Gaza and Israel-Iran regional war

Israel’s imperative to crush Hamas is likely to have the unintended consequence of destabilizing the region to Tehran’s benefit

Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel represents an inflection point in Iran’s four-decade conflict with Israel.

It is a culmination of the Shiite Islamist regime’s efforts to exploit chronic turmoil within the Arab world, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and entrench itself in the strategic environs of the Jewish state. Israel in its counteroffensive will likely seriously degrade Hamas’ warmaking capabilities.

However, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies on Israel’s northern flank will remain a longer-term threat.

Israeli and U.S. officials maintain that they do not have smoking-gun intelligence on Iran’s involvement in the extremely sophisticated Oct. 7 attack, in which hundreds of Hamas militants targeted several Israeli townships along the Gaza border, killing more than a thousand people and abducting some 150 others.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on October 10 that “Iran is complicit in this attack in a broad sense” but that Washington thus far has no evidence that Tehran was directly involved. Sullivan said the U.S. intelligence community was working hard to determine the precise role of the Islamic republic in the attack.

Earlier, in an October 9 press briefing, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Maj. Nir Dinar said, “Just because you don’t have that evidence doesn’t necessarily mean Iran isn’t behind it.”

He said that Israel had “no evidence or proof” of Iranian involvement, but neither did it have intel to see the attack coming.

In my previous analysis, published less than 48 hours before the attack, I discussed the strategy underpinning Saudi Arabia’s drive to normalize relations with Israel, which in recent weeks had kicked into higher gear. Riyadh has been deeply concerned that Iran and Hamas are eyeing the unfolding meltdown of the Palestinian Authority as an opportunity to expand their influence beyond the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.

Therefore, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was hoping to reach an agreement with the Israelis whereby the West Bank could build up resilience against the Tehran-backed radical Islamist Palestinian movement. From the point of view of Hamas and Iran, Saudi-Israeli diplomacy – which they seem to have torpedoed for the foreseeable future – threatened their own strategic ambitions.

The attack also serves another key Iranian interest. For several years, Tehran had been on the receiving end of covert Israeli intelligence operations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities. Iran suffered another huge blow in January 2020 when a U.S. drone strike killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Soleimani had spent decades building Iran’s proxy network, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, throughout the Arab world. His killing, along with the Israeli attacks and the serious domestic political and economic turmoil in Iran, seriously threatened Tehran’s credibility within its own ecosystem.

The Iranians thus had an imperative to reverse the perception that their regime was in decline. The Oct. 7 attack may have allowed them some measure of success in that regard, but it comes with a major cost. The magnitude of Hamas’ attack has raised the risk of a greater conflict between Iran and Israel. Since the clerical regime established its premier proxy Hezbollah in the early 1980s, the Israelis and the Iranians have been engaged in a long-running indirect conflict in the third-party battlespaces of Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Iraq.

Iran manipulated intra-Arab and Arab-Israeli conflicts, as well as those involving the United States, to position itself as the leader of the so-called axis of resistance.

For the longest time, Tehran’s strategy allowed it to avoid direct conflict with Israel. With the exception of occasional covert operations targeting Iran’s nuclear program, Israel has largely focused on striking Tehran’s proxies.

But after the Oct. 7 attack, this may no longer be possible, especially considering the massive intelligence failure. Israel can no longer be confident that its strategy thus far will be enough to keep a check on Iranian proxies in the Levant, where Israel faces Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian militias that are a much bigger threat than Hamas.

Even now as it moves toward a major ground offensive in Gaza, parts of which it may reoccupy, Israel is deeply concerned about Hezbollah opening a second front.

Hence why the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, said: “We do not want this to broaden, and the idea is for Iran to get that message loud and clear.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is considering whether to have the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower relieve the USS Gerald R. Ford, which has already been deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean, or to keep both carrier strike groups in the area. Washington has to assume that Iran plans to activate

Hezbollah and other assets in Syria to disrupt the Israeli military operation in Gaza. It is unlikely that Iran and Hezbollah would have assisted Hamas in the attack only to leave it alone to deal with Israel’s devastating response.

The scale of the Hamas attack has upended the old Israeli strategy of dealing with rocket fire from Gaza through periodic military operations, which included four wars since 2008. Hamas has demonstrated a breakthrough in tradecraft, and the Israelis cannot allow it to build on its gains.

Their other priority is to rescue the hostages that the group is holding. Neutralizing Hamas, however, likely will involve a much larger military operation than we have seen before. The counteroffensive aimed at regime change in Gaza likely will result in large-scale loss of Palestinian lives, potentially destabilizing the region.

Such an outcome would create the conditions in the region that Iran seeks, and it would exploit them to the maximum. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah gamed this out in considerable detail, especially factoring in the domestic Israeli political divide.

They want the Israelis to strike back massively so as to foment a major international crisis, which could allow them the space to advance. Israel will likely succeed in crippling Hamas’ offensive capabilities but in the process will exacerbate the Palestinian issue.

Meanwhile, Israel has no good solutions for the threat from Iran and its constellation of proxy militias situated along an arc on Israel’s northern frontier.