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The assassination inside Iran of the political leader of Hamas - an attack that Iranian and Gaza officials have blamed on Israel - risks turning a decades-old shadow war between Tehran and Tel Aviv into full-scale open conflict.

Adding to the stakes is the fact that the operation happened while Ismail Haniyeh was in Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian president - a significant security failure.

It also came just hours after Israel on Tuesday launched - and publicly declared what it had done - an airstrike against a top commander of another Iran-linked militant group, Hezbollah, in a suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut, a second flashpoint.

By contrast, the Israeli authorities have stayed silent about the killing in a strike of the even higher-profile Hamas target.

Follow live updates on Israel-Hamas war

But this is in keeping with a long-standing tactic of deniable warfare conducted by the Israeli military and security services against Iran and its proxies.

Hamas, a militant group in Gaza that is backed by Iran, said in a statement its political leader was killed during a "raid" on his residence in the Iranian capital.

Iran threatens 'harsh and painful response'

Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has already vowed a "harsh and painful response".

Aware of the scale of destruction that all-out fighting would inflict on the Middle East, Iran and Israel had in the past conducted murky assassinations, cyber attacks, sabotage and other forms of hostilities against each other that deliberately lie under the threshold of what could be considered a declaration of war.

As part of this strategy, Tehran built a network of proxy forces that it uses to build influence in the region and attack Israel and its allies.

These proxies include Hamas in Gaza, the much larger Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, and the Houthi militia in Yemen as well as militias in Iraq and Syria.

For Israel, its military has repeatedly struck targets linked to Iran across the region - often not publicly claiming responsibility - as well as carrying out assassinations such as the killing in November 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist.

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However, the level of direct violence that either side is willing to risk against the other has risen significantly in the wake of the 7 October terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel and the war by Israeli forces that followed inside Gaza, with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, the majority of them civilians.

A key escalation was on 1 April when Israel chose - though it has never publicly confirmed involvement - to strike an Iranian consulate building in the Syrian capital Damascus, killing members of the IRGC, including a senior commander of the elite Quds force.

The decision to hit such a sensitive target prompted Tehran to retaliate with unprecedented force.

On 13 April, the Iranian military overtly launched more than 300 missiles and drones from Iran towards Israel.

Israeli air defences, coupled with support from the US armed forces, the UK's Royal Air Force and others, managed to blast the overwhelming majority of the projectiles out of the AG百家乐在线官网, defending Israel from suffering significant harm.

New threshold of hostility

But the scale and nature of the attack - with no attempt to hide what was happening - created a new threshold of hostility that could well have triggered full-scale war, particularly if a larger number of munitions had penetrated Israel's defences.

At the time, the Israeli authorities were urged by their allies to "take the win" and resist escalating the crisis further.

Israel did respond to maintain an element of deterrence, because the need to be strong and deter the threat of attack is a fundamental goal in either side's military activity and posture.

However, the subsequent Israeli strike on 19 April - apparently using drones - against a sensitive military site in Isfahan was limited in nature, allowing Israel to point to a response and Iran - in public at least - to brush off the impact of the attack.

This show of restraint from both sides enabled their hostilities to sink back into the shadows but the fact that new lines had been crossed - with Israel's attack on the Iranian consular building and Iran's direct firing of missiles in return - means that future crises, such as now, could escalate more easily and rapidly into all-out war.

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It makes the question of how Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah choose to retaliate to this week's attacks pivotal.

A further escalation that requires an even larger response by Israel could ignite the entire region and make a return to shadow fighting impossible.