Destruction on the streets of Tulkarm, in the occupied West Bank after an Israeli attack. Many Israelis have lost hope of using diplomacy to resolve their conflict with the Palestinians. Photo / Getty Images
As well as its conflict with Hamas, Israel is battling along its border with Lebanon, waging a counterinsurgency in the occupied West Bank and exchanging sporadic fire with Iran and its regional proxies.
While Israel’s devastating war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip attracts the most attention, its military has also been fighting for months on several other fronts, making this one of the most complex periods of conflict in the country’s 76-year history.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the military has been raiding and striking militant groups in several Palestinian cities, killing about 600 people since October, in the deadliest campaign in the territory for more than two decades. On Wednesday, Israel began one of its biggest manoeuvers in the territory in recent months, simultaneously invading three cities to capture or kill militants.
Along the Israel-Lebanon border, Israel has been exchanging rocket and missile fire with Hezbollah, a militia allied with Hamas and backed by Iran, in fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border and killed hundreds.
And Israel’s yearslong shadow war with Iran has burst into the open, with each side striking the other directly in April, leading to fears that a relatively contained war in Gaza might end up setting off an all-out war involving Iran, its many proxies across the Middle East and even the United States.
Why are various groups fighting Israel, why is it using force to deal with them, and why is it taking so long for these wars to end?
Despite the destruction of much of Hamas’ military infrastructure and tens of thousands of deaths, there is no end in sight to the war in Gaza, partly because Israel has set itself a high threshold for victory: the eradication of Hamas’ leadership and the rescue of roughly 100 hostages still held by the group. By contrast, Hamas has a low threshold: it seeks to survive the war intact, a modest goal that allows it to weather a level of devastation that might have caused other groups to surrender.
Hamas’ extensive subterranean tunnel network also makes it hard for Israel to win. Some of the group’s leaders are thought to be deep beneath the ground, surrounded in some cases by Israeli hostages, making it challenging for Israel to find the leaders, let alone attack them without harming its own kidnapped citizens.
Israel’s tactics also make winning more difficult. Its military has swiftly retreated from most of the areas that it has conquered, allowing – in some cases – for Hamas to regroup there and preventing the war from ending in the way that most wars do, with one side capturing the other’s territory.
A cease-fire has also proved elusive, in large part because Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants only a temporary truce, while Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, seeks a complete halt.
While Israeli soldiers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the army retained a wide presence across the West Bank, partly to protect roughly 500,000 Israelis living in settlements that are considered illegal by most of the world.
The Israeli military regularly raids and strikes Palestinian cities in the West Bank to quell armed Palestinian groups, including Hamas, that mount terrorist attacks on Israelis in those settlements and in Israel itself.
Many militant groups oppose Israel’s existence. They have become more active in recent years as Israel’s occupation has grown more entrenched, all but ending the dream of Palestinian statehood and increasing Palestinian resentment of Israelis. Rising violence by settler extremists against Palestinian civilians, coupled with a sense of growing impunity for those extremists and the expansion of their settlements, have also been cited by Palestinian groups to justify their militancy.
Since the war in Gaza began, Israel has increased its attacks on these armed groups, saying they became even more active amid a rise in arms smuggled from Iran. Israel also says that the Palestinian Authority, the institution that administers Palestinian cities in the West Bank, has become too weak to rein in the groups by itself.
It is unclear how effective the Israeli raids have been, as observers dispute the extent to which they are restricting or encouraging Palestinian militancy.
The Israeli military says its campaign has killed several key militant commanders and thwarted many attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet the militants appear to be honing their techniques: this past month, a Palestinian from the West Bank set off a bomb in Tel Aviv. It was the first incident of its kind in years, and was cited by the Israeli military as an example of why it needed to mount the extensive operation on Wednesday.
Hezbollah, a Hamas-allied militia that controls large parts of southern Lebanon, began firing at Israel in solidarity with Hamas shortly after the October 7 attack.
Ever since, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging rocket and missile fire across the Israel-Lebanon border, while trying to avoid an all-out ground war that would most likely devastate both countries. Israel’s fighter jets could cripple Beirut, the Lebanese capital, while Hezbollah has thousands of precision-guided missiles that could wreck Israeli cities.
Israel has said it won’t stop targeting Hezbollah assets and operatives until it is safe for the residents of northern Israel, some 60,000 of whom have been displaced by the fighting, to return home. But that is a distant prospect because, in turn, Hezbollah has pledged to carry on firing until the implementation of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza.
With no end in sight in Gaza, the Lebanon battle looks set to drag on, raising the chances of a miscalculation by either side that could cause the conflict to spiral out of control. A Lebanese strike on schoolchildren in July led Israel to kill a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, leading analysts to predict a major escalation until both sides managed to step back from the brink last Sunday.
For decades, Iran’s leaders have said they sought Israel’s destruction. Both countries have clandestinely attacked each other’s interests and both have built competing regional alliances to deter each other. Israel views Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon as an existential threat and has frequently attempted to sabotage the programme.
Until the war in Gaza, both sides tried to maintain plausible deniability for their attacks, mainly to avoid a direct confrontation that could escalate into all-out war. Israel had never claimed responsibility for its assassination of Iranian officials. Iran avoided major public provocations of its own, while encouraging proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as Palestinian groups in the West Bank, to attack Israel.
The intensity and length of the conflict in Gaza has tempted both sides to be more brazen, bringing their shadow war into the open. In April, Israel struck an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria, killing several senior Iranian commanders.
Iran responded by firing one of the biggest barrages of cruise and ballistic missiles in military history in the first direct hit on Israel from Iran, raising the spectre of a full-on war, but ultimately causing little damage. And when Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, visited Iran in July, Israel took a risk by killing him on Iranian soil, leading Iran to promise another direct strike on Israel.
Israel says it has been left with no choice but to defend itself against an Iran-led regional alliance that aims not only to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, but to destroy Israel itself. Israeli officials highlight how Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel first, forcing Israel to respond, and they say that Iran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah makes it necessary for Israel to attack Iran and its assets.
Many Israelis have also lost hope of using diplomacy to resolve their conflict with the Palestinians. In mainstream Israeli discourse, Israel is perceived as having made many concessions to the Palestinians during a failed peace process three decades ago, only for its best offers to be rejected by the Palestinian leadership.
Israelis often cite their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 as an example of how Israeli goodwill fell flat: Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, a rival group, a year later and used Gaza as a platform for attacks on Israel that culminated in the October 7 raid, the deadliest day in Israel’s history. As a result, they see force as the only logical deterrent to groups including Hamas that ultimately seek Israel’s destruction rather than sincere coexistence.
Many Israelis yearn to be accepted within the Middle East without using force, and they see nascent economic and diplomatic ties with a growing number of Arab states as a step toward that goal. For now, though, their historical experience is that force often “works”.
More than diplomacy, it was force that helped the fledgling state survive the wars surrounding its creation in 1948. It was Israel’s strong military that allowed it to overcome three enemy states in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. And it was the same military that staved off a surprise Syrian and Egyptian attack in 1973, and helped Israel overcome a wave of suicide bombings in the 2000s.
Some Israelis even think their government is showing too much restraint, and should be striking back even more forcefully against Hezbollah and Iran.
In Gaza, opponents say that Israel displays too little concern for civilian life, accusing it of mounting a genocide, a charge Israel denies. In Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, Israel’s critics say it has been too provocative in its choice of targets and too reluctant to let diplomacy take its course. For example, some saw Israel’s recent strikes on Haniyeh and Fouad Shukur, a top Hezbollah commander, as irresponsible interventions that crossed too many red lines and risked turning a relatively contained war with Iran and its proxies into an uncontrolled disaster.
More broadly, Israel is also accused of having brought its predicament on itself by failing to agree to a peace deal with the Palestinians two decades ago.
Critics say that Israel conceded too little in the negotiations. They highlight how the young Palestinian militants who attack Israelis in the West Bank have often spent their whole lives under an occupation that has grown more expansive under the current far-right Israeli Government, amid growing attacks by settler extremists and stifling restrictions on Palestinian movement within the territory.
Israel’s opponents also see the October 7 attack in the context of Israel’s enforcement, along with Egypt, of a 17-year blockade on Gaza that prevented many in the territory from travelling abroad, stifled the territory’s economy and blocked access to everyday services including 3G internet and some kinds of complex health care.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patrick Kingsley
Photographs by: Tamir Kalifa, Sergey Ponomarev and Avishag Shaar-Yashuv
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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