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Smoke rises after what the Iranian media said was an Israeli strike on a building close to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria April 1, 2024.
Israel kills top Iranian commanders in Damascus
The freshly un-herniated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flexed some muscle beyond Israel’s borders on Monday, as an apparent IDF air strike flattened a section of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing several senior Iranian military figures responsible for proxy groups in Syria and Lebanon, as well as a handful of Iranian diplomats.
The strike marks an escalation between the Jewish State and the Islamic Republic. While Israel has conducted assassinations within Iran over the years and has struck a number of military targets belonging to Iran or its proxies in Syria and Lebanon in recent months, the strike on a diplomatic building was a particularly bold taunt of Tehran.
Iran said the strike suggested Netanyahu had lost his mind over his inability to master the Gaza situation — a colorful view that does little to mask a more black-and-white problem for the Supreme Leader and his generals: how to respond to a provocation like this without sliding into a direct conflict with Israel that Tehran has so far tried to avoid.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that the Israeli strike had flattened the entire Iranian consulate building, rather than just an annex of the building. We regret the error.
A man carries a child as Palestinians fleeing north Gaza walk towards the south, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, Nov. 9, 2023.
Israel agrees to brief pauses in fight against Hamas
Israel has agreed to daily four-hour pauses in the fighting in northern Gaza to allow civilians to evacuate to the southern part of the territory, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby announced Thursday.
Kirby lauded the move as a “step in the right direction.” But President Joe Biden also conceded to reporters that it’s taken "a little longer than I hoped" for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to the White House’s requests.
Biden said he’d urged Israel to consider a three-day pause and “asked for even a longer pause” to allow time to help get hostages taken by Hamas out of Gaza. The agreement for the four-hour pauses is seemingly a compromise.
The Israeli government continues to fiercely oppose a ceasefire, and Biden doesn’t think that will change anytime soon. Netanyahu in late October said that calls for a “ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism.”
Instead of endorsing a ceasefire, which the UN has pushed for, the US and a number of its allies have requested short pauses in the war. At home, Biden’s approach to the conflict has put him at odds with a number of progressive Democratic lawmakers who have explicitly called for a ceasefire.
The takeaway: Biden has generally offered unequivocal support for his Israeli counterpart since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 but now appears to be growing somewhat impatient with Bibi. It’s evident that the US is ratcheting up pressure on Israel to take more steps to protect Palestinian civilians as the fight continues and the death toll rises.