Victoria Coates
“Where does Hamas go from here?” read a Washington Post headline in the wake of the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 30 in Tehran.
The United States didn’t wait to find out. It dramatically increased its naval posture in the Middle East in an effort to deter Iran from an escalatory retaliation against Israel.
That attack hasn’t materialized, suggesting that the assembled firepower has indeed made Iran think twice. But recent events—the execution of Hersh Goldberg-Polin in the Gaza Strip, the attack on U.S. forces in Iraq that injured 17 and increasing Houthi action against commercial shipping in the Red Sea—indicate that Iran is not so much standing down as using its terrorist proxies to test the Biden-Harris administration. Iran wants to know if the United States would actually use any of the military capacity at its disposal or if it’s just for show.
Goldberg-Polin’s murder is the most egregious provocation to date in a disturbing shift of tactics for Hamas. In the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the terrorist group took dozens of civilians hostage, including dual Israeli-American citizens such as Goldberg-Polin. Until recently, Hamas’ general policy appeared to be to try to keep them alive, albeit under horrific circumstances, to use as bargaining chips in negotiations with Israel.
Goldberg-Polin, for example, had had his arm blown off below the elbow and would have required significant medical attention. But as Israeli forces closed in on the location of the six young people kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, Hamas didn’t abandon them or try to fight the Israeli military. It summarily executed the hostages.
The grim discovery of their bodies had the intended shocking effect, and Israelis took to the streets to demand the return of the other hostages. Anger has grown against the Israeli government for not making sufficient concessions to extract them in time. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/middle-east/commentary/hostage-goldberg-polins-execution-iranian-escalation-against-america