually focus on the bottom-up grassroots pressure, but the opposite can also happen.

• For months now, Iran has been absorbing Israeli slights and accepting symbolically valuable losses without a strong show of force.

• And although April's missile barrage appeared grandiose, it did little in the way of actual harm to Israel.

• The fact of the matter is that Iran was unable to exact a proportionate response: while its senior commanders were killed in an Israeli missile strike in Syria, its own response did little in the way of actual damage.

• Not only were there no corresponding casualties in Israeli command, there was little actual damage overall.