His analysis is that Israel’s defenses have been challenged and even violated. That’s why he highlighted new threats against Israel this week.

Re-reporting what Palestinian factions are saying in Gaza, Iran’s Tasnim news agency said Palestinian groups in Gaza are “ready at any time” to engage with Israel. “The nation and the Palestinian resistance heroically confronted the enemy in the battle of the ‘Sword of Quds’, and with unity, empathy and various means of resistance were able to smear the enemy’s muzzle and its sinister plans in the city of Quds to impose new realities by displacing, pursuing and arresting Palestinians, and overcoming the temporal and spatial division of the al-Aqsa mosque.

Under the rhetoric of “smear the enemy’s muzzle,” meaning something like “We gave Israel a black eye,” Iran believes Israel overestimated its capabilities in May. The argument is that while Israel believed it could achieve a quick and relatively easy defeat of Hamas, the terrorist group surprised Israel and largely dictated the pace of the war. When there were clashes in Israeli towns between Arabs and Jews, it made Hamas think it could have tapped into something deeper.

The bigger question for Iran and its allies in Iraq and Lebanon is whether it thinks the time has come to unleash a new crisis. Lebanon has its own political crisis. In Iran, there is a presidential election. Egypt has worked to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza and would be upset to see its work canceled.

Given the rapprochement between Riyadh and Doha, the transfer of Qatari money to calm the situation in Gaza can be seen as a step in the direction of Cairo and Riyadh rather than against them.

Iran may want destabilization and sing the praises of Hamas and whitewash statements from Gaza to assert its willingness to challenge Israel. But he will have to carefully calculate how to do this.