What next for the Middle East tinder box?

If Israel continues to press its advantage following the deaths of Hizbollah’s leaders in Lebanon and the weakening of Hamas in Gaza, will Iran continue to hold back?

Do you know how Hassan Nasrallah, killed by a massive Israeli bomb attack on his Beirut bunker last Friday, became the leader of Hizbollah?

He took over from Abbas al-Musawi, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike back in 1992.

Do you know how Yahyar Sinwar became the leader of Hamas?

He took over from Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in a bomb attack in Tehran last July.

Turn the clock back even further and you get to Ahmed Yassin, who founded Hamas in 1987, killed in an Israeli missile attack in 2004, who was succeeded by Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who was killed by another Israeli missile just two weeks later.

Israel has a long history of assassinating its adversaries. Whether it is a policy that has diminished the threats to the country’s security is, I would argue, arguable.

When I was a correspondent based in the Middle East in the 1980s, one of Israel’s most implacable Palestinian adversaries was a man called Khalil al-Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jihad.

He was Yasser Arafat’s number two in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in charge of the PLO’s armed wing. I used to meet him from time to time when he was living in some comfort in a suburb of the Jordanian capital Amman, where he was happy to meet up with Western journalists to explain his strategy for defeating the ‘Zionist entity.’