The New Middle East
The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 set a series of events in motion that have shifted the balance of power in the region in a way the terrorists themselves never intended.
The Gaza-based Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, were slaughtered and 250 taken hostage, ended up radically restructuring the Middle East—though not in the way the Palestinian terrorists or their Iranian patrons had envisioned. After fourteen months of hostilities, Israel has emerged as the dominant power in the region and Iran has been brought low: its regime now fears for its life and dreads an Israeli or Israeli-American assault on its strategic assets, including its oil and nuclear installations. Recent reports tell of major power outages in Tehran and non-functioning factories throughout the country, which is under severe international economic sanctions, and of fears of what the incoming Trump administration might yet do.
The Israeli counteroffensive that followed 7 October mauled first Hamas and then Iran’s chief regional proxy: Lebanon’s Islamist organisation, Hezbollah. And in a massive air assault in October 2024, Israel destroyed Iran’s air defence network as well as many rocket production and storage sites, leaving the country much weakened and humiliated. The devastation of Hamas and Hezbollah led almost directly to the overthrow on 7–8 December 2024 of the tyrannical Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus by its internal opponents and to the dismantling of Syria’s army. The fall of the Assad regime was the severest blow Tehran has suffered since 1988, when it began to project its power and consolidate alliances around the Middle East following the stalemate that ended the Iran–Iraq war.
Ever since 2011, when Assad’s army and police brutally crushed a rebellion unleashed during the region-wide anti-establishment tumult called the “Arab Spring,” Syria has been embroiled in a civil war that pitted the Assad regime, supported by Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah forces, against a host of rebel organisations led by Sunni Islamist militias. During those 13 years of civil war about half a million Syrians died, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, tens of thousands were disappeared, and perhaps as many as ten million fled the country. More than five million Syrians are currently dispersed in neighbouring Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, and many of them must be currently weighing whether to return to their devastated homeland.
