- Hamas carried out a devastating attack on Israel one year ago, killing about 1,200 people.
- The terror attack has helped push the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.
- Attempts to de-escalate have repeatedly failed, with Israel and Iran getting closer to a conflict.
Israel’s air raid sirens alerted the country’s residents to an impending attack early on October 7, 2023.
The Israel Defense Forces later claimed that 1,200 people were killed in a coordinated strike carried out by Hamas, a militant group that the majority of the West has labeled as a terrorist organization.
The Middle East is on the verge of a wider conflict a year after the slaughter, as violence has only become worse.
De-escalation strategies, which the US has mainly supported, have frequently failed. Furthermore, it seems like Israel is getting closer to going to war with Iran directly—a terrible situation that has been avoided for years as the two nations have kept their fighting to proxies in a covert warfare.
For Israel and the broader Axis of Resistance, the year-long struggle with decades-old roots has had serious consequences, according to Chuck Frielich, a former deputy national security advisor who spent more than 20 years working in Israel’s security apparatus, who spoke with Business Insider.
“The Axis of Resistance is now on the defensive after Israel reversed the course of events. According to Frielich, Iran is now in a precarious situation. “Hamas has been defeated militarily, though not politically, and remains in political control in Gaza,” Frielich stated.
“Conversely, Israel was in the midst of a multi-front war which may result in significant damage to its homefront and is deeply isolated in the world,” he stated.
A year of bloodshed
Following an attack by Hamas on October 7, Israel retaliated with a heavy bombardment campaign and a ground incursion into Gaza, which according to Palestinian sources resulted in the deaths of about 42,000 Palestinians.
Early in that campaign, the Houthi rebels in Yemen started assaulting commercial ships that were trying to travel via the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal, which marked the beginning of the first high-profile expansion of the larger battle.
The Houthis, who have previously received funding and weapons from Iran, claimed they were striking Israeli-affiliated ships as a show of solidarity, but it was frequently discovered that they had been using drones, missiles, and raiding parties to target unaffiliated vessels.
With the Houthi attacks threatening to close off a vital international shipping lane, the US and its allies and partners established a heavy military presence in the Red Sea to fend off the rebels.
January saw the West’s most direct and overt military involvement in the conflict, when the US, UK, and their allies barraged Houthi targets with airborne, surface, and subsurface-launched strikes after warning the rebels repeatedly to cease their attacks.
The campaign has dragged on for almost a year with no end in sight , and the US has been rotating multiple aircraft carrier groups into the region while carrying out further strikes on Houthi territory.
To the north, Syria became the site of further conflict in April, when Israel launched a strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus , killing several senior officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two generals.
Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, previously told BI that the strike was significant because it was the “first time Israel struck an official Iranian government-affiliated site with high-ranking people inside.”
Following that, Iran launched an unprecedented long-range attack on Israel, reportedly launching 30 cruise missiles, 120 ballistic missiles, and 170 attack drones, nearly all of which were intercepted, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel subsequently retaliated by attacking many Iranian cities with its own bombs. Furthermore, the political head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in July, shortly after he saw the coronation of Iran’s new president.
It was widely believed that months before Haniyeh’s death, an explosive device concealed in the guesthouse he was staying at in Tehran would detonate remotely, killing him.
That week, Israel also claimed credit for the assassination of senior Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr, who served as Hasan Nasrallah’s secretary-general’s advisor. Israel carried out the airstrike in Beirut.
Since the incident on October 7, Israel and its longtime nemesis Hezbollah have been exchanging gunfire on Israel’s southern border, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate on both sides.
In September, thousands of Hezbollah-used pagers and communication devices exploded in one of the most spectacular strikes the region has ever seen, leaving at least eight people dead and over 2,800 injured.
Although Israel has not taken credit for the attack, it is generally accepted that Mossad, the intelligence agency of Israel, planned it by placing explosives within the devices before they were distributed.
At the start of this month, Israel began what it called a limited ground incursion into Lebanon , saying it aimed to dismantle Hezbollah’s positions and artillery in the south.
It’s unclear if Israel plans to expand its scope in Lebanon, where it faces difficult terrain and Hezbollah troops who have had years to embed and prepare.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s health ministry said more than 2,000 people have been killed so far in the ensuing strikes and raids.
Days after starting its ground incursion, Israel followed up with a strike that killed Nasrallah at Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut, bringing an end to his 32-year leadership of the militant group.
Iran moved hours later to launch a second missile attack on Israel.
Tehran is reported to have fired about 200 missiles at Israel on October 2, including its advanced Fattah missile capable of reaching speeds of Mach-5.
Escalations don’t bode well for the Middle East
According to history, Israel is unlikely to let that attack to go unanswered, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in a September 27 address to the UN General Assembly.
“We will strike you if you strike us. “Throughout the entire Middle East, there is no place that Israel’s long arm cannot reach, including Iran,” he declared.
Thousands of Israelis demonstrated last month over Netanyahu’s inability to broker a cease-fire agreement that would have allowed the captives who had been held in Gaza following the attack a year earlier to be freed.
Gili Roman, whose relative Carmel Gat was one of the six dead captives that the IDF retrieved in early September, and whose sister was abducted on October 7 before being freed, told BI last month that Netanyahu and his administration were “prioritizing themselves” over the hostages.
The globe is on edge due to the expectation of yet another round of ever-greater retribution, along with concerns that a full-scale conflict between Israel and Iran would destabilize the entire area.
The immediate concern on a global scale is that if the violence spreads to the rest of the Middle East, oil supplies will drastically decline.
A significant attack on Iran’s oil infrastructure, according to Citigroup analysts last week, may cut the world’s oil supply by 1.5 million barrels per day.
Israel ignores US red lines
For the past year, US President Joe Biden has been attempting to prevent the fight from expanding into a larger regional confrontation that would involve the US and other major powers.
He has made repeated attempts to coordinate increased humanitarian aid for civilians, mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, and curtail Israel’s campaign.
But Netanyahu has consistently violated Biden’s red lines and has continued to push forward against Hamas even as the civilian death toll soared and international condemnation to Israel’s campaign intensified.
The US has also stationed soldiers in the region to thwart additional Iranian aggression while simultaneously attempting to defuse the tension.
The US has also assisted in defending Israel against Iranian missile attacks, which have been instigated by the April killings and recent attacks on Hezbollah.
Two weeks ago, when Israel stepped up its attacks against Hezbollah, the US claimed to have mediated a potential cease-fire agreement. However, Israel assassinated Nasrallah the following day.
Critics of US policy contend that Netanyahu is attempting to preserve his precarious coalition government—many of whose far-right members favor escalating the war against Iran and its allies—out of self-interest.
“Neither Israel’s reliance on the US nor Netanyahu’s bond with Biden seem to concern him. His immediate political objectives are all that matter to him. Former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East strategy Andrew Exum wrote in The Atlantic last week, “Everyone but Biden can see this.”
The global economy on edge
There were concerns that a bigger conflict in the Middle East could have an effect on the world economy when the crisis started a year ago.
Following the October 7 assaults, oil prices did rise, reaching a peak of over $92 per barrel later in the month. However, they began to decline, reaching roughly $73 in mid-December.
In contrast, after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, oil prices rose to roughly $130 per barrel.
A broader conflict in the area, experts have warned Business Insider, may stifle global economic expansion and spark inflation.
In May, the Bank of Israel projected that the war’s expenses would come to approximately $66 billion by the end of the following year, or about 12% of Israel’s GDP.
Furthermore, compared to other regions, the Middle East experienced notably strong long-term economic repercussions from severe conflict in terms of real GDP per capita, according to a June IMF report.
It stated that ten years after a conflict starts, the real GDP per capita of Middle Eastern nations should fall by about 10% from its pre-conflict levels.