How Hamas’s attack on Israel could spark a wider Mideast war

Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia fired dozens of rockets and shells into Israeli positions on Sunday, sparking fears of a wider, and coordinated, war engulfing the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s military command said its operations were in support of the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, which launched an unprecedented surprise attack into southern Israel on Saturday, which has claimed the lives of some 700 Israelis as of Sunday. The Israel Defense Forces have begun retaliatory strikes against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and also struck back against Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon.

“Our history, our guns and our rockets are with you,” a senior Hezbollah official, Hashem Safieddine, said at a rally for Hamas in east Beirut on Sunday. Hezbollah said in a statement that its firing of a large cache of shells and rockets was to show its solidarity with the “Palestinian resistance.”

Hamas’s attack and deep incursion into Israeli towns in the south is being called Israel’s 9/11. And Israeli and U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that the conflict Hamas started risks expanding into a broader regional war, which could bring in Iran and its other proxies. This is especially the case as Israel is signaling it will launch a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip in the coming days and weeks to target Hamas fighters and reclaim kidnapped Israelis – an operation that could cause thousands of Palestinian deaths.

Iran and its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent decades arming and funding Hezbollah and Palestinian and Syrian militias in a maneuver that could effectively encircle Israel. This strategy has been remarkably successful, and Israel faces today the possibility of facing a three- or four-front war with Tehran’s regional allies. These include Hamas from the Gaza Strip; Hezbollah from south Lebanon and Syria’s border with Israel; and Palestinian militants, such as Islamic Jihad, operating out of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Concerns about this broader conflict are tied into the perceived motivations behind Hamas’s weekend attack. The Palestinian militant group and Iran have both voiced growing concern about accelerating negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, backed by the U.S., to normalize diplomatic relations between the historic foes. Such an agreement would radically alter the power dynamic of the Middle East, and align Israel, the U.S. and most Arab states against Iran and its proxies. American and Israeli officials said Hamas’s attack may have been specifically focused on derailing this diplomatic track by dragging Israel into war with the Palestinians.

Israeli and American officials said this weekend that they’re vetting past intelligence to see if Iran may have been operationally involved in planning the Saturday attack. Iran’s leadership has praised Hamas’s operation and staged rallies in Tehran in support of it. Hamas leaders have met Iranian leaders in recent weeks, both in Lebanon and Tehran, for meetings in which the surprise attack could have been planned.

A Hamas leader last week in Tehran specifically cited the threat posed by Israeli-Saudi normalization and the need for the Iranian axis to oppose it. Iranian state media quoted Hamas politburo member Osama Hamdan as saying: “Normalization of relations with the Zionist regime is an injustice to all Palestinians. …We must stand and resist such a plan.”

Even if Iran didn’t help plan the attack, current and former Israeli officials said they’re worried Tehran’s allies will come to Hamas’s defense as the ground war into the Gaza Strip gains momentum. “I would give a very high probability to the expansion of this war to other fronts,” said former Israeli ambassador to Washington Michael Oren on the Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast Sunday.

Senior Biden administration officials said this weekend that they’re closely tracking Tehran’s contacts with Hamas and Hezbollah and whether Iran essentially ordered the attack or was instrumental to its preparations. “It’s too early to say whether the state of Iran was directly involved or planning, supporting,” said a senior administration official on Saturday. “We’re going to be looking at that very closely. That said, there’s no doubt Hamas [is] funded, equipped, armed by Iran and others.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reached out to most of the Middle East’s leaders over the weekend to try and guard against any countries trying to instigate more unrest in the Palestinian territories. Leaders of Qatar and Turkey – who give sanctuary to some Hamas leaders – have squarely blamed Israel for this weekend’s terror and the potential for more bloodshed.

“I was on the phone yesterday … to make sure that, first of all, people had heard very clearly what the president said about others in other places not taking advantage of the situation … so that we don’t have a broadening of this conflict to other places,” Blinken told Face the Nation on Sunday.

Iran watchers are divided over whether Tehran’s Islamist leaders want to see the war in Gaza spread at this stage. Hezbollah is estimated to have 150,000 rockets in south Lebanon that are trained on Israel. This arsenal is seen as a valuable deterrent against Israel striking Iran directly, specifically to degrade its growing nuclear infrastructure. Hezbollah’s entrance into the conflict now would likely significantly reduce this arsenal — and might prompt Israeli attacks on Iran proper.

If Hezbollah does engage, though, the threat to Israel will be substantially larger than anything Hamas maintains. “If the northern front opens, and Hezbollah unleashes its significant arsenal, including advanced weaponry, Israel will be facing a whole new dilemma,” said Enia Krivine of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

• Iran has been expanding over the past decade its regional alliances, known as the Axis or Resistance, to include Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthi army in Yemen and Iraqi and Syrian Shiite militias. There’s a debate over how much autonomy these forces have from Tehran.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was intimately involved in planning the Hamas attack, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials.