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Oct. 7, 2023, ranks as the bleakest day in modern Israeli history, when a massive Hamas surprise attack killed more than 1,200 civilians, captured hundreds of hostages and humiliated the country’s vaunted intelligence and military services.
But a year later, it’s a very different picture as stunning Israeli victories have resuscitated the fortunes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and left Israel’s prime adversaries — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — reeling.
Hamas did notch one indisputable political victory with its terrorist rampage — putting the all-but-forgotten Palestinian cause back at the top of regional and world agendas.
But as all sides prepare Monday to mark a year of bloodshed and upheaval, that victory has been eclipsed by a remarkable rebound in Israel’s fortunes and standing in the region.
Even the Biden administration, Israel’s primary military patron, has been forced to the sidelines as Israel seizes what it sees as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to use the Oct. 7 attack to rewrite the region’s strategic map in its favor.
Mr. Netanyahu clearly sees it that way, using a visit Sunday with Israeli troops on the Lebanese border to discuss how the world has changed since the attack.
“In the past 12 months, we are changing the reality from end to end,” Mr. Netanyahu told the soldiers, according to Agence France-Presse. “The whole world is amazed by the blows you are delivering to our enemies. … Together we will fight, and together we will win.”
The endgame for the current crisis has yet to play out, but the year has brought profound losses for Israel’s most determined foes.
Analysts say Hamas has largely been broken as an effective military force in Gaza, while many of its top military and political leaders have been killed. Longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and almost the entire senior leadership corps of the Lebanese Shiite movement have also been wiped out by Israeli strikes, while Israel Defense Forces ground troops press a campaign to push back Hezbollah forces along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
Iran humiliations
Iran, which claims it did not know of the Oct. 7 attack plans ahead of time, has suffered a year of mounting humiliations.
SEE ALSO: Biden, Harris plead for peace in Israel and Gaza on Oct. 7 anniversary
Several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps senior commanders have been killed; Tehran’s two missile attacks on Israel were almost entirely turned aside by Israeli and allied missile defense systems; and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was shockingly assassinated in the heart of Tehran while attending the inauguration of a new Iranian president.
As Iranian leaders — and the world — brace for a widely anticipated Israeli response to the second missile salvo earlier this month, the key components of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” are in a far shakier state than they were on Oct. 6, 2023.
“In the last couple of months, with all of these targeted assassinations that Israel has conducted with the killing of Nasrallah, with the entry into Lebanon, we really see that it has turned the tables not just on Hezbollah, but on Iran more broadly,” Michael Doran, a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, said in a recent panel discussion.
“What really strikes me now is how Iran is rather naked before Israeli power, in a way that I would not have predicted at all just a couple of months ago,” he added.
Paul Salem, vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute, said Israel’s stunning intelligence and military successes against Hezbollah “leave Iran profoundly vulnerable.”
“Not only has Tehran lost (at least for several years) its primary strategic asset, but the Israeli side has demonstrated an intelligence and attack capacity — and willingness to take risks and casualties — that neither Hezbollah nor Iran saw coming,” he wrote in a recent analysis.
But the year has not been an unqualified success for Israel. The massive loss of life, the brutality of the Hamas attackers, and the vulnerabilities exposed on Oct. 7 continue to reverberate through the country.
Although his political fortunes have improved with Israel’s battlefield and intelligence successes, Mr. Netanyahu faces searing criticism at home over the fate of some 100 hostages still held by Hamas.
The violence and unrest of Gaza also has spread to the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. An Israeli airstrike just last week killed 18 Palestinians after hitting a coffee shop in the occupied West Bank, the first fighter-jet attack in that area since the Second Intifada during the early 2000s.
Diplomatic costs
There has been a diplomatic cost as well, as international criticism mounted in tandem with the tens of thousands of Gaza residents — including large numbers of civilians — killed in Israel’s retaliatory invasion of the densely populated Palestinian enclave.
For example, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ criticism of Israeli strikes, most specifically an August attack that accidentally hit a food-aid convoy, led Israel to declare him “persona non grata” last week and bar him from entering the country.
Relations with Washington, Israel’s strongest ally and top defense supplier, have also been badly strained.
President Biden has expressed mounting frustration with Israel as efforts by the U.S., Egypt and Qatar to negotiate a cease-fire and prisoner exchange in Gaza with Hamas have languished for months. Many think Israel’s successful strikes on Hezbollah’s leadership have dashed hopes of a diplomatic settlement for good.
The damage for the White House has been both political — the Middle East wars split the Democrats and threaten the political base of Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee — and strategic, with American leverage and influence in the region plummeting by the apparent U.S. inability to restrain the Jewish state.
“It is painful to witness the continuous humiliation of the U.S. president and government by Netanyahu,” veteran Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson, a former U.N. deputy secretary-general, wrote on social media last week.
While the U.S. has labored to keep the Gaza conflict from spreading, he added, “the prospect of a wider and more frightful war in no way intimidates” Mr. Netanyahu.
Even as Washington diverts more and more military assets to the region to protect both Israeli and American interests, “the United States is trapped in a reactive Middle East policy approach of its own making one year into a regional war that continues to expand,” Brian Katulis, senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Middle East Institute, wrote in a recent analysis.
“This strategic drift in U.S. policy is a direct result of the Biden administration’s wishful thinking and unwillingness to exert leverage through diplomacy backed by a coherent regional security approach. As a result, the United States has been unable to achieve nearly any of its stated diplomatic and security outcomes,” he said.
Murky end game
Despite Israel’s recent successes, regional specialists say it is far too early to tote up winners and losers.
U.S. officials say they have pressed Mr. Netanyahu repeatedly in vain for a vision of his “end game” to the conflicts with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and perhaps with Iran.
The carnage has already put in deep freeze any U.S.-Israeli push to normalize ties and build up an alliance against Iran with Arab states such as Saudi Arabia.
Scenes of suffering Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and now the reported deaths of some 1,400 Lebanese just in recent days have made any Arab diplomatic outreach to Israel politically toxic.
And while the fighting in Gaza has taken a back seat as Israel’s conflicts with Hezbollah and Iran heat up, the situation remains volatile: An Israeli strike on a mosque in the Gaza Strip early Sunday killed at least 19 people, The Associated Press reported, citing Palestinian officials.
The Pentagon announced Sunday that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was making yet another trip to Washington to discuss next steps with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Short-term military triumphs in the region have a way of turning into long-term headaches. Hamas may have been decimated as a fighting force by Israel’s campaign since Oct. 7, but the challenge of finding a workable political solution for the Palestinians remains.
“Hamas might suffer attrition in the short term. Its numbers and perhaps even capabilities may reach a level where they no longer present an imminent threat to Israel,” M.L. deRaismes Combes and John Nagl, both professors at the U.S. Army War College, wrote in a recent Foreign Policy.com symposium on the future of the region.
“But the manner in which Israel achieves any such pyrrhic victory has in reality already created the next generation of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or whatever other group feels pushed to the brink of despair and anger,” they said.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the affiliation for Michael Doran, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
• David R. Sands can be reached at dsands@washingtontimes.com.
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