Iran pushed Hamas into war; Israel’s response brings reality to Middle East
Four hundred and sixty-six days since Hamas fighters massacred over 1,000 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more, the guns may finally be falling silent.
Faces of death: HAMAS launched a peacetime attack that sparked off a deadly war
It is difficult to overstate how much the world has changed since that horrific day two autumns ago.
It has been Israel’s longest war – the longest single conventional war of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In intensity and concentration of violence in the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip, it may have been the most destructive aerial and artillery bombardment of the 21st century.
Above all, the war changed Gaza.
The level of physical destruction has been compared to the firebombing of Hamburg in the Second World War.
Fury of the bruised: Israel activated its war machine
The Palestinian death toll, which the official Hamas-run health ministry puts at 46,600, is more than 10 times its count in all previous Gaza conflicts since 2008 combined.
It says just over half of the dead are women, children or older people. Israel says the figures are suspect because of Hamas’s control of the ministry in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has not released figures for its losses.
In any war, the dead are often the lucky ones: the numbers of the maimed and crippled often dwarfs those of the dead.
There is a hope that the ceasefire might – might – lead to a final peace settlement and a Palestinian state. It seems impossibly remote, but the very fact that it is being talked about is astounding.
Before the war, the assumption was that Arab kingdoms like Saudi Arabia would happily overlook the Palestinian issue in exchange for the normalisation of ties with Israel. Not any more. Even the last British government made a very visible, if symbolic, shift towards the possibility.
And though the war was fought almost entirely inside Gaza, it also changed Israel.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) says it has lost 405 soldiers in Gaza, on top of the more than 1,200 Israelis, military and civilian, killed on Oct 7.
It is difficult to describe to anyone who was not there just how stunned the country was after Oct 7.
The nearest, imperfect analogy I can think of is the feeling of horrified unreality that reigned in Britain and America after the Sept 11 attacks.
Initially, it brought out the Jewish state’s strengths: unity, self-sacrifice, and the sense of purpose and belonging that makes it such a peculiar place.
On Oct 7, the Israeli government, military, and intelligence establishment failed catastrophically. That failure has still not been properly accounted for.
I lost count of the number of people who told me that once the war was finished, they would deal with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and the others they blamed for getting them into this mess.
Tensions between Israel’s hard-Right, the families of hostages, the military establishment and the Netanyahu government have all come to the fore.
It brought out hatred. “We will take back Gaza and we will kill them all,” a shell-shocked policeman told me as we surveyed the blood-stained grounds of the Nova music festival a few days after the massacre there.
That thirst for vengeance was understandable. It also explains elements of Israel’s conduct of the war that troubled even its closest allies.
The strength of Israeli anger
The alliance with the West, and the United States in particular, survived – but it has been strained badly. Those friendships will need to be attended to closely.
The war will be remembered as a test for the very concept of international humanitarian law.
In November last year the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for senior Hamas leaders – but also for Mr Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the then Israeli defence minister.
For the court’s champions, it was a watershed moment: It was the first time a Western ally had faced such charges, demonstrating once and for all that the laws of war applied to everyone – not just African and Balkan warlords.
For Israel and its key allies, including traditional backers of the court like Britain, it was “outrageous”. Can a truly independent international court survive in the era of international conflict? It is not yet clear.
But the war has also remade the entire Middle East.
Hezbollah entered the war somewhat reluctantly – Hassan Nasrallah, its leader, was said to be furious at Hamas’s recklessness when he learnt of Oct 7.
Nevertheless, he authorised rocket attacks on northern Israel, and the war on the Lebanon border took on its own logic. Then late last year, Israel launched a full offensive across the border.
Before long Nasrallah was dead, Hezbollah in tatters.
In December, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria finally collapsed – largely because his Hezbollah allies had been killed in Lebanon.
And the battering of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad represent military catastrophes for Iran.
Its “axis of resistance”, the network of militias, proxies and allies that over 20 years it used to project power across the Middle East, is in tatters – and with it the Islamic Republic’s brief moment as a regional superpower.
It is not a coincidence that Tehran is making conciliatory overtures to the incoming Trump administration about a new nuclear deal.
Lebanon, Syria, and Iran all in their own way must grapple with new realities.
And the shockwaves reach much further across the world.
It is impossible to tell if the Gaza war helped Donald Trump win the US election, although there is plenty of evidence that it caused problems for Joe Biden among Democrat voters.
Mr Trump’s unpredictability, his willingness to use intimidation in negotiation, and his vanity – he is said to be enamoured with winning a Nobel Peace Prize – all contributed to finally bringing an end to this war.
He has already claimed this ceasefire as his first deal of his second presidency. More international arm-twisting is yet to come.
• Original story was written by Roland Oliphant and published in The Telegraph
