Even after Hezbollah failed, but claims to have avenged the killing of its second in command, the Mideast is on edge. Which of Iran’s “ring of fire” proxies, or the Islamic Republic itself, will attack Israel next?

After declaring a state of emergency for a few hours, the Israel Defense Force’s home front command on Sunday lifted most urgent measures, including a brief closure of Ben Gurion international airport. Yet Iran’s proxy armies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria keep threatening. To avert a region-wide war, America is maintaining its firepower in the Mideast.  

“The threat of an attack on Israel by Iran and its affiliates still exists,” the Pentagon spokesman, Major General Patrick Ryder, said Monday. A day earlier Defense Secretary Austin ordered two strike carrier groups, led by United States Ships Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, to lurk in the region.   

One bet in the region is that the Houthis will first follow up on the Sunday Hezbollah assault. “I assume they will attempt an attack, and not only on orders from Iran, but also for their own reasons,” a Yemen researcher at the Open University in Israel, Inbal Nissim-Louvton, tells the Sun.

The Yemen-based Houthis have vowed to avenge a July 20 IDF strike that scorched its top port at Hodeidah. The Islamic Republic also says it would escalate the war on Israel, stressing that assaults could come from Iran itself, one of the proxy armies it calls the Axis of Resistance, or all of the above.   

Tehran will “definitely respond” to the killing on July 30 of Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, the commander of the Iranian military, Major General Mohammad Bahgeri, said Monday. “The Islamic Republic will decide on its own for revenge, and the Axis of Resistance will also act separately in this regard, as we saw on Sunday.”

The IDF destroyed on Sunday a large number of Hezbollah rocket launchers. It acted on intelligence that the Lebanon-based terrorist group was planning a major attack to retaliate the July 30 killing of its second in command, Fuad Shukr.

“Since the start of the war we haven’t heard such noisy booms” from across the border, the founder of a northern Israel-based Alma research center, Sarit Zehavi, tells the Sun. “The earth literally shook. The IDF hit Hezbollah structures, including deeply-dug rocket launchers, all along the border, and further to the north.” 

Yet, she added, “it remains to be seen” if the preemptive strike would suffice to deter Hezbollah. On a visit to the Lebanese border Monday, the IDF chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said that the mission, “to return residents to the north,” is yet to be completed. Shortly after, Hezbollah intensified rocket and drone attacks on border communities.

While the IDF avoided hitting targets inside southern Lebanese villages on Sunday, Hezbollah “pretends to target military targets, but is using inaccurate weapons that mostly hit civilian areas,” Ms. Zehavi says. Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, is boasting success after launching more than 300 rockets on northern Israel Sunday.

Mr. Nasrallah is widely ridiculed across the region, where jokes abound about how Hezbollah’s most glaring success was a hit on a chicken coop in northern Israel. Yet, he seems to ignore the ridicule. The “first stage” of the revenge on Israel has been completed, he said Sunday. Iran, too, seems to defer direct attack for a future date, if at all. 

The Houthis, on the other hand, might be spoiling for a fight. “We reaffirm once again that the Yemeni response is definitely coming,” the terror group said in a statement Monday, referring to the Israeli hit on Hodeidah. The IDF strike was a response to a Houthi missile that killed a man near the American consulate at Tel Aviv.  

“The Houthis might do something with or without Iran’s approval,” Ms. Nissim-Louvton says. “They claim to have new capabilities that would surprise the enemy. They also have small affiliated groups in Syria and Iraq” that could strike Israel from closer proximity than Yemen. 

The Houthis, Ms. Nissim-Louvton says, have long attacked commercial vessels in the Red Sea. These strikes are now amped-up, hitting what they claim to be ships that are somehow linked to Israel.

As yet, neither Israel nor America found a way to end this assault on the global freedom of navigation. “Instead of seeing it as a global challenge,” Ms. Nissim-Louvton says, “the world has adopted the Houthi narrative.”

The Houthis claim they are fighting Israel to aid Hamas in Gaza. In fact, Hamas launched an unprovoked attack against Israel October 7, Hezbollah joined on October 8, as did the Houthis shortly after. All three are Iran-backed.

American diplomats say that talks at Cairo Monday could end the Gaza war, and with it ease all Mideast tensions. Tehran and its allies, however, may have other plans.