Orientul Mijlociu

Initial reports of the gruesome massacre carried out by Hamas in Israel on October 7 came with an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. After the last conflagration in Gaza in May 2021, I had written an article with the unfortunate title, ‘Until the next time…’ It was a safe prediction because the scars of the battles of 2008 and 2014 were still raw and the seeds of this escalation were being sown, even as a tenuous ceasefire had started to take hold.

While the world was watching the horrific scenes coming from Israel and Gaza, a comment made by President Biden’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan,[1] a few days before the breakout of hostilities, stands out. It conveys, yet again, some of the current U.S. administration’s dystopic views concerning the changing world order.

Israel’s use of white phosphorus in military operations in Gaza and Lebanon puts civilians at risk of serious and long-term injuries, Human Rights Watch said in releasing a question and answer document on white phosphorus. Human Rights Watch verified videos taken in Lebanon and Gaza on October 10 and 11, 2023, respectively, showing multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border, and interviewed two people who described an attack in Gaza.

“We coordinated with Hezbollah and with Iran and the Axis [of Resistance] before, during and after the battle at the highest level.” — Hamas representative Ahmed Abdulhadi, revealing Hamas coordination before and during the massacre, Newsweek, October 11, 2023.

Washington now sees Hamas the same way as Isis and could offer help killing senior leaders

The US will support Israeli plans for targeted assassinations of senior Hamas officials, a former CIA analyst specialising in the Middle East has told.

The October 7 Hamas cross-border assault on Israel will upend the geopolitics of the region and prompt a reconsideration of many of the assumptions underpinning U.S. and allied policy toward the Middle East.

Although Iran’s role in the attack is contested, its role as orchestrator of an “axis of resistance” will further alienate Tehran in the region, and could cause broader conflict if Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, fully enters the battle against Israel in what would be a second, deadlier phase of the conflict.

The attack demonstrates that U.S., Israeli, and Arab assumptions that the region was headed toward peace and security through normalization agreements and broader de-escalation have proven flawed.
U.S. leaders are likely to return their focus on the Middle East and counterterrorism that characterized U.S. global policy for a decade after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

As the war between Israel and Hamas stretches into its fifth consecutive day, Israel is attempting to keep the conflict contained to prevent further escalation that could bring Hezbollah or Iran into the fight.

Sending a carrier strike group to the Middle East serves as an unequivocal message that the U.S. is firmly behind Israel, yet the so-called “axis of resistance,” led by Iran, responded by issuing its own red lines and threatened to target U.S. interests with missiles and drones if Washington intervenes.

Palestinian Hamas has launched the largest war against Israel in decades, with hundreds already killed. For the first time, militants were able to take control and even hold several Israeli settlements for some time. Previously, only the armies of neighboring states could pose such a serious threat to Israel and only when they acted together. Now, the real war against the Jewish state has been launched not by regular troops from Syria or Egypt, but by militants from the Gaza Strip who have neither aviation nor armored vehicles. How did it happen that Hamas terrorists came to power in the Gaza Strip and the only social ladder for the residents was jihad, and why Israel ignored intelligence warnings about the possibility of a large-scale attack – journalist Yuri Matsarsky understood all this (he previously worked in the Gaza Strip, and now serves in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and his parents, on the contrary, fleeing the war, left Kharkov for Israel and now came under fire from Hamas).

Contrary to popular belief, Hamas is not just flip-flop hijackers with rusty Kalashnikovs and suicide bombers wrapped in cheap explosives. Hamas has been busy for many years with its scientific program, which included developing weapons of mass destruction and electronic intelligence. Iran is actively helping the program, but Gaza already has many of its own engineers, trained at the local university.