Hamas v Israel: Iran Escalating?
Violence Spreads Across The Region
Sadly, slowly, but surely, the war between Hamas and Israel is expanding.
Israel is trading rocket and artillery strikes with Hezbollah to the North.
Israel’s Defense Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces on Friday asked residents to evacuate from the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanon border.
The evacuation order, which was approved by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, comes amid fears that the Israel-Hamas war could spill over into a regional conflict. Shelling has intensified in recent days between northern Israel and southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
Protests are breaking out in the West Bank.
Violence in the occupied West Bank has surged since Israel began bombarding the Gaza Strip and clashing with Hezbollah at the Lebanon border, fuelling concerns the flashpoint Palestinian territory could become a third front in a wider war.
Drones and rockets are being fired at US bases in Syria and Iraq.
The United States is seeing stepped-up drone attacks in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon said on Thursday, while an American destroyer in the Red Sea intercepted cruise missiles and drones fired toward Israel by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The uptick in activity, which targeted US bases in Syria and Iraq, has resulted in minor injuries but prompted fresh concerns that Israel’s war with Hamas may spark a bigger conflict and pull in the US.
Perhaps most disturbingly, cruise missiles were fired apparently from Houthi sites in Yemen, targeting Israel.
A US Navy warship operating in the Middle East intercepted multiple projectiles near the coast of Yemen on Thursday, two US officials told CNN.
One of the officials said the missiles were fired by Iranian-backed Houthi militants, who are engaged in an ongoing conflict in Yemen. Approximately 2-3 missiles were intercepted, according to the second official.
While Israel is undeniably increasing the intensity of its attacks on Gaza in response to Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on Israel, the conflict beyond Gaza has another common denominator besides Israel: Iran.
In its own perverse and even devious way, Iran is steadily ratcheting up the military pressure on Israel, even as it notionally remains uninvolved.
View and analyses of the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza (for it is a war, let us have no illusions about that) abound, and some are more problematic than others.
Here on Substack, there are views which focus attention and more than a little culpability for events in the Middle East on Moscow.
Yet even that view does not escape connection to Iran.
Iran, which is supplying Moscow with killer drones to use against the people of Ukraine, is the root of Israel’s problem. But the fertilizer was made in Moscow.
Indeed, the potential for Moscow having a hand in this was a possibility I considered even as the initial Hamas attack was unfolding.
However, if Russia is involved, it’s involvement almost certainly runs through Tehran, as Iran is the country with the connections to the militant and terrorist groups in Gaza and throughout the Middle East1.
Since the end of the 2006 Israeli-Hizballah conflict, Iran has supplied Hizballah in Lebanon with thousands of rockets, missiles, and small arms in violation of UNSCR 1701. Israeli security officials and politicians expressed concerns that Iran was supplying Hizballah with advanced weapons systems and technologies, as well as assisting the group in creating infrastructure that would permit it to indigenously produce rockets and missiles to threaten Israel from Lebanon and Syria. Iran has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Hizballah and trained thousands of its fighters at camps in Iran. Hizballah fighters have been used extensively in Syria to support the Assad regime.
In 2020, Iran provided support to Hamas and other designated Palestinian terrorist groups, including Palestine Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. These Palestinian terrorist groups were behind numerous deadly attacks originating in Gaza and the West Bank.
Moreover, last Sunday (October 15), Iran quite ominously threatened that Israel would face some form of escalation if the conflict in Gaza continued.
“If the measures aimed at immediately stopping the Israeli attacks that are killing children in the Gaza Strip end in a deadlock, it is highly probable that many other fronts will be opened. This option is not ruled out and this is becoming increasingly more probable,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Al Jazeera on Sunday.
Events that have unfolded this week arguably are Iran making good on that threat.
Geopolitical strategist and author Peter Zeihan is a notable non-corporate media commentator on world events, and he somewhat remarkably takes the view that the entire conflict is a “tempest in a teapot.”
Peter Zeihan is an interesting commentator to follow, and I frequently find his take on world events thought-provoking, although I do not always agree with his assessments. This is one time when I definitely do not agree with him.
Zeihan’s YouTube video discussing the potential for escalation and even a global war arising out of the Hamas-Israeli war is as of this writing just a few hours old. It was released after the missile attack by the Houthis, after the rocket attacks by Hezbollah, after the drone and rocket attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq. To focus just on IDF operations in Gaza is to my mind rather shortsighted. One conclusion he makes which is already flatly disproven is that Hezbollah will sit on the sidelines:
You've got Lebanon. Lebanon is a borderline failed State Hezbollah is the militant group that is there and they certainly don't care for the Israelis at all. But there's two things that hold them back: number one they are part of the national government, so there are other factions in Lebanon that would politically restrain them if they get too uppity because they know that in the Israeli's current state of mind the Israelis would not think twice of sending in some assassins and just wiping out the entire government and that is a very focusing factor for the non- Hezbollah factions within Lebanon; and then second while Lebanon could definitely send Hezbollah could definitely send a lot of rockets in the northern Israel that doesn't change what's going on in Gaza or honestly overly shift the military disposition of the Israeli Army and Hezbollah doesn't have an army if they were to launch a ground invasion they would be massacred so they are definitely the faction to watch but the chances of them doing anything meaningful are very very low
Hezbollah, as already noted, has been sending rockets into Israel. A lot of rockets. Hezbollah is creating enough of a security situation in northern Israel that Israel’s Defense Ministry has ordered the evacuation of at least one city near the Lebanese border. The IDF is already vowing to hold Hezbollah accountable for the violence towards northern Israel.
IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari says the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group will bear responsibility for attacks carried out on northern Israel, including those claimed by Palestinian groups.
The Hezbollah attacks are hardly the stuff of global war, but neither are they meaningless and insignificant.
Zeihan is similarly unimpressed by Iran.
The Iranians don't have anything they can really do directly. They could launch some long range missiles; all that would do would be generate a huge amount of international condemnnation and get all the sanctions slammed back in in a matter of seconds—might even get the United States to do some slowboat trips by all of their oil platforms and just blow them to hell we did that back in the 1980. The target to watch there is a place called Kharg Island which is their only only oil offloading facility you take that offline that's the end of the entire export industry for Iran so it's a question about whether they would risk that that in order to do something symbolic that would have absolutely no impact on the ground.
The attacks from the 1980s to which Zeihan refers are Operations Prime Chance, Praying Mantis, and Nimble Archer, operations which were the beginnings of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), a unified special ops command structure which unified the special operations forces from across all branches of the US military.
While such retaliations are certainly an option for the US against Iran, Zeihan is overlooking one key factor: disrupting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf would almost certainly push oil prices beyond the crucial $100/bbl threshold. This has always been a risk, as I have noted a few times during the past week.
What is also cause for concern is the continuing outsized influence of energy prices upon the consumer price index. With continuing media speculation about Iran’s possible direct involvement in last weekend’s attacks by Hamas on Israel, there is ample geopolitical risk that oil prices may move sharply upwards quite literally at any time.
When oil prices plunged despite Russia’s diesel export ban, the initial sense of the Hamas attack on Israel was that it would not have dramatic impact on oil production or oil transshipment.
If the conflict between Israel and Hamas does not spread to include the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf, its impact on oil supply and oil production is going to be minimal. Israel and Gaza are neither oil refining centers nor oil producing centers, nor are they even near major oil terminals. Even with the Persian Gulf states joining the conflict, the most likely scenario where oil supply gets disrupted is if the conflict interferes with shipping traffic coming through the Suez Canal, which is roughly 100 miles from the Egyptian side of Gaza.
However, as the conflict has been spreading, we are seeing the price of oil climb once again.
Taking out Iran’s oil production or export facilities at this juncture guarantees oil prices move beyond the psychologically important $100/bbl threshold—not because of surging oil demand, but because oil supply is under direct threat. Dismissing the global economic impacts of an oil price surge is a surprising amount of naivete by Peter Zeihan.
A far more balanced view comes from combat commentator Paul Lewandowski.
Paul notes that the missiles fired apparently by Houthi rebels in Yemen are almost certainly made by Iran, delivered to Yemen, and this may very well be an attack that was more or less ordered by Iran.
We know that these houthi Rebels and that control these Yemen are backed by Iran so it seems highly likely these are Iranian backed missiles and drones again likely targeting Israel but this is how sort of Iran fights its proxy wars
Paul’s take is that Iran is using the missile attacks in particular to send a message to Israel and the West, although exactly what that message might be is itself a matter of some speculation.
Paul’s assessment is in line with that of the Israeli military, which views the events in the West Bank in particular with a fair bit of concern.
The violence poses a challenge to both Israel and to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the only Palestinian governing body recognised internationally which is headquartered there.
The Israeli military said it was on high alert and bracing for attacks including by Hamas militants in the West Bank.
Hamas was trying to "engulf Israel in a two- or three-front war", including the Lebanese border and the West Bank, military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus told Reuters. "The threat is elevated," he said.
Indeed, the threat is elevated quite literally everywhere in the Middle East at the moment.
Cruise missiles flying up the Red Sea towards Israel puts the vital Suez Canal very much in jeopardy. Even a quick glance at a map of the region shows that shipping traffic transiting the canal is along the flight path of any such missile heading from Yemen to Israel.
Oil shipments from Russia’s oil terminal at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea bound for Asia would have to sail all the way around Africa if the Suez Canal is not available due to a wider conflict in the Middle East. Not only would that make Russian oil more expensive in Asia, the added expense would be problematic for Russia, which has benefited from shattering the EU/G7 price cap on Urals Crude, and which has been staging something of a recovery from the post-diesel ban crash in the wake of Hamas and Israel going to war.
There is not a single aspect of these wider attacks, minor in size though they may be, which does not carry significant geopolitical risk, and in particular economic risk.
Do these escalations mean we are facing World War 3 at last? Certainly there are those who believe that it does, and there are those who can marshal not insignificant arguments that the world has been embroiled in a global war for quite some time, going back at least to the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War last year if not further.
Strictly speaking, neither the United States nor NATO is formally entangled in a war anywhere, not even in the Middle East. While the political situation virtually guarantees the US will support Israel, and perhaps even help with lethal aid much as the US has with Ukraine, in the strictest sense of the word this is still not a war the US is fighting, nor is it a war that NATO is fighting.
Yet this is a war that is being fought. It is unequivocally a war in Gaza, it carries all the earmarks of war in the north of Israel next to Lebanon, and cruise missiles on the Red Sea certainly give that body of water the appearance of being contested. The United States is defending itself in Syria and Iraq against drone attacks. If the missile launch from Yemen was targeting Israel, the US has now intervened militarily on behalf of Israel. While the US may not be formally “at war”, it is undeniably doing the things a nation at war would do.
Is Iran behind these escalations? As has been the case throughout, direct evidence of a linkage between Iran and these acts of terrorism and violence is exceedingly thin. The most substantial aspect of the case against Iran is that groups such as Fatah or the Palestinian Jihad are known to be supported by Iran. At a minimum Iran has enabled and almost certainly encouraged these spasms of violence.
Does Iran benefit from such chaos? Potentially. Iran has ambitions regional hegemony among the Persian Gulf states. This could be the sort of muscle-flex that a power seeking to be seen as a Great Power might very well do. Moreover, so long as the fighting stays away from the Persian Gulf and the middle of the Red Sea, Iran can reap the benefits of higher oil prices, and perhaps even $100/bbl+ oil prices.
This much is certain: whether or not Iran is escalating this war, there is no doubt that this war is escalating. We may not be at World War 3 yet, but we are closer today than we were yesterday.
United States Institute Of Peace. U.S. Report: Iran’s Support for Terrorism. 18 Dec. 2021, https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2021/dec/18/us-report-iran%E2%80%99s-support-terrorism.
The real question is what will happen tomorrow, or even before tomorrow. Especially since we do not have any government that we can trust.
Excellent summation, Mr, Kust.