Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

It’s widely expected that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, could sign a heavily-previewed Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement at the summit, signaling they’ll deepen cooperation in a number of areas, and potentially on a military level. “Expect to see a commitment to defense cooperation (likely vaguely worded and deliberately opaque) and a script that claims Russian-Iranian alignment against a Western ‘agenda of aggression’,” Burcu Ozcelik, senior research fellow for Middle East security within the International Security department at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told CNBC in emailed comments.

As Darya Dolzikova, a research fellow in proliferation and nuclear policy at the Royal United Services Institute in London said, this political decision is as critical as Iran’s technical capabilities. “The risk that you run is that, if Iran’s not made that decision to weaponize, yet, if you do militarily attack those facilities, you might actually push Iran towards a decision to weaponize, because it decides that that’s what it needs,” Dolzikova said. “It needs that nuclear deterrent to keep itself safe.”

H A Hellyer, a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies and scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dismissed US talks of a “day after” in Gaza as “laughable”. “There is no day after,” said Hellyer. “We all need to recognise that the Israelis have made it very clear that they’re not leaving Gaza, that the military presence will remain, so the idea of any sort of political horizon here is just very, very unrealistic.”