A Year of War in the Middle East

The human suffering has been unspeakable, the military balance has shifted, the war continues to expand—but one year after Hamas struck Israel, a solution remains as distant as it was a year ago.

Photograph Yahya Hassouna, AFP

A year ago today, the world witnessed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. A region that had enjoyed a modicum of security and stability was suddenly set aflame. One year later, war has engulfed much of the Middle East.

In the past week alone,

• Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon and conducted air strikes throughout the country, including in residential areas in Beirut.

• Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles against Israel.

• Hezbollah continued its daily barrage of rockets against northern Israel.

• Iraqi militias launched drone attacks against Israel in the Golan.

• The United States struck Houthi missile and other sites in Yemen.

The cost of 366 days of unrelenting warfare is impossible to measure—it has come in lives lost, families torn asunder and displaced, and futures upended for millions of people throughout the region. Israel suffered more than 1,200 dead and 3,000 wounded, and saw about 250 of its people kidnapped by Hamas on October 7—and more since. 140,000 of its citizens have been displaced for the year. Gaza is effectively destroyed, with over 40,000 people killed, 100,000 wounded, more than 60 percent of buildings razed, over 90 percent of people displaced. The West Bank is becoming a battleground with hundreds killed and thousands wounded. Lebanon is on the verge of total disaster.

Israel did not choose war on October 7. Hamas did. And Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iranian-backed militias chose to join the fight without provocation. But Israel did chose to respond in a way that made regional escalation more likely and death and destruction more inevitable. A year of fighting has left Israel’s economy weakened, its country politically divided, and its global standing in tatters.

But it also inflicted major costs on its enemies. Hamas’s military has been effectively destroyed and its capacity to control life in Gaza has been severely degraded. Hezbollah’s leadership has been decapitated and its missile and rocket stocks have been reduced by half. Its fighters are disorganized and its hold on Lebanon is more uncertain than in years. Iran has seen its proxies depleted—and its deterrent against a direct Israeli strike weakened. Its missile forces have proved wanting—with large numbers failing at or immediately after launch and many others being intercepted by Israeli and US defenses.

A Warning Unheeded

After October 7, Israel united around a singular objective: to eliminate the threats to its security once and for all through the use of superior intelligence and firepower. Given what happened that day—the rapes and murders, the killing of babies and elderly, the kidnapping of young and old, male and female, soldier and civilian, Israeli and non-Israeli, even Jew and Arab—that response was not only to be expected, but fully justified.

Days after the massacre, President Joe Biden flew to a country in shock to embrace the nation and give it his and America’s full and unconditional support. But Biden arrived at Ben Gurion airport on October 17 not only with the empathy for which he is rightly famous and with a determination to stand with Israel for as long and with everything that it takes. He also came with a warning, born from experience when America had faced its own tragedy two decades earlier:

After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.

He didn’t spell out those mistakes publicly, pointing instead to the need not to be driven by anger and rage. “It requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.”

But the mistakes America had made in its response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were clear. They didn’t need to be spelled out. One mistake was going to war without planning for what comes after—an error the Bush administration made not just once in Afghanistan, but again in Iraq. Another was to believe that early success could be replicated elsewhere—a form of hubris that ultimately proved the undoing of America in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and throughout much of the Middle East.

Unfortunately for Israel and the region, the Israeli government led by Benyamin Netanyahu was not interested in learning from America’s mistakes or listening to warnings from its best friend in America. To the contrary. The last year has seen Israel make the same mistakes the United State made 20 years earlier—with equally disastrous results.

Israel’s failure to plan for the day after in Gaza has meant that chaos and despair—not to mention death, destruction, disease, and famine—has become the defining feature of this strip of land along the Mediterranean where more than 2 million Palestinians continue to live in misery. Hamas may no longer control the enclave as it did before—but it still has the capacity to disrupt Israeli forces, regain control of areas the IDF has left (whence the need to return again and again to the same places), and prevent the emergence of an alternative governing structure. With Israel unwilling to re-occupy the strip and the world unwilling to help until a durable ceasefire is in place, the future in Gaza appears to be a choice between Hamas and chaos. So far, Israel has opted for chaos—with the resulting suffering and despair.

The main reason for ignoring the long-term future in Gaza is that Israel sees a need to deal with a greater threat to its North and East. Just as the Bush administration followed its successful operation to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan by turning to what many officials saw as the greater threat in Iraq, so the Netanyahu government turned its attention towards Hezbollah and Iran. Having prepared for more than a decade to fight these foes, the IDF and Mossad have demonstrated striking success in crippling Hezbollah and surprising Tehran. Its deep penetration of Hezbollah’s leadership cadre and daring conversion of ordinary communication devices into IEDs has dealt a crippling blow to its enemy in the North.

But as so often in war, early successes create a sense of possibility—of hubris, really—that these can be replicated elsewhere. The intelligence penetrations and precision strikes against top leaders were therefore soon followed by a ground incursion of Lebanon—despite the fact that previous invasions of the country ended badly for Israel (not to mention the people of Lebanon). Though still limited in geography, ground wars like these have a way of expanding in both scale and scope, with the pressure to “go all the way” often irresistible—especially when the early going is easier than expected. The temptation for Israel will be all too real.

Even as Israel has expanded the war to the north, its leaders are debating whether this is the time to go after the very head of the beast, which is located in Tehran rather than Rafah or Beirut. Iran’s missile strike may have been ineffective (although dozens of missiles likely did penetrate Israeli defenses), but the launch of nearly 200 missiles gives Tel Aviv a reasonable justification for striking back—against Iran’s oil facilities, its underground nuclear program, or even the leadership itself.

Whether Israel does strike back—and whether it does so against strategic targets like these—remains to be seen. But the hubris that comes from success, and the overpowering belief that military might is the only way to vanquish one’s enemies that has so powerfully penetrated Israeli thinking (as it did America’s two decades ago), suggests that further escalation is far more likely than not.

Ultimately, though, this war will not end in “total victory” for any side. No matter how many Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, and even Iranian cadres and leaders are killed, without addressing the underlying political causes of the conflict, true victory is impossible. If anything should teach Israel that lesson, it surely is the reality of America’s defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq.