Since 2021, when Hamas fired rockets at Israel to “retaliate” for Israeli actions it was unhappy with relating to the Temple Mount and east Jerusalem, Israel has experienced a growing multifront threat.
This grew to include Hezbollah and Syria in April 2023, when rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria all around the same time to retaliate for disputes between Israel and Palestinian rioters on the Temple Mount.
But the apex of this multifront threat was the October 7 massacre, which forced Israel to fight significant and extended wars simultaneously against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and five other fronts: Iran, proxies of Iran in Syria, Yemen’s Houthis, proxies of Iran in Iraq, and terrorists in the West Bank.
Has the November 27 ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s expulsion from Syria with the fall of the Assad regime in December, and the January 15 ceasefire with Hamas ended the multifront threat?
The theory behind the multifront threat – or “ring of fire,” as its architect, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, coined it in 2017, before his assassination in 2020 – was simple: to overwhelm Israel simultaneously on many fronts.
Soleimani and Israel’s other enemies knew that one-on-one, none of them could directly defeat or even seriously challenge Israel. But if they all started to attack at once, striking all parts of the home front at once, they might overwhelm Israel by forcing it to split its forces, they hoped. Hamas could hammer the South and Hezbollah the North, but it was doubtful that either could seriously harm the whole country.
The battle against Iran's proxies
Collectively, Iran’s proxies could possibly defeat Israel just by the sheer number of moving threats from different spots, or at the very least, they could force Jerusalem into various strategic concessions that would improve the power and standing of Tehran’s axis.
By February 2023, The Jerusalem Post had been told by defense sources that the Islamic Republic was expected to take more aggressive and risky actions to exploit the multifront threat against Israel.
At select points over the past 15 months, Iran and its proxies may have thought that the multifront strategy had borne fruit.
It was not just the 1,200 Israelis Hamas slaughtered and the 250 it took hostage on October 7, 2023. It was also the 10,600 rockets that Hamas fired at central and southern Israel, including sometimes hundreds a day at Tel Aviv, from October 2023 until January 2024, with some continued rocket fire from time to time throughout 2024.
Israel decided to allow Hezbollah to destroy portions of the North, including evacuating more than 60,000 residents from their homes for 13 months to escape rocket fire.
From mid-September to late-November 2024, one-third of northern Israel spent significant time under lockdown due to rocket fire from Hezbollah.
For a year, Israel endured periodic ballistic missiles from Yemen’s Houthis, many of which would send two to three million people in the center of the country into bomb shelters in the middle of the night.
While 2024 was somewhat better than 2023 in that regard, the combined level of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israelis from the West Bank in 2023-2024 has been off the charts. And, of course, soldiers were periodically killed by drones from Syria and Iraq.
But that has not been the majority of the story, and it certainly is not the end of the story.
Israel ultimately brought Hezbollah to its knees. Thirteen months after promising not to drop out of the war unless Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Lebanese terrorist group – now without its assassinated leader Hassan Nasrallah – left with its tail between its legs.
Hezbollah remains the strongest power in Lebanon, but at least it is currently agreeing to political compromises with more moderate forces in Lebanon that it would never have dreamed of prior to the war.
The Assad regime and Iran’s foothold in Syria are gone.
Iran threatened to immediately attack the Jewish state a third time after IDF aircraft destroyed most of its best air defenses, some of its ballistic-missile production, and one nuclear site on October 26. But so far, it has not done so.
Hamas promised it would only negotiate about the return of hostages if the IDF first withdrew from Gaza, but eventually, it cut a ceasefire deal in which the military would remain in part of Gaza until all (or at least most) of the hostages were returned.
All 24 of Hamas’s battalions had been dismantled by the IDF by last June.
And the architects of Hamas’s war, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif were both killed, along with Ismail Haniyeh and most of its prewar leadership.
There are open questions about whether, after the ceasefire, Hamas will retain full control of Gaza or whether, in order to receive aid to rebuild, it will need to accept some hybrid rule with the Palestinian Authority and other regional and global parties.
Is all of this enough to have convinced Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and other anti-Israel forces that the multifront strategy awoke the sleeping Israeli lion and blew up in their face?
In addition to avoiding any major altercation with Israel for the next year, and possibly years, as a tactical matter to find time to rebuild and rearm, will at least some of these various enemies conclude strategically that they should limit any conflict with Israel, if any, to their own specific interests?
Put differently, given that Israel has more power and leverage on nearly every front (it is far weaker today in global legitimacy than at any time in decades) than it did before October 7, has the theory of multifront war with Israel been disproven?
Prior to the October 7 massacre, Israel was afraid to fight with Hezbollah – even about moving a small tent 10 meters into an open field in Israeli territory – lest a small conflict trigger a larger Hezbollah rocket onslaught.
Might different parties also draw different conclusions, with some being less interested in conflict with Israel, but Iran possibly merely altering its conflict strategy to new avenues, including the nuclear weapons path, global terrorism, and cyberwarfare?
It is too early to say, and a lot of what various parties conclude depends on whether Hamas’s threat from Gaza remains reduced and whether Israel succeeds in a broader normalization initiative with the Saudis.
Some observers also believe that some of Israel’s enemies, even after the beating they have received, still view Israel as more beatable given the October 7 massacre and the punishment the home front took for 15 months.
But there is at least hope that one strategic positive change from this war may be getting Israel’s enemies to think twice about whether joining someone else’s war with Israel is in their interest.