Travelling at a speed of more than Mach 8, a Houthi, hypersonic missile has struck the central Israeli city of Lod, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. 

Israeli media reported that the missile disintegrated in the air, while interceptor missiles of the Israeli Iron Dome fell in open areas, causing fires and damage to nearby structures. 

Houthis claim that Israeli missiles and air defences failed to intercept the missile. 

With the Gaza conflict ever intensifying and spilling over into the region, there is already widespread expectation of an Israeli military campaign in Southern Lebanon, against Hezbollah. 

Skirmishes and raids between the two sides have steadily escalated since the start of the Gaza offensive. 

Matters reached a head when the Houthis successfully managed to penetrate multi-layered Israeli air defences earlier this year, with a drone strike over Tel Aviv. 

The Israeli port city of Eilat has also been on the Houthi radar, which seems to have been affected due to the Houthi policy of targetting Israeli ships travelling through the Gulf of Aden. 

In turn, Israel has targeted the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, hitting oil references and electric grids, marking its preference for carrying out crippling sorties against Yemen's infrastructure, besides also starving it of energy, as well as disrupting maritime operations. 

The Russians further report that Houthis have started sending paramilitary troops to Syria, in the strongest indication yet of an Israeli offensive into Lebanon. 

This would shake the power dynamics in Damascus, owing to the role played by Hezbollah in countering ISIL terror in Syria. 

With more Daish personnel being targetted in Iraq by coalition forces in the past week, perhaps the region is witnessing a regrouping of ISIL militia forces in the Levant. 

Therefore, the Russian assessment of Houthi paramilitary forces in Syria would suggest that Hezbollah fighters are preparing to go back to Lebanon, in preparation for war. 

After swarms of Iranian drones hit Israel recently, it appears that the Israelis are preparing for a showdown with Iran. 

Already, it has targetted Iran with its missiles hitting Haniyeh in Tehran, and with preparations underway for a war of annihilation against Hezbollah.

Any use of proxies to destabilize Iran, coupled with intermittent missile strikes, will have a similar effect in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with KP and Baluchistan worst affected due to the fallout of the asymmetrical war, as evidenced through the previous two decades. 

By singling out Hezbollah, therefore, it can be said that Israel is targetting Bashar Al Assad and Syria as its primary targets, and aims to "disrupt the status quo" in the whole of the Levant. 

Years of fighting in Syria have exposed its faultlines to the Israeli Shin Beit, and the country is poised on a knife edge to fragment and balance into multiple power centres, should the war of attrition escalate into full-blown hostilities. 

Alarmingly, biological agents have previously been used in the Syrian "civil war" as the battle with ISIL was popularly referred to in the media. 

Coupled with repeated Russian warnings of the use of a Dirty bomb in the Kursk region by NATO and Ukrainian security forces, the present conflict in the Middle East threatens to engulf Eurasia into a hazardous, radioactive warzone. 

The proxies remain "non-state actors" ensuring that the conflicts will be long-drawn, and the principal factor driving future wars will remain chaos, whereas propoganda and "fake news" will remain the principal tools fuelling this chaos.  

The use of hypersonic missiles by the Houthis marks a dangerous turning point in the Gaza conflict - hypersonic technology only being available to a handful of states, with Russia and China leading the way. 

The distance travelled by the Houthi missile is another stark factor in the attack - a 2040 km distance covered in 11 and a half minutes. 

Pakistan's longest-range missile, the Shaheen III, has a range of 2750 km. 

The attack comes days after the US slapped sanctions on multiple Chinese entities for exporting missile technology to Pakistan for use in its Shaheen III and Ababeel missiles, in contravention of missile technology control regime (MTCR) frameworks.