With its latest assassination, Israel is testing Iran

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Key Points

And it is galling to hear Iranian officials invoke the sanctity of consular buildings, when the first major act of the newly established Islamic Republic was to take hostages at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979..

Since October 7th, when Hamas militants crossed the border from Gaza and killed more than 1,100 people, Israel has been fighting on two fronts: against Hamas in Gaza, and against a wider array of Iranian-backed militias across the region..

After a decade of civil war, Bashar al-Assads regime is too brittle to fight back, and the Iranian-backed militias in Syria lack the enormous arsenal of their Hizbullah comrades in neighbouring Lebanon..

The two countries have tried to de-escalate tensions since January 28th, when an Iranian-backed group launched a drone at an American base in north-eastern Jordan and killed three soldiers..

American officials have made it known publicly that they had no advance knowledge of the Israeli attack in Damascus, a message they also passed via intermediaries to their Iranian counterparts..

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