Orientul Mijlociu

The Houthis are an Iranian-backed, Shiite Muslim armed religious and political movement in Yemen. The Houthis waged a series of bloody insurgencies against the Yemeni government for over a decade, leading to that regime’s overthrow in 2015.

The war between Israel and Hamas makes the two-state solution less viable than ever before. Achieving peace requires political will, compromise, and initiative from the international community.

Amid the escalating attacks launched at Israel from South Lebanon by Hizbullah and other armed organizations there, both Lebanese and Palestinian, many in Lebanon are increasingly concerned that the country will be dragged into a confrontation with Israel.[1] There is also concern about the growing power of the Palestinian militias in the country, and a possible return of the situation that prevailed there in the 1970s and 1980s, when Palestinian organizations were given free rein and dragged the country into a devastating war.

In an article on the Saudi news website Elaph, Kurdish journalist Nizar Jaff accused the Iranian leaders of hypocrisy, saying that they shed crocodile tears over the war in Gaza and deny having any hand in it, when the fact is that they are the force behind Hamas in Gaza, behind Hizbullah in Lebanon and behind the militias in Iraq. Iran, he adds, started the war in Gaza in order to draw attention away from the popular protests within its own borders, while playing on the religious sentiments of the people in the region. These people must understand that the solution to their problems lies in opposing the Iranian regime and overthrowing it, he concluded.

Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Iran and its regional proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, have joined in hostilities against Israel and the U.S. in a multifront maneuver which threatens regional escalation. Iran-backed groups have conducted attacks from Israel’s north, east and south to bolster Hamas’s war aims and detract from the Israeli response to the militant group in Gaza. Below, MEMRI JTTM provides an update on the most recent developments in the multifront threat to Israel.

Recent drone attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria have increased concerns that the war in Israel is spreading. Do Iran-supported groups in Iraq and Yemen present a serious threat to peace or is it just saber-rattling?

The United States carried out two series of strikes in Iraq against Iranian-backed militants, U.S. officials said on Tuesday, in the first publicly reported U.S. responses in Iraq to dozens of recent attacks against troops in the region, Reuters reported.

Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein worries that the conflict in Gaza will drag on and expand beyond Israel’s borders.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said the United States needs to put more pressure on Israel to end the conflict in Gaza, just as Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani urges Shiite militias to stop targeting US military installations in the country amid a surge in such attacks.

Saeid Iravani told Al-Monitor that Saudi Arabia’s normalizing relations with Israel in the foreseeable future has reached an impasse following war in Gaza.

Iran’s United Nations envoy said Tehran is not seeking to instigate any regional wars and would only get involved in the Israel-Hamas conflict if its national security interest is threatened, but he warned that an increased US presence in the region leaves it more exposed to an attack.