A fire that would burn Israel down: How Sinwar ruined Iran's dominance in Middle East - analysis

“In our view, the conditions in Israel after the Al-Aqsa Storm are historic, and in my opinion, it is the starting point of history itself.”

So said Iran’s Intelligence Minister Esmaeil Khatib on October 30, 2023, less than a month after Hamas’s barbaric assault (Al-Aqsa Storm). The attack – mass murder, rape, and abduction on a scale not seen in Israel’s history – was met not with condemnation by Tehran but with praise and triumphalism.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the assault “logical and legal,” adding that, “the Palestinians were right.”

One rather doubts whether he still believes today that “the Palestinians were right” about unleashing that “storm.”

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar believed that the massacre on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah would set off a chain of events that would redraw the Middle East map. It did – but not in the way he imagined.

Sinwar saw October 7 as a tidal wave against Israel

Sinwar hoped that October 7 would unleash a tidal wave: a multi-front war against Israel, mass uprisings in Arab capitals, and the collapse of normalization efforts between Israel and moderate Arab states.

He believed the sheer shock value of the operation would galvanize Iran’s network of proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen – to rise in concert and overwhelm the Jewish state. He expected that the Arab street would erupt in solidarity. He thought that the region would shift beneath Israel’s feet and swallow it up.

The calculated brutality of the attack – the ISIS-style atrocities, the abductions of women and children, the filming and dissemination of the massacres – was not incidental. It was part of the plan. Sinwar’s message to the region was clear: look what is possible, look what we can do, look how vulnerable Israel is.

The goal was not only to kill but to whet the appetite of all the other extremists in the region – and there is no lack of them – to spark a fire that would burn Israel down.

Even the date seems to have been chosen for maximum symbolic impact. October 7, 2023, fell a single day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – another surprise attack that rattled Israel and reshaped the Middle East.

Sinwar felt that he was launching an updated equivalent. But while Egypt and Syria in 1973 used conventional armies to challenge Israel, Sinwar believed that mass terror could achieve even bloodier and more far-reaching results.

But not only did the gamble fail, it backfired – spectacularly. Just how spectacularly is playing out right now in Iran.

Israelis didn’t believe, even after decades of conflict, that Hamas truly thought it could destroy the country. That disbelief was a failure of imagination. But Hamas did believe it. Sinwar spoke of it. Hamas’s clerics preached it. And Iran worked toward it, building up a proxy strategy to deter Israel, as well as the arsenal and infrastructure over decades to make its destruction a reality.

Sinwar hoped that his act of barbarism would mark the beginning of Israel’s end. Yes, it sounds crazy, but he believed it. Instead, it triggered the unraveling of the strategy Iran had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in and which it has spent the last three decades putting into place.

What has happened since October 7 is a methodical, deliberate reversal of what Sinwar had envisioned and what Iran had been planning for. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the early days of the war that Israel would change the face of the Middle East. Step by step, it has.

First, Hamas has been decimated militarily: most of its leaders are dead, and its arsenal is mostly wiped out. Gaza, its stronghold, is being dismantled.

Second, Hezbollah – the cornerstone of Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy – has been defanged, so much so that the Lebanese government, which for years was under Hezbollah’s thumb, on Friday warned Hezbollah against firing at Israel and dragging Lebanon into this war.

Syria, which Iran essentially turned into a client state, is a client state no more, depriving Tehran of being able to rebuild Hezbollah or turn it into a staging ground for attacks against Israel.

And now, after all that, Israel’s attention has turned from the tentacles of the octopus to the head of the octopus itself.

For more than three decades, Iran’s strategy was to surround Israel with heavily armed proxies, creating a deterrent wall so formidable that Jerusalem would never dare strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. And if Israel did strike, the logic went, the price would be unbearable.

But that strategy is now unraveling. Piece by piece, Israel has peeled away the layers. First Hamas, then Hezbollah, then Syria. Iran’s deterrent shield has been punctured. The Houthis are still standing, but they are geographically distant. And while they’ve shown they can be disruptive, they were always the weakest link in the axis.

Today, the IAF is operating in the skies over Iran with near-complete freedom – something that, if mentioned even a few weeks ago, would have been dismissed as pure fantasy.

Since October 7, Netanyahu has shown and preached patience and resolve. Now, that persistence is yielding results once thought unimaginable.

Just a short time ago, Iran – through its proxies – cast a long, menacing shadow over the entire Middle East. That shadow is now shrinking dramatically. And to think it all began with Sinwar’s attack on October 7 – a massacre intended to bring Israel to its knees. Instead, it may mark the moment the Middle East began to shift – not toward Israel’s collapse, but toward the unraveling of those who set out to destroy it.