We seem to have reached a kind of half-time in the Islamist war against Israel, which began on 7 October 2023 with Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel, in which some 1,200 Israelis were murdered, together with a handful of foreign guest-workers, and a further 251 taken hostage. While the war has focused on Gaza, where Hamas is based, the other fronts ignited by the invasion—in Yemen, Iran, southern Lebanon, southern Syria, and in the occupied West Bank—appear somewhat dormant.

But the relative quiet may be deceptive. In Lebanon, the Islamist organisation Hezbollah, which received a thrashing at the hands of the Israel Air Force (IAF) in October–November 2024, is desperately trying to re-arm and re-establish a foothold in the south of the country, on both sides of the Litani River. Israeli intelligence and drones are keeping constant watch, and the IAF periodically kills Hezbollah operatives, interdicts Iranian arms and cash shipments, and bombs rocket storage and launching sites. Since the signing of the American–Israeli–Hezbollah ceasefire deal last November, some 250 Hezbollah operatives operating in southern Lebanon in contravention of the agreement have been killed. Meanwhile, IDF troops continue to occupy five strategic outposts on the Lebanese side of the border—also in contravention of the agreement. So far, Hezbollah—fearing a renewed all-out Israeli assault—has refrained from retaliation. But under pressure from Iran and from the organisation’s rank-and-file, Hezbollah’s leaders could order reprisals at any time, thus renewing full-scale war with Israel.

And the potential for fresh, major hostilities in Lebanon is not limited to war between Hezbollah and Israel. Last week, Lebanon’s government, under President Joseph Aoun, announced that it will disarm Hezbollah by the year’s end, in line with the terms of the ceasefire agreement. Hezbollah has vowed to resist, and its major regional backer, Iran, has denounced the Lebanese government’s decision. Aoun has countered that Lebanon will not countenance “foreign interference.” So far, Hezbollah has expressed its displeasure with Aoun largely through noisy street demonstrations in Beirut. But last week, six Lebanese Army soldiers were killed by a booby-trap while trying to dismantle a Hezbollah weapons storage facility outside Tyre. Whether this was a recent booby-trap, designed to kill Lebanese soldiers, or was of older vintage is unknown. But clearly, the possibility of civil war is again in the air. Lebanon’s last civil war between the Christian and Muslim communities, which permanently scarred the psyches of all Lebanese, lasted sixteen years, ending in 1991. Despite the risk of civil war, however, the Lebanese government and army, prodded by Israel and America, appear determined to push ahead in their efforts to disarm Hezbollah. While the terrorist group lost most of its heavy weaponry to IAF strikes last year, it still retains an abundance of small arms and a steadfast determination to remain decisive both in Lebanon’s internal politics and in those of the wider Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, who control northern and western Yemen, continue to launch ballistic missiles and drones against Israel two or three times a week and to bar Israeli and international shipping from and to Israel’s southern seaport of Eilat, despite massive repeated IAF raids of the Houthis’ Red Sea ports. On 17 August, Israeli missile boats hit assorted energy-related targets in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. The Houthis, guided by Tehran, maintain that they are acting in solidarity with their fellow Hamas Islamists, in support of their war against the IDF in Gaza. Israel’s interceptor anti-missile batteries have shot down almost all the Houthi missiles and drones—although one did get through and narrowly missed Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv earlier this year, resulting in a months-long cessation of flights by almost all international carriers. And each interception that uses an Arrow or THAAD battery costs Israel millions of dollars. Nonetheless, the Israeli government and public regard the Houthi launches as little more than a nuisance—although if another missile breaks through Israel’s defences, it could trigger massive retaliation against Yemen. The occasional IAF bombings of Houthi targets over the past months, each of which has involved dozens of aircraft and missile boats, are also expensive in terms of fuel, munitions, etc., and have so far failed to deter the Houthi attacks. An escalation may be on the cards.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian attacks on Israeli forces and settlers and against targets within Israel have been few and far between, mainly due to the deployment of two dozen or so IDF battalions—mostly of reservists—who have blanketed the territory and to frequent IDF raids of the hideouts of Palestinian gunmen, who are mostly holed up in the territory’s so-called “refugee camps” (actually built-up slum neighbourhoods adjoining the West Bank’s towns). But alongside this official military activity, West Bank settler groups, under cover of local IDF forces and Israeli police, have been continuously harassing Palestinian communities, especially small villages and Bedouin encampments: beating shepherds and their families, occasionally killing youngsters who resist them, and torching tents, buildings, and cars. Such actions effectively destroy these communities, allowing the settlers to take over the lands abandoned by the evicted Arabs. Israeli critics allege that, under cover of the Israel–Hamas war, the settlers are engaged in a gradual ethnic cleansing campaign with tacit governmental approval, the ultimate objective being Israeli annexation of all or large parts of the West Bank.

Israel–Gaza: A War Between Cousins

Both Israelis and Palestinians have a reasonable claim to live in the Holy Land, based on deep local roots.

QuilletteJohn Aziz

In furtherance of this objective, this week Israeli government agencies are expected to lay the legal and administrative groundwork to set up a large Israeli settlement in the West Bank’s “Area E1,” a twelve square kilometre patch of land between Jericho and Jerusalem. Bezalel Smotrich, the messianic cabinet minister in effective charge of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has announced that such a settlement “would finally bury the notion of a Palestinian state.” He has described the project as a response to the recent declaration by a group of Western governments, led by France, that they plan to recognise a Palestinian state in September. For decades, pressure from the international community, which is keen on a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict, has deterred successive Israeli governments from settling Area E1. Such a settlement would sever the northern West Bank from its southern part, effectively dividing the region into two non-contiguous cantons and torpedoing the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state based on the West Bank.

But while the question of the West Bank is more immediate, in the longer term, Israel’s most problematic area of conflict may turn out to be the Syrian front. Forged by the amalgamation of two former imperial Ottoman provinces by the occupying French in the early 1920s, the country is a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities. In the past century, the new state was held together by French authoritarian rule and home-grown dictatorships. Then, in December 2024, after a decade of civil war, Sunni Islamists under Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammad al-Julani) ousted the Alawite (Shia)-based Assad regime, which had been in power since the early 1970s, and conquered Damascus. But the new regime has been unable to unite the ethnically and religiously diverse Syrian population. As Zvi Barel, Arab affairs commentator for the Israeli daily Haaretz, recently expressed it, Syria “is like a storeroom full of spare parts that could serve to put together a state, but the instruction sheet seems to have gone astray” (my free translation). Both the moderate non-Arab Muslim Kurds in the north of the country and the non-Muslim Druze minority in the southeast around Suweida refuse to disarm since they do not trust the government to protect them. Over the past two months, Islamist militias, apparently supported by government troops, have slaughtered hundreds of Druze, whom they regard as infidels. Two months earlier, these Islamist militiamen and government troops also slaughtered 1,600 Alawites—the Assads’ main constituency—around Latakia in northwestern Syria. In recent weeks, Israel, under pressure from its own Druze community, whose youngsters serve in the IDF, came to the aid of the embattled Syrian Druze, sending in munitions, food, and medical gear, and the IAF has occasionally bombed Sunni militia groups around Suweida. To drive the message home that the government should lay off the Druze, the IAF also bombed the Syrian Defence Ministry complex in Damascus, leading al-Sharaa to pull out his troops.