Tipping point

A Hamas leader killed in Beirut. Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea. A US airstrike in Baghdad. As the Israel-Gaza war bleeds across borders, is wider violence in the Middle East inevitable?

- Peter Beaumont

Mohammad Atout, a Palestinian resident of the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, was eating with his children last Tuesday evening when the news broke across the Lebanese capital that Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of Hamas's political bureau, had been assassinated.

"Someone told me there had been an attack [in Beirut]. Moments later the television said it was Arouri. Then people came out in the streets. It hit them very hard. He was an important leader for us," Atout said.

In the coffee shop he owns, which opens on to a street decorated with Palestinian banners, his customers have been watching AI Jazeera footage of the war in Gaza.

"We never thought that the Israelis would dare to do this in Beirut," Atout said. He believes the reason for Arouri's killing was Israel's failure to find and kill Hamas's leaders inside Gaza, including the head of the movement, Yahya Sinwar.

He suggests Arouri, whose office was struck by missiles, was lowhanging fruit-his assassination a cover for Israel's slow progress in meeting its declared war aims- although he remains unconvinced that the growing escalation will lead to all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel.

That is the question that has dominated debate in Lebanon and the wider region in the days since Arouri's killing, even as a tenuous normality has returned to Beirut's sprawling southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold, in wake of the attack.

Last Saturday morning, Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel, saying the barrage was only its first response to Arouri's killing. The cross-border exchanges have highlighted the fact that, three months on, Israel's war against Hamas is starting to bleed ever wider across the region.