The Middle East is now a pressure cooker that threatens to explode. The war in Gaza continues, there is war tension on the border between Lebanon and Israel, there are attacks in Syria and Iraq, and an old ghost also returns: the Islamic State.

The Islamist organization, of Sunni confession, claimed responsibility this Thursday for the attacks in Kerman, in southeastern Iran, which caused at least 84 deaths during events marking the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, influential commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The terrorist group, also known by the acronym ISIS or Daesh, attacks the main Shiite regional power, and thus once again puts on the regional stage the sectarian violence that in the past led to hostilities between Tehran and the Islamic State. The last, an attack by the Islamic State in 2022 in Shiraz, in southern Iran, in which fifteen people died.

The double attack this Wednesday is considered, however, one of the bloodiest that the Islamic Republic has suffered in decades, even since its founding in 1979. And also one of the most symbolic because it occurred near the mausoleum of Soleimani, a general with ancestry in the country killed in 2020 in a United States drone attack. Then the president was Donald Trump.

Islamic State has also confirmed that it was a suicide attack. According to the message transmitted on the social network Telegram, two of its members went towards a large concentration of people and detonated explosive belts so that “the polytheists know that the jihadists are behind them and their projects.”

The first explosion took place around three in the afternoon, local time, just 700 meters from Soleimani’s mausoleum. The second explosion occurred about twenty minutes later, according to Iranian authorities.

Tehran has assured that those responsible will be arrested and that those who support them “will fear the wrath of the Iranian nation.” Whichever way you look at it, the attack adds even more fuel to the war tension that is spreading through the Middle East.

And the fires grow. And you only have to get close to the border between Israel and Lebanon to touch them.

The driver of the bus bound for Kiryat Shmona, the most populated Israeli city on the border with Lebanon, in its far north, turns up and up the volume of the radio when the announcer begins to talk about Hizbullah and its warning of a war “without limits” if Israel escalates the offensive in Lebanon. He sighs and turns off the radio. The leader of the pro-Iran militia, Hasan Nasrallah, already said this on Wednesday and there does not seem to be any news. Although there are: nine Hizbullah militants died this Thursday after an Israeli offensive on the border with Lebanon. It is already the largest escalation of cross-border violence since the Lebanon war broke out in 2006. And Israel slips that “there is a short period of time for diplomatic understandings, which we prefer.”

Yesterday, the death of three pro-Iranian militiamen east of Baghdad, in Iraq, was also confirmed. And his Foreign Ministry says he has the right to take measures “to deter anyone who attempts to harm his territory or security.” He held the United States and its allies responsible for the attack.

And all this when there is concern about the shock wave of the attack last Tuesday in Beirut against the number two of Hamas, Saleh al Aruri, an attack that Lebanon attributes to Israel, but which the Israeli Government, as usual, neither denies nor confirms.

And all this, too, when in Gaza the Israeli offensive continues focused on the center and south of the strip with no ceasefire in sight. The Gaza Ministry of Health also denounces that in the bombings in Khan Younis – where it is believed that the Hamas leaders in the strip may be – and in a coastal area in the south, dozens of people have died who had fled the attacks in other areas. The UN estimates that 1.9 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced by the war. It is 85% of its population.

The leader of Hizbullah, in his highly anticipated speech this Wednesday, in fact insisted that Israel is being fought in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Gaza and Yemen. Each one separately, without a central command, and he cited the Houthi rebels who attack in the Red Sea.

Only ten days before, the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, detailed these same fronts.

The rope is tightened on all sides.

And in Kiryat Shemona, in the middle of a ghost city (like all on the border with Lebanon and on the border with Gaza), its mayor, Avichai Stern, explains to La Vanguardia that for him the difference is in October 7. That since that day everything has changed. That the threat of projectiles was already there and that they are used to it. That the area has seen other massacres in the past and his grandfather and aunt are among the victims of that past and that they continued. But now if people do not return it is because there is “fear” of other incursions like that of Hamas from Gaza. In his case, from the Hizbullah militiamen from the mountain that borders his city and where artillery fire is heard from time to time.

This precipitates everything, expresses it directly, with hardly any time to catch a breath.

There have been more than 90 days of war in Gaza and the fires in the region, in the Middle East, are growing instead of decreasing.