Israel appears to have targeted Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in with a massive strike on one section of a neighborhood in the Beirut suburbs. The destroyed buildings were rumored to sit atop a reinforced bunker used by the Iran-backed terror group’s top command.

The scale of the destruction suggests that whoever was in that bunker has been killed, but we’ve got no confirmation one way or the other regarding Nasrallah’s presence. So we’ll wait.

All we know right now is that the Israelis aren’t messing around.

Nasrallah, who was born in Beirut 64 years ago, became Hezbollah’s leader when his predecessor, Abbas al-Musawi, was killed in a targeted assassination in the 1990s. Israel seems to believe it’s high time the two men are reunited.

If Nasrallah is dead, Hezbollah as an organization is crippled, because Nasrallah’s deputies have also been sent to meet Musawi in waves leading up to this strike. That does not mean Hezbollah poses no threat; but it does mean it would have a long road to recovery. We’ll know soon enough.

Conventional wisdom has also taken a hit from Israel’s ongoing assassinations of high-level Hezbollah and Hamas officials, as well as from its pager plot and its drumming of Hamas rank-and-file. The popular belief was that since Iran is the head of the snake, it cannot be defeated by beating up its proxies around the region. The corollary to this was an assumption that, therefore, it wasn’t worth the price to destroy its proxies.

But an article in the Telegraph this week made a subtle counterargument. The paper reported that Hezbollah has been practically begging Iran to attack Israel directly to display a serious response to Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran this summer. Hezbollah felt itself getting pushed to the limits of its capability to keep pace with the IDF on its own.

But Iran said no. According to the Telegraph: “[Iranian President Masoud] Pezeshkian told reporters on Monday that Israel was attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to provoke a wider regional war, but stressed that Iran did not want to fall into this ‘trap’.”

So what was happening was this: Iran was using Hezbollah to draw Israeli attacks on Hezbollah’s stronghold in South Lebanon, while claiming Israel was attacking Hezbollah to provoke Iran. For the Iranian president to say this out loud was essentially an admission that Tehran won’t sacrifice itself to save Hezbollah or to avenge Hamas’s honor.

To be clear, there are limits to this reticence. Iran has been using its proxies in four different countries to attack Israeli and American targets, and Iran did strike at Israel this summer directly with hundreds of missiles and drones.

Hamas and Hezbollah (and the Houthis and groups in Iraq) are extensions of Iranian force around the Middle East. The assumption was that Iran would intervene before letting any of its proxies get fully destroyed. But what if that’s not the case? It’s not clear at all that Iranian self-preservation extends to those groups, or beyond Iran’s borders at all.

The idea that it’s impossible to, say, destroy Hamas because “you can’t kill an idea” was always preposterous. Hamas can be destroyed. But it’s becoming clearer that there is no reason not to destroy Hamas, because destroying Hamas won’t trigger a wider war with Iran. And Hezbollah is clearly getting worried that they, too, might be considered expendable by the regime.

The answer to this one isn’t clear yet. Iran does not have the same investment in and connection to Hamas that it has with Hezbollah, which is a key arm of its global expansionist militaries. But terror groups don’t last forever, and this one is now into its fifth decade on earth.

That doesn’t mean Iran won’t fight to hold onto its control over territory in Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and Yemen. But no proxy is more important than its principal.

A path to a wider victory is clear: maximum pressure on Iran, along with strong regional alliances, can defeat Tehran in the long run. The West just has to decide if it wants that victory.