Middle East Crisis: Arab States Urge Iran to Show Restraint in Conflict With Israel

In the past week, Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi of Jordan has twice met with senior Iranian officials, including the newly elected Iranian president, in a rare visit to Tehran.

“Jordan informed the Iranian brothers of its message in a clear manner,” Muhannad al-Mubaidin, Jordan’s minister of government communications, said in an interview. “We will not allow for our airspace or land to be used for any purpose. We are not willing to be a battlefield.”

In April, Jordan helped intercept missiles and drones fired by Iran at Israel after senior Iranian officers were killed in an airstrike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, Syria. The strike was widely attributed to Israel.

The latest tensions between Israel and Iran have put Jordan in a particularly challenging position. While it maintains a strong relationship with the United States and close security coordination with Israel, Jordan also has millions of citizens of Palestinian origin, including many who fiercely oppose aiding Israel in any form.

“Jordan has to strike a very delicate balance,” said Saud al-Sharafat, a former brigadier general in Jordan’s intelligence service. “It’s like walking on a tightrope.”

Last week, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that avenging Mr. Haniyeh’s death was “our duty” because he had been killed on Iranian soil. He promised to deliver “a severe punishment.”

Countries farther from Israel have also been urging Iran to refrain from escalating regional tensions.

In a phone call on Monday, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, told Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, that he had spoken to Ali Bagheri Kani, the Iranian foreign minister, about the need for restraint, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

The Qatari prime minister also informed Mr. Blinken that Qatar had given a similar message to Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militia that has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces along the Lebanon-Israel border, the official said. Hezbollah says it is fighting there in support of Hamas in Gaza. Both groups are backed by Iran.

Hours before Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, Israel killed Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military official, in response to a deadly strike on a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights days earlier. Israel blamed Hezbollah for that strike, but the group denied responsibility.

Earlier this week, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a speech that his group and Iran were “obliged to respond” to the killings of Mr. Shukr and Mr. Haniyeh, “whatever the consequences.”

“What is required is confrontation,” he said.

On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty of Egypt called Mr. Bagheri Kani as a part of his country’s efforts to “contain the escalation in the region,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Saudi Arabia, whose wealth and Islamic holy sites give it great clout in the Arab world, was calling for de-escalation by all sides, an immediate end to the war in Gaza and the release of hostages held in the enclave, according to a Saudi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the kingdom’s position freely.

Saudi Arabia took different stance in public on Wednesday, however, sympathizing with Iran’s position and sharply criticizing Israel during an extraordinary meeting in Saudi Arabia of foreign ministers from countries belonging to the Organization for Islamic Cooperation.

The Saudi deputy foreign minister, Waleed El Khereiji, said that Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination had been a “blatant violation” of Iran’s “sovereignty, its regional and national security and of international law.” Mr. El Khereiji added that the kingdom called on the international community to force Israel to “bear responsibility for its crimes,” including attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Amid the flurry of calls and meetings, some officials in the Arab world were predicting that Iran would conduct a limited response.

One adviser for an Arab country whose officials speak frequently with their Iranian counterparts said they saw Iran as “smart and cautious” and that while they did expect a response to Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination, they thought it would be calibrated to avoid further escalation. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to disrupt diplomatic channels.

Reducing tensions, Jordanian officials said, was important for giving an agreement on a cease-fire in Gaza a chance to be reached.

“It’s not possible to end a war while you’re witnessing an escalation from all the sides,” Mr. Mubaidin, the government communications minister, said.

Vivian Yee and Vivian Nereim contributed reporting.

American and Israeli officials have accused Hamas of intransigence over the deal, and they say Mr. Sinwar has always had the power to veto any proposal, given his leadership of the group in Gaza. Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said the announcement on Tuesday would reinforce that role.

The choice of Mr. Sinwar “only underscores the fact that it is really on him to decide whether to move forward with a cease-fire,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference in Annapolis, Md., late Tuesday, shortly after the appointment was announced. “He has been and remains the primary decider when it comes to concluding a cease-fire.”

At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has taken a hard line, saying last week that he wanted to put more military pressure on Hamas to squeeze more concessions from the group. Families of hostages taken to Gaza on Oct. 7 have accused Mr. Netanyahu of doing too little to reach an agreement that would secure their release.

Around 115 of the people seized as hostages on Oct. 7 remain in Gaza. That number includes the bodies of those who have died or been killed in captivity.

Hamas named Mr. Sinwar to replace Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s previous political leader and a key liaison in the indirect cease-fire talks with Israel. Mr. Haniyeh, who had been living in Qatar, was killed in an explosion in Iran last week that has been widely attributed to Israel.

Mr. Sinwar is a major target of Israel’s military, which has vowed to eliminate him. He has made no public appearances since the start of the war and communicates through intermediaries.

In effect, the naming of Mr. Sinwar to the position amounts to a new phase in the cease-fire talks because it binds Hamas to the leader most identified with the war, one who has previously adopted an inflexible approach, according to Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science from Gaza City.

He said Mr. Sinwar was also more closely aligned with Iran than others in the group’s top leadership. Iran backs Hamas and has threatened retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh.

“He isn’t going to make any more concessions. He knows more than anyone else that the hostages are the only card he has,” said Mr. Abusada, who is now based in Cairo.

Choosing a new leader for the political wing of Hamas would normally take months, and different segments of the group, including prisoners detained in Israel, would be consulted, according to Ibrahim Dalalsha, founder of the Horizon Center for Political Studies and Media Outreach, a research organization based in the West Bank. But Hamas made the decision quickly in order to send a message, he said.

Mr. Dalalsha said Mr. Sinwar cannot effectively oversee Hamas’s entire operation, given that he is in hiding, but the group wanted to signal that it views the war in Gaza, rather than developments in the West Bank, Qatar or elsewhere in the region, as its primary focus. Hamas’s selection of Mr. Sinwar also signals his primacy in the cease-fire talks.

“It tells Israel in a defiant way that they are negotiating with Sinwar, so it’s blunt,” he said.

But Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued that while the new role for Mr. Sinwar was symbolically important for Hamas, it would make little difference in the negotiations, which he said have been deadlocked largely over arrangements for policing a strip of land between Gaza and Egypt.

Waiting for Mr. Sinwar’s approval has often slowed cease-fire negotiations. It has sometimes taken a day to get a message to him and another day to receive a response.

Mr. Sinwar has sometimes disagreed with Hamas leaders outside Gaza and is seen as less ready to concede ground to the Israeli negotiators, in part because he knows that he is likely to be killed whether or not the war ends, analysts say. The death of Mr. Haniyeh, in an explosion in Tehran last week, lends credence to this perception — as has Israel’s response.

Israeli officials have vowed to kill Mr. Sinwar in retaliation for his work in planning the Oct. 7 attack, which they say killed about 1,200 people and led to roughly 250 being taken back to Gaza as hostages. The military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, reiterated that stance on Tuesday.

“There is only one place for him, and that is alongside Muhammad Deif and all of the other terrorists who are responsible for Oct. 7,” he said, referring to another Hamas leader, whom Israel says it killed in an airstrike in July. “That is the only place we are preparing for him.”

Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.

Mr. Sinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled its home, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. This displacement deeply influenced his decision to join Hamas in the 1980s.

Mr. Sinwar had been recruited by Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who made him chief of an internal security unit known as Al Majd. His job was to find and punish those suspected of violating Islamic morality laws or cooperating with the Israeli occupiers, a position that eventually landed him in trouble with Israeli authorities.

A crucible

Mr. Sinwar was imprisoned in 1988 for murdering four Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records. He spent more than two decades in prison in Israel, where he learned Hebrew and developed an understanding of Israeli culture and society.

While incarcerated, Mr. Sinwar took advantage of an online university program and devoured Israeli news. He translated into Arabic tens of thousands of pages of contraband Hebrew-language autobiographies written by the former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet.

Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist who treated Mr. Sinwar when he was in custody and who developed a relationship with him, said Mr. Sinwar had surreptitiously shared the translated pages so that inmates could study the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. Mr. Sinwar liked to call himself a “specialist in the Jewish people’s history,” Dr. Bitton said.

The two men spoke regularly. “The conversations with Sinwar were not personal or emotional,” Dr. Bitton said. “They were only about Hamas.”

Mr. Sinwar knew the Quran by heart, and he coolly laid out his organization’s governing doctrines, Dr. Bitton said, describing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations as religious and not political.

During his time in prison, Mr. Sinwar also wrote a novel called “The Thorn and the Carnation,” a coming-of-age story that limned his own life: The narrator, a Gazan boy named Ahmed, emerges from hiding during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to a life under Israeli occupation, which causes the “chests of youth to boil like a cauldron.” In retaliation, Ahmed’s friends and family attack the occupiers and those who collaborate with the enemy. Woven throughout the book is the theme of the unending sacrifice demanded by the resistance.

Mr. Sinwar once told an Italian journalist that prison is a crucible. “Prison builds you,” he said, adding that it gave him time to reflect on what he believed in and the price he would be willing to pay for it.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sinwar tried to escape from custody several times, once digging a hole in his cell floor in hopes of tunneling under the prison and exiting through the visitor center. And he found ways to plot against Israel with Hamas leaders on the outside, managing to smuggle cellphones into the prison and use lawyers and visitors to ferry messages out, including about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners.

These activities foreshadowed the approach Mr. Sinwar would take years later when planning the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

After prison

When he was released from Israeli prison in a prisoner swap in 2011, Mr. Sinwar said that the capture of Israeli soldiers was, after years of failed negotiations, the proven tactic for freeing Palestinians incarcerated by Israel. “For the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him,” Mr. Sinwar said at the time.

After his release from prison, Mr. Sinwar married and had children. He has said little in public about his family but once remarked that “the first words my son spoke were ‘father,’ ‘mother’ and ‘drone.’”

His hard-line stance suggests that he will not be eager to reach a cease-fire agreement with Israel that would end the fighting in Gaza and lead to the return of about 115 hostages, living and dead, taken from Israel who are still being held in Gaza.

Indeed, Israeli and U.S. intelligence officers have said that Mr. Sinwar’s strategy is to keep the war in Gaza going for as long as it takes to shred Israel’s international reputation and to damage its relationship with its primary ally, the United States.

What does this mean for cease-fire negotiations?

Since the war began, most cease-fire talks have taken place in Egypt and Qatar. But Mr. Sinwar has still played a principal role, even from his hide-out in Gaza. Throughout the talks, Mr. Sinwar’s consent has been required by Hamas’s negotiators before they agree to any concessions, according to officials familiar with the talks.

While Hamas officials have previously insisted that Mr. Sinwar does not have the final say in the group’s decisions, his leadership role in Gaza and his forceful personality have given him outsize importance in how Hamas operates, according to allies and foes alike.

“There’s no decision that can be made without consulting Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended Mr. Sinwar while they were both jailed in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinwar isn’t an ordinary leader. He’s a powerful person and an architect of events,” Mr. al-Awawdeh added.

Waiting for Mr. Sinwar’s approval has often slowed cease-fire negotiations. Israeli strikes have damaged much of Gaza’s communications infrastructure, and it has sometimes taken a day to get a message to Mr. Sinwar and another day to receive a response.

Mr. Sinwar has sometimes disagreed with Hamas leaders outside Gaza and is seen as less ready to concede ground to the Israeli negotiators, in part because he knows that he is likely to be killed whether or not the war ends. The death of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, in an explosion in Tehran last week, lends credence to this perception, as has Israel’s response.

“The appointment of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar as the new leader of Hamas, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, is yet another compelling reason to swiftly eliminate him and wipe this vile organization off the face of the earth,” Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, said in a post on social media on Tuesday.

“I thought that after they killed Haniyeh, they had already achieved their goal and that we were closer to the end of the war,” said Nisreen Sabouh, a 37-year-old displaced mother of four.

“But now, with Sinwar taking over, I don’t believe this will bring the negotiations to a better place,” she said, adding that Mr. Sinwar, who remains the head of Hamas in Gaza, “is tough and everyone knows that.”

The situation in Gaza has continued to worsen as Israeli troops have in recent weeks been returning to parts of Gaza where they said Hamas had regrouped. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, too, has expressed little appetite for compromise, insisting last month on further concessions from Hamas in negotiations.

The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of parts of the northern town of Beit Hanoun on Wednesday, the latest in a series of recent directives that have forced tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to relocate yet again amid ongoing airstrikes and shelling.

Against that backdrop, the change in the leadership of the group that had governed them — often oppressively — was one of the many things some people said they no longer had the luxury to worry about.

“I don’t care who Hamas chooses to lead the movement inside or outside,” said Safaa Oda, a 39-year-old cartoonist from the southern city of Rafah who was displaced to a tent in Khan Younis.

“What we need is a cease-fire,” she said, adding that she believes that Sinwar’s appointment will make the situation in Gaza “worse than ever before.”

Mr. Sinwar, who is believed to be hiding out in tunnels deep beneath Gaza, has been widely seen as trying to keep Hamas’s focus more on military power than on running a civilian government. Hamas leaders have said they want to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts as a way to revive the Palestinian cause.

Husam al-Khateeb, a 45-year-old technician at a local radio station from Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, described Mr. Sinwar as “the most obstinate man I have ever seen.”

Mr. Sinwar was “willing to do anything for the sake of the movement’s survival,” he said. A solution to the conflict and an end to the war would not come from Mr. Sinwar or from inside Gaza, he said, but from Iran and its proxies and the United States.

Ibtihal Shurrab, 29, from Khan Younis, noted the widespread thinking that Mr. Haniyeh was more of a figurehead, while Mr. Sinwar “has the first and last word in everything.”

“It is a scary situation that we live in,” she said. “I hope Sinwar can be the one to end the war, the way he was the one who started it.”

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London.

The government said that the shutdown on Wednesday occurred merely because of extreme heat (the temperature in Tehran was expected to reach 108 on Wednesday) and that the closings of airspace were for military exercises.

But the explanations belie the statements from officials that, as the acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, told state media on Tuesday, “Iran’s response will be definitive and severe.”

While the time and scope of Iran’s response remain unclear — whether it will act alone or in coordination with regional militias like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — the disconnect between the escalating rhetoric and the nonchalance about preparing the public is striking.

“We are in the dark, clinging to news programs on satellite television to figure out what is happening because our officials are not telling us anything,” said Maliheh, 66, a retiree in Tehran. Like others interviewed by telephone for this article, she asked that her surname be withheld for fear of retribution by the authorities.

The government has not issued any directives about what citizens should do if Israel responds with counterstrikes: no temporary shelters; no air raid drills; no warnings to stock up on emergency supplies; and no contingency plans for hospitals in the event of a strike.

“The answer is nothing, zero,” said Ehsan, a 41-year-old business owner in Tehran, when asked if he had heard of any public safety instructions. “The people are an afterthought in our country.”

On social media and in interviews in several cities, Iranians said they were anxious and confused.

“The situation is beyond our tolerance,” said Parisa, 37, an artist in Tehran,. “Many people who never wanted to leave the country are now thinking about immigration. Everyone is sad, aggressive and worried.”

But some others questioned whether the war chatter was justified, doubting that an Israeli counterstrike to whatever Iran decides to do would disrupt daily routines or critical services such as electricity and water.

Mostafa, 36, a computer engineer in Rasht in northwest Iran, criticized the government’s support for militant groups in the region, saying it placed Iran in Israel’s crosshairs. Still, Mostafa said, he did not believe an all-out war was coming. “It will be a remote war and in the form of destroying specific targets,” he said. “So I am not that worried.”

Others said they were already emotionally exhausted from months of tumultuous events, each enough on its own to unnerve a nation, including a terrorist attack claimed by ISIS that killed over 200 people; exchanges of missile strikes with neighboring countries; nearly going to the brink of war with the United States and Israel; and the death of the president and foreign minister in a helicopter crash.

In the past week, the already battered currency plunged anew against the dollar while the stock market tumbled.

“We are just sick and tired of waking up every day to news that someone died, something blew up, the price of the dollar went up, and recently we have to worry about going to war every few months,” said Behdad, 39, of Tehran, who said his import-export business was suffering as a result.

Domestic challenges have also roiled the nation.

A widely circulated video showing female police officers beating two teenage girls and dragging them into a van because they were not wearing the hijab has stirred outrage. Many Iranians are calling for the newly elected reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to fulfill his campaign promise to women and end enforcement of the mandatory hijab. (The video was shot in late June, before the presidential election.)

Lone voices have emerged among political analysts cautioning against heading into a conflict that could quickly spin out of control. Ahmad Zeidabadi, a reformist, said in a post on Telegram that while Israeli analysts and journalists openly debated the various consequences of a confrontation with Iran, nobody in Iran dared offer a similar honest reckoning and risk assessment.

“If someone says just one word — ‘Be careful and be cautious, and don’t jump in the water recklessly’ — he would be ambushed and accused of supporting Zionism and being in cahoots with America," Mr. Zeidabadi wrote.