News Analysis: A Wider War in the Middle East
The information laid out in this article is gathered through cross-referenced fact finding from independent primary news sources with correspondence capabilities in the Middle East as well as from verified secondary reporting and publicly available documents.
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A Timeline of Key Events since October 7
2023
7 Oct (Palestine) — “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” is executed — a coordinated attack of rocketfire and ground incursions led by Hamas alongside other Palestinian militant groups against the State of Israel that left over a thousand Israelis dead. The assault is the first invasion on Israeli territory since 1948 and the initiating event in the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.
8 October to 19 October (Axis) — Various armed operations against Israel begin following the October 7 attack: Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq each begin their own offensives on the state. Israel begins a counter-operation against Palestine in response to the Hamas-led attack and initiates a total blockade of the Gaza Strip.
13 October to 14 October (Palestine) — Israel calls for the evacuation of Gaza City in preparation for a counteroffensive. Civilians are advised to relocate to Southern Gaza, or to leave Palestine via the Rafah border with Egypt. Egypt agrees to take in the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees.
27 Oct (Palestine) — Israel launches a ground invasion of Gaza.
24 November to 1 December (Palestine) — A temporary truce in the Gaza Strip allows Hamas and Israel to exchange hostages and prisoners.
2024
2 Jan (Palestine) — Saleh al-Arouri, deputy chairman of Hamas’s political wing, is killed in an Israeli airstrike.
12 Jan (Yemen) — The United States and the United Kingdom begin a missile campaign against Houthi facilities in Yemen. The airstrikes are ongoing.
12 Feb (Palestine) — Israel begins a bombing campaign on the Gazan city of Rafah.
29 Feb (Palestine) — Over a hundred are killed, with 760 wounded, after Israeli forces fire on Palestinian civilians awaiting food aid.
1 Apr (Iran) — Israel strikes an Iranian embassy in Syria in an attack widely condemned by international voices.
13 Apr (Axis) — Iran, Hezbollah, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and the Houthis launch a coordinated bombing attack into Israel, which was blocked by a defensive coalition of Israeli, American, British, French, and Jordanian forces. The attack was the first direct attack on Israel made by Iran and the largest attempted drone strike in history.
6 May (Palestine) — Israel launches a military offensive in Rafah.
17 May (Palestine) — The United States opens a floating pier on the coast of Gaza and begins delivering humanitarian aid through the dock.
8 Jun (Palestine) — Israel conducts an armed hostage rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp that is widely described by international groups as a massacre.
3 Jul (Lebanon) — Senior Hezbollah field commander Mohammed Nasser is killed in an Israeli airstrike.
13 Jul (Palestine) — An Israeli airstrike on the Al-Mawasi area of the Gaza Strip leaves over 90 dead and 300 wounded. Israel claims to have killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif during the attack; Hamas denies Deif’s death.
17 Jul (Palestine) — The United States shuts down the Gaza floating pier. Nearly 20 million pounds of aid were delivered during its operations.
31 Jul (Palestine) — Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, is killed. The assassination has been attributed to Israel. Iran and Hezbollah pledge retaliation.
28 August to 6 September (Palestine) — Israel carries out a large-scale military campaign in the West Bank, an operation that many say is the most expansive operation ever conducted in the region.
1 September to 12 September (Palestine) — A three-phase temporary truce in parts of the Gaza Strip is enacted to allow for children to be mass vaccinated against polio.
10 Sep (Palestine) — Israel announces a planned shift in its primary military operations towards its war with Hezbollah, claiming that the military organization of Hamas has been dismantled. Hamas disputes this claim.
17 September to 18 September (Lebanon) — A dozen people are killed, and almost three thousand wounded, after thousands of pagers explode in a coordinated attack widely attributed to Israel. Another wave of explosions targeting walkie-talkies occur the following day that killed 30 and injured several hundred.
23 Sep (Lebanon) — Israel and Hezbollah trade rocket fire in a deadly exchange that leaves over 500 dead and almost two thousand injured.
27 Sep (Lebanon) — Hezbollah leader Hassran Nasrallah is assassinated in an Israeli airstrike.
1 Oct (Lebanon) — Israel begins a ground offensive into Lebanon.
1 Oct (Iran) — Iran launches 181 ballistic missiles at Israel that were largely intercepted by defensive forces from Israel, the United States, and Jordan. Israel and the US pledge retaliation.
2 Oct (Lebanon) — Nine are killed in an Israeli airstrike in central Beirut. Countries have begun to plan citizen evacuations out of Lebanon as Israel continues its incursion into southern Lebanon.
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Next week marks the start of the second year of continuous warfare between the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, which has been recognized internationally as the deadliest war in the history of the decades-spanning conflict between the two regions and which has long sparked international calls for ceasefire.
Politics across the sovereign states of the Middle East have long been tense, but international concerns of a wider war continue to strengthen as key players in the conflicts involving Israel continue to apply intensified military and political pressure on a country that has now found itself fighting wars on multiple fronts. Since the beginning of the war this time last year, the direct political struggle in the Middle East alone has immensely complexified as years-long relationships among the region’s countless paramilitary and insurgent forces, officially-recognized governmental figures, and everyday citizens are tested amidst a unifying campaign against Israel. The region’s links to the wider world is also under tension as world leaders continue to choose sides in a conflict that has found itself at the forefront of international politics.
There are now five primary military organizations in opposition to Israel: the Palestinian militant group Hamas (and its allies in the region), the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthi Movement in Yemen, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (a complex network of independent Iraqi militant groups), and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The groups are unified against the Israeli state as part of the larger Israel-Palestine conflict — all with uniformly stated goals of ending the Israeli occupation in Palestine — but each force has its own struggle and history with the State of Israel.
Hamas (also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement) is currently the largest political and militant organization in Palestine, having governed the Gaza Strip militarily and politically for nearly two decades. (The other territory of the State of Palestine, the West Bank, is civilly governed by the rivaling Fatah party but remains under Israeli administrative control.) The group’s ongoing war against Israel is operated under a united front of a dozen Palestinian armed factions, collectively dubbed the “Palestinian Joint Operations Room.” Israel has repeatedly said that its war with Hamas would end only once the group’s military and political influence has been stripped from the region.
Hezbollah is often considered its own organizational enclave within Lebanon, as its influence is drawn largely from the Shiite population of Lebanon (which accounts for a third of the country’s total population). The group’s political front has over time assimilated into several aspects of the Lebanese government, and its military wing is currently assessed to be stronger than the Lebanese army. (Hezbollah is thought to be the strongest non-state military organization in the world.) It is currently engaged in a separate direct confrontation with Israel known as the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, which began as a spillover of the October 7 attacks and which comes following the group’s contributions to the proxy war between Iran and Israel and to the South Lebanon conflict.
The Houthi Movement (officially Ansar Allah) is a revolutionary group that has claimed political control over the Republic of Yemen since its seizure of power a decade ago. The asserted governance of the group’s executive body is contested by its opposition in the ongoing Yemeni civil war and by international bodies. Much of the Houthis’ participation in the Israel-Hamas War has been through the disrupting of maritime traffic across the Houthi-controlled Red Sea, which has itself drawn further military responses that have brought the sea inlet into a wider ongoing crisis. Iran denies any official support for the Houthis and their side in the country’s civil war, although international forces see the group as an Iranian proxy and the country’s internal conflict as a theater of the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a loosely-defined umbrella group composed of autonomous Iran-backed Shia Islamist militants that conduct offensive operations, largely drone and rocket attacks, against the United States and Israel. It is considered to be an independently-operating offshoot of the Iraqi paramilitary network Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which itself has been recognized by the Iraqi government as a self-governed force that operates alongside official Iraqi security forces. The Islamic Resistance is composed of the PMF’s pro-Iran component militias and which has at times acted against the wider network’s political interests. The group has not experienced significant engagements thus far but has pledged support for Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis in their respective conflicts with Israel and the United States.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is the only internationally-recognized government in direct confrontation with Israel surrounding the Israel-Hamas War. Since the end of the Gulf War, the country has engaged in direct hostilities with Israel and does not currently recognize the Israeli state’s legitimacy. The two countries have been engaged in a three decade-long proxy war that has broadly shifted the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. Iran has backed, and continues to back, Islamist paramilitary groups in direct opposition with Israel. Tensions between the two countries escalated to a full conflict early this year as one of the many political repercussions of the Israel-Hamas War.
Many smaller militias backed by Iran have also engaged in skirmishes against Israel in Syria and Iraq.
Each of these groups have their own ongoing crises with Israel and the United States, which have all escalated as the Israel-Hamas war trudges on. And each one is a member organization of the Iranian “Axis of Resistance,” a network of autonomous militant groups across the Middle East ideologically and politically opposed to Israel. (The Syrian Arab Republic is the only other internationally recognized state that is part of the Axis.) Many of the groups in the coalition and who are key players in the Israel-Palestine conflict, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, are internationally designated as terrorist organizations.
Iran has long relied upon the Axis of Resistance as a network of armed proxies to advance its military objectives against the Israeli state—a decades-long effort to keep Tehran at the heart of the Middle Eastern geopolitical landscape whilst avoiding direct retaliations for its work.
The country’s gambit, though, has suffered major setbacks as the past month saw Israel systematically tear down the proxy network piece by piece. In September, Israel announced that it was shifting its primary efforts from its war against Hamas (whose military, the Israeli government claimed, was organizationally and infrastructurally dismantled) to its armed engagement against Hezbollah. The Israeli state followed through in the ensuing weeks, beginning a focused campaign that has led to the assassination of the top Hezbollah commander and an ongoing ground offensive in Lebanon.
And Iran itself, now, is facing heat from Tel Aviv: Israel has pledged to retaliate in full following last week’s attempted missile strike against the country. (The Islamic Republic said that its attempted attack was made in response to Israel’s continuing assault on the Iran-backed Hezbollah.) Without the buffer afforded to Iran by its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, the country is at risk of being plunged into direct warfare with the Israeli State — and bringing the rest of the Middle East with it.
The United States has asked Israel to avoid, should it strike back, from hitting Iran’s nuclear sites, but has also said that it would impose its own sanctions in response to the attack.
Wednesday night was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. As the Israeli state moves to celebrate the first of the High Holy Days in the fallout of the Iranian attack, and as both countries have both vowed severe and lasting consequences to the other’s attacks, it is more uncertain than ever if the world may still evade the triggering of a wider war in the Middle East.