Ever since Hamas’ deadly surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, pundits and military analysts alike have been warning the world that the Israel-Hamas conflict might well lead to a catastrophic regional war.
When the strategy Israel chose to pursue its objective of destroying Hamas’ military capability became clear—a conventional invasion depending heavily on supporting arms of air and artillery, that would inevitably be catastrophic for more than two million Palestinian civilians—concerns over a wider war engulfing Israel’s neighbors became acute.
As State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said to reporters in Washington on Jan. 3, “We remain incredibly concerned… about the risk of the fighting spreading into other fronts… This is something that we’ve been intensely focused on.”
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Few officials, American or otherwise, seem ready to admit it, but the wider war in the Middle East has already arrived.
The Israelis, more than the other players, seem to have a visceral understanding that this is very much the case. As early as Dec. 26, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was in a multi-front war, coming under attack from seven theaters. “This is the end of the era of limited conflicts,” Gallant told reporters in a briefing. “We are facing a new security era in which there may be a real threat to all arenas at the same time… We operated for years under the assumption that limited conflicts could be managed, but that is a phenomenon that is disappearing. Today, there is a noticeable phenomenon of the convergence of the arenas.”
He identified Iran as the driving force behind the trouble.
Indeed, the Machiavellian genius of Hamas’ brazen attack was such that it provoked exactly the response from Israel its leaders had hoped for: an invasion that destroys far more civilians than Hamas fighters, as well as Israel’s moral high ground in world opinion.
Israeli bombs and shells have killed more than 22,000 human beings. Fewer than a quarter of them likely have any connection to Hamas. On top of this, there is a widespread consensus among counterterrorism experts that Israel’s goal is unrealistic and its strategy counterproductive. Its operations have produced outrage in the Islamic world, and deep and troubling concerns in Washington—so much so that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been ratcheting up the pressure behind the scenes to put an end to highly kinetic Israeli military operations in favor of a slower, protracted effort conducted by IDF special forces.
The sun rises above the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza on Jan. 1, 2024.
AFP/Getty ImagesAlong the Lebanese front, more than 150,000 people have been forced by the fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to leave their homes, and the fighting by all accounts appears to be intensifying.
In Yemen, Houthi rebels—like Hezbollah and Hamas, supported and advised by Iran—have been attacking international shipping in the Red Sea. One-third of the world’s container traffic passes through this waterway, but not any longer. Major shipping companies have rerouted their ships along a much longer and more expensive route around the Horn of Africa.
A U.S.-Navy-led flotilla has been attacking Houthi fast boats when they attempt hostile action against civilian shipping. On Dec. 31, Navy helicopters fired rockets on three Houthi ships, sinking three and killing 10 fighters. On the first day of the new year, Tehran announced that it was deploying its own naval force into Red Sea waters, significantly heightening the fear over a direct clash between the U.S. and Iranian navies.
Meanwhile, Iraq, where roughly 2,500 U.S. troops are stationed, is yet one more volatile front where Iranian proxy forces have conducted more than 100 rocket and drone attacks against American positions, and wounded several dozen U.S. service members. On Jan. 4, U.S. Special Operations Forces fired a missile that killed Abu Taqawa, a senior Iranian security official working with a pro-Iranian Iraqi militia responsible for a number of those attacks.
Smoke billows from an Israeli bombardment in the Khiyam plains near the border with Israel in southern Lebanon on Jan. 8, 2024.
Rabih Daher/AFP via Getty ImagesIncreasingly, it appears the Israeli-Hamas war is only one very complicated and intractable part of a wider conflict over the shape and trajectory of Middle East geopolitics—with the United States and Iran as the leading participants.
The Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iraqi militants have been waging war with the abundant support and advice of Iran’s notorious Quds Force—a relatively small unit within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that plans and orchestrates operations against Israeli and American interests.
Tehran, for its part, claims not to want a wider war, but it doesn’t act like it. Emboldened by its new allies, Russia and the People’s Republic of China, it seems more than ready to test American and Israeli resolve. The strategic momentum in the region seems to lean in the direction of more fighting and less talking.
If all of this interrelated conflict and violence doesn’t constitute the first phase of a major regional war, what would?
The Middle East is awash in violence that is the direct result of Hamas’ immensely destabilizing attack.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has triggered yet another phase of what historian David Crist calls the “Twilight War” between the United States and its allies and Iran and its partners.
Ironically, Iran experienced its worst suicide bombing incident since the founding of the Republic when two ISIS operatives blew themselves up at a memorial service in Kerman, Iraq, on Jan. 3 for the assassinated former commander of Quds, Qasem Soleimani. This officer, widely recognized as a master irregular strategist, was killed by a U.S. drone strike three years ago. This week’s attack killed 84 people.
The Twilight War has been an on-again, off-again conflict that very clearly is rising in intensity.
Back in 1988, the U.S. Navy destroyed five Iranian ships and killed more than 50 sailors in a one-day battle known as Operation Praying Mantis, which was brought on when Iran mined the Persian Gulf waters to halt commercial shipping. Iran was behind many attacks against American forces during the Iraq War, and has waged a 45-year largely successful political warfare campaign against the United States and Israel.
It was not for no reason that in 2012, the head of U.S. Central Command, Marine General James Mattis remarked that he had three countries constantly on his mind: “Iran, Iran, Iran.” It seems entirely probable that his current successor, Army General Erik Kurilla, has his mind firmly fixed on Iran’s machinations this very day, as does his commander in chief in the White House.
