Iran shot at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Oct. 1, 2024, heightening tensions in the Middle East that are increasingly characterised by “escalation after escalation,” as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres placed it. Iran’s attacks – which Israel especially deterred with its Iron Dome missile defence system, along with support from nearby U.S. naval destroyers – followed Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime head of the Tehran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, on Sept. 27.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into northern Israel since the beginning of the Gaza war, which began after Hamas and other militants overran Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and killed nearly 1,200 people. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks have expelled around 70,000 people from their homes in northern Israel.
The Middle East is in much more explosive situation than it was even a year ago. This conflict has extended far outside of clashing primarily between Israel and Hamas. Now, Israel and Hezbollah have a dispute that has developed over the past year that appears more difficult than the Israel-Hamas one. This involves the usage of Israeli special operations units, which have worked clandestinely in Lebanon in small companies since November 2023. In addition, Israel has been charged by Hezbollah with conducting unconventional warfare functions – like flaring walkie-talkies and pagers – and threw hundreds of air and missile strikes in Lebanon over the past few weeks. The variety of these operations has destroyed Hezbollah’s spear caches and military infrastructure and killed several senior executives in the group, including Hassan Nasrallah.
The human costs of these episodes are significant, as more than 1,000 individuals in Lebanon have perished. Among this total, it is ambiguous how many of the dead or wounded are actually Hezbollah fighters. Israel and Hezbollah last had a direct fight in 2006, which lasted 34 days and extinguished over 1,500 people between Lebanese civilians and Hezbollah fighters. Since then, Israel and Hezbollah have been in a cloudy war – but not with the same kind of vigour and daily pattern that has been noticed in the post-Oct. 7 landscape. Now, the conflict has the prospect to widen well outside the region, and even globally.
