WASHINGTON — As Israel prepares for Iran’s anticipated retaliation for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Biden administration officials have been busy readying contingency plans such as potentially evacuating US citizens from the region.
The US Navy has assembled more than a dozen warships across the region’s waterways, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, currently in the Gulf of Oman, and the USS Wasp amphibious ready group with 4,000 embarked sailors and Marines, currently in the eastern Mediterranean.
The Biden administration has pledged to defend Israel should it come under attack. Pentagon officials say the array of warships, fighter aircraft and air defenses across the region are ready.
Yet three US officials stressed Thursday that no military orders had been yet issued. “There has not been any official tasking in response to recent events,” one of the officials told Security Briefing, adding, “One of the benefits of having a naval force in place is it gives leaders options.”
Three other officials, two Israeli and one American, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli government notified the Biden administration ahead of the strike on Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in south Beirut on Tuesday.
But high-ranking US military officials in the Middle East were caught off guard by the assassination of Haniyeh. Top US diplomat Antony Blinken said the United States had no foreknowledge or involvement in the assassination.
“All of this adds to the complicated nature of what we’re trying to get done. And what we’re trying to get done is a cease-fire deal,” White House National Security Council coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday.
Iran and its proxies are signaling fierce and unified retaliation may be in store. “We, on all support fronts, have entered a new phase,” Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned in a speech Thursday.
“Laugh now, but you will cry greatly, and you don’t know what red lines you have crossed and what kind of aggression you have committed,” Nasrallah said.
Iran plans with its proxies
Iranian officials have said they will consult with their proxies before taking action. Two US military sources who spoke to Security Briefing on condition of anonymity said conventional strikes like Iran’s April 13 massive drone and missile barrage against Israel are likely.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was expected on Friday to sign off on additional deployments to the region to bolster a defensive effort, one US official told Security Briefing. The source stressed that no final decisions on new deployments had yet been made.
Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Yemen’s Houthi rebels may also join in the anticipated attack, particularly given the recent high-profile Israeli strikes on their turf. This time, however, the barrage may be heavier in a bid to overwhelm US-led attempts to collectively defend Israeli airspace.
The fusillade of more than 300 missiles and drones fired by Iran and its proxies in April was largely intercepted by Israeli air defenses backed by US, UK, French and Jordanian fighter aircraft as well as US Navy destroyers, all armed with early-warning intelligence from Gulf states.
Whether Arab states will participate in collective defense to the same degree if Iran and its proxies launch a repeat attack remains to be seen.
There are more than 3,400 US troops at bases across Iraq and Syria, with thousands more in the Persian Gulf region, all within range of Iran and its proxies’ projectiles. The Pentagon rushed air defense systems back to the Middle East following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
During the barrage in April, Iran and its proxies refrained from striking US troop positions in the region. But that may not be the case this time, Al-Monitor’s sources said.
The United States carried out a lethal airstrike in central Iraq against Kataib Hezbollah members Tuesday night, in the intervening hours between the assassinations of Shukr and Haniyeh.
Iran-backed militias in Iraq have already begun to portray that strike — which US military officials insist was defensive — as a sign of US-Israeli coordination despite the denials from Washington.
Kataib Hezbollah said in a statement that it would consult with other Iran-backed groups before “taking the appropriate decision” in response. Harakat Hezbollah Al-Nujaba reacted more harshly, saying the United States and Israel had “opened the gates of hell upon themselves” with their respective strikes.
Kataib al-Sayyid al-Shuhada, another IRGC-backed militia in Iraq, accused neighboring Arab states of permitting the use of their airspace in the recent strikes.
Michael Knights is the Jay and Jill Bernstein fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “This is the new normal,” he told Security Briefing. “If there is a cross-axis strike on Israel, I would expect ancillary strikes on Erbil, al-Asad [air base] and Tanf mixed in.”
US troops at bases across the region have been taking precautions since a suspected errant Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children at a soccer field in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights.
It was precisely the mistake Western diplomats have feared could spark a war along the Blue Line.
“This is the closest the region has been to an all-out conflict in the last 10 months,” said Michael Mulroy, who served as Middle East policy director at the Pentagon under Defense Secretary James Mattis during the Trump administration.
“All diplomatic efforts should be made to find an off-ramp to de-escalate the situation. If nothing changes, the current trajectory of war seems inevitable,” Mulroy added.
