Hamidreza Azizi & Julien Barnes-Dacey
Out of the shadows
The war in Gaza is nudging the longstanding conflict between Iran and Israel out of the shadows. Much international political attention remains focused on Israel’s devastating actions in Gaza since Hamas’s horrific attacks on 7 October. But Iran, its allies and proxies in the “axis of resistance”, and Israel are also already engaged in a low-level war across the Middle East, which is edging closer than ever to a direct Iranian-Israeli clash. Iran wields its most powerful influence in Lebanon and Syria, and it is there that there is the greatest risk of the shadow conflict escalating into a full-blown regional war.
On the Lebanese front, Israel and the Iranian-backed Hizbullah movement have seen their most intense clashes since the 2006 Lebanon war. The Syrian theatre, meanwhile, risks sparking an even more deadly direct conflict between Israel and Iran. Since October 2023 Iranian-backed militias have launched more than 170 attacks against American bases in Syria and Iraq, with the United States responding in kind following the deaths of three of its soldiers in an attack on the Syria-Jordan border on 28 January. Then on 1 April, Israel bombed the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus. The attack – its most overt on Iranian sovereign territory to date – killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander in charge of Iran’s Syrian and Lebanese operations. Iran retaliated on 13 April, launching more than 300 missiles and drones against Israel in an unprecedented, if cautiously calibrated, direct response.
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