Israel, Gaza, and Iran’s “Ring of Fire”

Editor’s Note: The ongoing struggle between Israel and Hamas is also a low-level regional war. One of the key questions for the region today, and in the future, is how much coordination there will be between Hamas and other allies of Iran, notably Hezbollah. Hebrew University’s Daniel Sobelman assesses this coordination and argues that it is increasingly part of the regional strategic environment.

Daniel Byman

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As Israel, Hamas, and the Middle East approach the first anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 military-turned-terrorist offensive, the strategic landscape of the region remains in flux. The conflict has already lasted longer than Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, and, with no end in sight, fundamental questions hover over Israel’s ultimate end game and what the war will mean for the long-term strategic standing of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah—and Israel itself.

Already in the first hours and days of the war, the situation necessitated U.S. military and diplomatic mobilization to deter Iran and Hezbollah so that they would not exploit Israel’s vulnerability—this, at a time when Israel was struggling to retake towns and villages temporarily conquered by its least powerful enemy, Hamas. Although the massive U.S. deployment in the region likely impacted Iran’s and Hezbollah’s calculations, reports in the pro-Hezbollah press have reflected the Lebanese group’s impression that Israel may no longer be capable of independently defending itself. In this respect, the war has put on stark display a bleak strategic reality that Israeli leaders have described in recent years: the consolidation of Iran’s regional “ring of fire” around Israel.

This situation predates the Gaza war. For example, the 2018 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Strategy acknowledged that the Iranian “axis” had created “a balance of deterrence” vis-a-vis Israel. In 2021, then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described the predicament that Iran’s strategy had created, stating that “Iran deliberately and persistently surrounded Israel from every direction with a ring of militias and rockets.” The following year, IDF Gen. Tal Kelman, head of the IDF Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate—informally referred to as Israel’s “Iran command,” whose primary task is confronting its regional influence—told Israeli media, “The threat of precision-guided missiles is not at the level of the existential nuclear threat, but it is not far behind it.” IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir followed suit in a 2022 policy report, claiming that Iran’s deployment of “massed precision fires,” coupled with its ability to “launch coordinated strikes from several geographical locations” in the region, “reaches the level of supra-conventional or sub-nuclear threat.”

While Hamas is unlikely to reconstitute militarily in the near term, its astounding offensive and the subsequent multifront conflict that it touched off in the region have rendered these otherwise hypothetical descriptions alarmingly palpable. Nowhere was this more evident than in the words of former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, who recently warned that Iran is “planning a holocaust for us in the next two years,” which it would supposedly execute by simultaneously unleashing “tens of thousands of missiles” from “multiple fronts.” Former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, who temporarily joined the government after the war broke out, has noted that Israel’s “basic deterrence” and image of “invincibility” took a hit on Oct. 7, leading its enemies to conclude that Israel can be defeated. Netanyahu himself has described the ongoing war as “an existential war against a stranglehold of terrorist armies and missiles that Iran would like to tighten around our neck.” Ironically, Iran’s so-called stranglehold, which relies on conventional weapons, came into being on Netanyahu’s watch, during which his primary concern was Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel’s intelligence agencies have excelled at data collection on the regional activities of Iran and its proxy allies in the Levant. But Israel was slow to comprehend the overall potential implications of its perceived weakness, particularly in the eyes of its two most proximate enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas. It also underestimated the evolution of their perception and assessment of its vulnerability, especially given their acquisition of stockpiles of missiles, rockets, and precision-guided weapons. For instance, in August 2022, a person described as Hezbollah’s “senior jihadi commander”—evidently Hezbollah’s top military commander, Fuad Shukr—told Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar that Hezbollah had shifted its focus to “qualitative capabilities capable of destroying the Israeli army and not simply preventing it from achieving its objectives.” This suggests that at least some prominent figures within Hezbollah may have been shifting from Hezbollah’s long-standing classic guerilla concept of winning by not losing, to winning by actually winning.

In the years that preceded the war, and relative to previous phases of its conflict with its non-state adversaries, Israel grew increasingly deterred and coerced by Hezbollah and Hamas. This was distinctly evident in 2023, when Israel, fearing escalation, refrained from removing a tent erected by Hezbollah on Israel’s side of the border. While this assertion is at odds with Israel’s self-image and track record, what ultimately mattered was that this was how the two increasingly coordinated groups had come to perceive Israel.

Importantly, this perception predated the social-political crisis that engulfed Israel after January 2023. In recent years, and especially after 2018, Hamas, following in the conceptual footsteps of Hezbollah, began to act according to Thomas Schelling’s famous maxim that military hardware is most successful “when held in reserve.” Hamas harnessed its capacity to hit central Israel with rocket barrages to deter Israel from exceeding certain thresholds of escalation—namely killing Hamas activists or otherwise responding disproportionately to violent activities on its border—as well as to coerce the Israeli government to grant the Gaza Strip limited but substantial economic concessions.

Like Hamas, Hezbollah had also established deterrence versus Israel, thereby preventing Israeli forces from operating in Lebanon and, from 2019 until recent months, from violating Lebanese airspace. In 2022, against the backdrop of Israel’s weakening deterrent posture, Hezbollah successfully conducted a coercive diplomacy campaign in which it effectively threatened Israel with war if Israel unilaterally extracted natural gas from an offshore field claimed by both Israel and Lebanon and if a deal was not reached by October 2022. While Hezbollah had long deterred Israel, its compellence of Israel was unprecedented.

A watershed moment in the evolution of the “stranglehold” on Israel occurred around 2020-2021, when Hamas fighters were integrated into a campaign with Iran’s other Axis of Resistance proxies. In May 2021, an emboldened Hamas expanded the scope of its military intervention, initiating, for the first time, a conflict in response to rising tensions not in Gaza but in a totally different theater—East Jerusalem. The fighting, which Israel code-named Guardian of the Walls and Hamas called Sword of Jerusalem, saw the first, if sporadic, participation of regional “resistance” groups from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—their operations coordinated from a joint operations room in Beirut.

This was a major turning point in the conflict. For the first time, Hamas, whose military power had reached a certain tipping point, had begun to extend its deterrence beyond the Gaza Strip; it effectively took strategic ownership over the entire Palestinian arena. Moreover, it now had the backing of the axis. The significance of these developments was lost on Israel.

For Hamas, the 11-day conflict, in which it showered major Israeli cities with nearly 400 rockets per day, represented a quantum leap in its military prowess and sense of its own capability. In words that ring far more ominous in retrospect, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar announced in the wake of the conflict that next time, “the very structure of the Middle East will change.” Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh characterized Guardian of the Walls as “a dress rehearsal for the full liberation” of Palestine. From the vantage point of Hamas’s senior leadership, the combination of the party’s military power and its alliance with Hezbollah were a game-changer. In recent months, IDF units have indeed uncovered secret Hamas documents in Gaza summarizing high-level discussions in which the movement’s top leaders concluded that the Axis of Resistance could be leveraged toward what they secretly referred to as “the great enterprise.” Israel’s impending normalization with Saudi Arabia, too, bolstered Hamas’s determination to act drastically.

It was in this context that Hamas conducted its Oct. 7 offensive. Having invaded Israel with thousands of elite fighters, killing approximately 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping some 250, Hamas neither sued for peace nor issued political demands. Rather, its leaders urged their regional strategic partners to join the fray. An hour into the raid, Hamas’s top military commander, Mohammed Deif, urged “our brethren in the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria” to intervene, saying that “today is the day in which your resistance converges with your kindred in Palestine.” Ismail Haniyeh similarly addressed “our strategic partners,” stressing that “today is your day.” Two days later, senior Hamas leader Osama Hamdan added, “the current battle has to do with the core goal of eliminating the Zionist entity, liberating the land and liberating the holy places. The resistance did not act emotionally or thoughtlessly; it acted strategically and methodically.”

While Hezbollah and the axis went ahead and launched “support fronts” from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and occasionally Syria, their involvement has fallen short of Hamas’s expectations. Among other things, this has resulted in an ongoing debate within the “resistance” camp about the appropriate strategy going forward. Whereas Hamas leaders initially characterized their offensive as a “first strike” and as a “strategic blow” to Israel, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who effectively functions as the grand strategist and primary explainer of the resistance camp in the region, tellingly explained that the axis had not “yet” reached the capacity to inflict a “decisive blow” on the Jewish state. According to Nasrallah, the ultimate triumph over Israel would be reached through the “accumulation” of achievements, a “victory by points.” Although Hamas successfully drew Hezbollah into the conflict to a significant extent, Hezbollah has limited its intervention to remain below the threshold of all-out war. It is for this reason that Hamas’s momentous gamble has failed overall. While Hezbollah’s unprecedented war of attrition along the Israel-Lebanon border has forced Israel to devote significant attention to its northern border, Hezbollah has been unable to constrain Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. Nonetheless, Hamas’s offensive showed, in the words of a Lebanese writer closely connected to Hezbollah, that “the liberation of Palestine” was “no longer imaginary.”

To the extent that Israel’s enemies in the region share this view, Israel’s core strategic objective in the upcoming months and years will be to disabuse them of the notion that it can be coerced, deterred, and decisively overwhelmed. Whether this leads to increased military friction in the Middle East or paves the way to an ultimate equilibrium in the region will depend greatly on the ability of diplomats to harness the events of the past year in the service of regional diplomacy and a robust geopolitical architecture. In this regard, recent months have highlighted the vital importance of regional U.S.-backed cooperation against the direct and indirect threat posed by Iran and the Axis of Resistance in the region.