Carlo Versano
On Sept. 29, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan took the stage at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., looking upbeat.
Sullivan, a former adviser to both President Obama and Hillary Clinton now running point on foreign policy for the Biden administration, was there for a conversation about “American Democracy at a crossroads” centered mostly on the war in Ukraine.
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Sullivan said toward the end of his remarks, using a line he had written in an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine about America’s geopolitical strategies.
It was a statement that reflected the views of policymakers and well-respected analysts around the world.
Eight days later, as the sun was rising on an early autumn Saturday just after the Jewish high holidays, Hamas terrorists breached the security perimeter where the Gaza Strip borders southern Israel by land and air, launching a brutal day-long, multi-pronged attack.
When it was over, some 1,400 people were dead, and more than 200 others had been taken back to Gaza as hostages. Another casualty was that “quieter” Middle East, and the long-held belief among Israelis that their borders and homes were secure.
Now, one month after the attack, Israeli troops are mired in the nation's first ground war in Gaza in nearly a decade.
Iran and its proxy groups in the region — Hezbollah in particular — have threatened to open new fronts to defend Hamas. American aircraft carrier groups and nuclear submarines are positioned in the eastern Mediterranean amid fears of a wider war.
And in communities across the U.S., views of the conflict have been riven in ways many Americans haven’t seen since the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003, in scenes playing out on city sidewalks and college campuses across the country.
The Aftermath: Israel
Hamas’ initial surprise assault took aim at civilian targets, including an electronic music festival and several sleepy kibbutzim, the collectivist communities that dot much of Israel.
Even now, after so many stories and images have been shared, it's hard to describe or comprehend the carnage. Children were murdered in their beds and in ovens. Young women were kidnapped, paraded naked, and then killed. Young parents were executed in front of their babies. First responders are still recalling traumatizing scenes of unspeakable barbarity.
The remains of Israeli children found after the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eriEylon Levy/X
Beyond the dead, another 6,900 people were injured that Saturday, and nearly 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes, government spokesman Eylon Levy said Monday.
In the month since Oct. 7, more than 9,000 rockets have been fired at Israel, Levy added. Those rockets have come mainly from Hamas in Gaza, but also from Israel’s other enemies in the region, including Houthi rebels in Yemen, militant groups operating from Syria and Iraq, and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.
The Aftermath: Gaza
Israel’s response to the massacre has been a siege and war in Gaza, where it has vowed to destroy Hamas no matter the cost. The war has already been more ferocious than any prior Israeli incursion, and the relentless campaign of bombings more intense than any war in decades, leading to growing international calls for a ceasefire.
On the eve of the one-month mark, the death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza crossed 10,000, among them thousands of children, according to figures from the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. More than 25,000 have been injured. Another 1.4 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been displaced from their homes, according to figures from international aid groups.
In the hospitals that are still operating in the Strip, the situation ranges from bad to worse, according to journalists reporting from the region (all of whom are doing their jobs at their own considerable risk).
At least 37 journalists have been killed in Gaza in the past month, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian. The United Nations said Monday that the toll of its workers had reached 88, more than in any conflict since the U.N.'s founding more than seven decades ago.
Gaza's hospitals have also been a symbol of the modern informational warfare at play.
An Oct. 17 explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital was quickly and widely reported based on Hamas statements to have been the result of an Israeli missile strike with hundreds of casualties; soon after, after that story rocketed around the world on phones and social feeds, multiple sources had determined that an errant rocket from a Palestinian militant group had likely been to blame, and that the death toll had been far lower than initial reports.
But Israeli strikes have hit schools, hospitals, and ambulances — all explained by the IDF as legitimate military targets because Hamas strategically hides its operations behind civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
On the Israeli side, at least 34 IDF soldiers have died in the ground offensive as of Monday.
Amid the growing humanitarian crisis in the besieged Strip, roughly 420 truckloads of aid have been allowed in as of the past weekend. While that number has been increasing in recent days, it remains far below the level of aid Gaza requires even in relatively peaceful times.
Meanwhile, Hamas has released only five of the roughly 240 hostages it took to Gaza on Oct. 7. The fate and condition of the remaining hostages remain largely unknown.
A Geopolitical Lightning Bolt
Among the biggest questions in the days after Oct. 7 was whether Iran, which supports Hamas, had been aware of — or actively participated in — the terrorist attack. On Oct. 8, the Wall Street Journal reported a bombshell suggesting that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had helped Hamas plot the assault and given the final sign-off.
That report has since been widely criticized, and few other media outlets have reported that the Iranians were involved in — let alone knew — what Hamas leaders were planning. (For its part, the Journal has stood by its reporting.)
But there is no question when it comes to Iran's considerable influence among various proxy militant groups, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis in Yemen. Iranian leaders have warned Israel and the U.S. of crossing "red lines" in the attacks in Gaza, and when asked to respond to the Iranian threats of escalation, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a one-word response: "Don't."
The Pentagon deployment of a pair of aircraft carrier groups to the Mediterranean was seen as a warning to Iran not to intervene directly; perhaps as a way of augmenting the warning, American officials in recent days also took the rare step of acknowledging that a U.S. nuclear submarine was in the region.
Making matters more complicated, Russia's proxy groups have shown signs of getting involved, with reports that the paramilitary Wagner Group is considering sending arms to Hezbollah.
The war in Gaza has also had ripple effects on the grinding, 20-month-old war in Ukraine. The shift in global attention to the Hamas attacks and Israel's retaliatory strikes have left Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy concerned that the war his troops are fighting with Russia (which his own top commander said last week may be headed for a "stalemate,") risks losing both political and public support in the West. On Saturday, Zelenskyy said the war in Gaza was "taking away the focus" from Ukraine, adding that was "one of the goals" of the Kremlin.
Divisions in the U.S.
As Americans awoke on the morning of Oct. 7 to the scenes of horror from Israel, the images drew widespread comparisons to the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks. "Israel's 9/11" became an early rallying cry. Sympathy for Israel, a stalwart U.S. ally, was profound and widely expressed.
But as the days and weeks passed, and the Israeli response took shape, the sympathy ebbed in many quarters.
In some places, that change came early. On the day after the massacre, as Israelis were still trying to make sense of who was dead, who was alive, and who had been kidnapped, a letter signed by a group of pro-Palestinian student organizations at Harvard University placed the blame for the attacks squarely on Israel’s government and its past policies in Gaza and the West Bank.
That letter, followed by similar statements from groups at other elite universities, set in motion a reckoning for many American Jews who have long seen themselves as allies of the college-educated progressive left.
Deep-pocketed Jewish donors closed their checkbooks, protesters and counter-protesters clashed in quads and libraries, and some university administrators — the same people who were quick to put out statements on politically fraught topics like the election of Donald Trump and the murder of George Floyd, as even many liberals dryly noted — either stayed silent on Hamas' massacre or issued equivocal statements calling for an end to "violence everywhere."
A woman looks at posters showing pictures of Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants since the October 7 attack, near Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023
At the same time, a grassroots street art project was gathering steam in cities around the country, beginning in New York. A pair of Israeli artists, feeling helpless in the aftermath of the attack on their homeland, printed fliers bearing the word "KIDNAPPED" with photos of the Israeli hostages, along with a QR code urging others to print and post their own.
Those fliers, reminiscent of the thousands of “missing” posters that appeared across Manhattan after 9/11, quickly became their own flashpoint in a roiling national discourse. People were filmed tearing them down in New York and Miami, complaining that they were propaganda, or fake, or didn’t take into account the fate of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
The White House, meanwhile, hoping to focus on a booming economy one year out from what looks increasingly like a nail-biter of an election, found itself shuttling the president and his top diplomat to the region in the hopes that the U.S. could broker, at the very least, a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza to help evacuate civilians.
No such pause has been forthcoming.
As for Jake Sullivan and that Foreign Affairs article — when it finally went to press, the magazine excised his comments about the “quiet Middle East.” But toward the end of the piece, Sullivan acknowledged what has since become clear: that things can go south in a hurry when it comes to geopolitics.
“The United States has been surprised in the past,” Sullivan wrote. “[I]t will likely be surprised in the future, no matter how hard the government works to anticipate what is coming.”
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