Parsing issue with HTML tag vs. link precedence

I’m trying to render a Markdown diff in in which a change like this happens:

Here is a link -> Here is a [link](destination)

I’d like to indicate that the brackets and the destination were newly added. I tried to highlight that like this:

Here is a <span class="green">[</span>link<span class="green">](destination)</span>

However, this parses in a way that seems wrong to me. The link takes precedence, resulting in it actually rendering a link. This kind of throws a wrench in my plans to render Markdown diffs, is it possible the spec could address this? (Or is there some workaround?)

Here’s a link to the dingus where you can see what I mean.