Amin Saikal
Another round of Israel-Hezbollah tit-for-tat attacks is over for now, but the danger of an all-out war continues to haunt the Middle East. Both sides have said that despite their reluctance to escalate, they are prepared for it.
It is nearly 11 months since Hamas’s declaration of war on Israel on 7 October 2023. With no end in sight to that war, the Middle East has been teetering on the edge of a regional conflict whose scope and intensity could be more devastating than any since the 1967 and 1973 Israeli-Arab wars.
In a new war, Israel is set to be confronted not by Arab state armies, but by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its regional network of affiliates, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Syrian regime and the Yemeni Houthis in particular. With the United States acting as Israel’s security guarantor, and its global adversaries in China and Russia as well as North Korea supporting Iran, there is little chance of confining the impact of the war to the regional antagonists alone.
All parties in the current conflict are aware of the magnitude of such a scenario, and this has so far deterred them from allowing the conflict to expand into a regional confrontation. Yet, the situation is unsustainable in the medium to long run.
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