{"id":37689,"date":"2024-10-01T22:45:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T22:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=37689"},"modified":"2024-10-20T15:57:23","modified_gmt":"2024-10-20T15:57:23","slug":"irans-strikes-on-israel-are-the-latest-sign-that-the-conflict-in-the-middle-east-is-spiraling-presenting-rising-global-security-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/irans-strikes-on-israel-are-the-latest-sign-that-the-conflict-in-the-middle-east-is-spiraling-presenting-rising-global-security-threats\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran\u2019s strikes on Israel are the latest sign that the conflict in the Middle East is spiraling, presenting rising global security threats"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Javed Ali<\/a>, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran fired at least 180 ballistic missiles<\/a> at Israel on Oct. 1, 2024, amplifying tensions in the Middle East that are increasingly marked by \u201cescalation after escalation<\/a>,\u201d as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran\u2019s attacks \u2013 which Israel largely deterred with its Iron Dome missile defense system, along with help from nearby U.S. naval destroyers<\/a> \u2013 followed Israel\u2019s killing of Hassan Nasrallah<\/a>, the longtime leader of the Tehran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, on Sept. 27.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hezbollah has been sending rockets into northern Israel<\/a> since the start of the Gaza war, which began after Hamas and other militants invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and killed nearly 1,200 people<\/a>. Hezbollah\u2019s rocket attacks have displaced around 70,000 people<\/a> from their homes in northern Israel.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at the Conversation U.S., spoke with counterterrorism expert Javed Ali<\/a> to better understand the complex history and dynamics that are fueling the intensifying conflict in the Middle East.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"People
Israeli police officers inspect a damaged school building in the southern city of Gedera, following Iran\u2019s barrage of missiles fired on Oct. 1, 2024. Menahem Kahana\/AFP via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

How much more dangerous has the Middle East become in recent weeks?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Middle East is in much more volatile situation than it was even a year ago. This conflict has expanded far outside of fighting primarily between Israel and Hamas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, Israel and Hezbollah have a conflict that has developed over the past year that appears more dangerous than the Israel-Hamas one. This involves the use of Israeli special operations units<\/a>, which have operated clandestinely in Lebanon in small groups since November 2023. In addition, Israel has been accused by Hezbollah of conducting unconventional warfare operations \u2013 like the exploding walkie-talkies and pagers<\/a> \u2013 and launched hundreds of air and missile strikes in Lebanon<\/a> over the past few weeks. The combination of these operations has destroyed Hezbollah\u2019s weapons caches and military infrastructure and killed several senior leaders in the group<\/a>, including Hassan Nasrallah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human costs of these attacks is significant, as more than 1,000 people in Lebanon have died<\/a>. Among this total, it is unclear how many of the dead or wounded are actually Hezbollah fighters<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israel and Hezbollah last had a direct war in 2006<\/a>, which lasted 34 days and killed over 1,500 people between Lebanese civilians and Hezbollah fighters<\/a>. Since then, Israel and Hezbollah have been in a shadow war \u2013 but not with the same kind of intensity and daily pattern that we have seen in the post-Oct. 7 landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, the conflict has the potential to widen well outside the region, and even globally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does Iran have to do with the conflict between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Iran has said it fired the missiles<\/a> into Israel as retaliation for attacks on Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranian military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A coalition of groups and organizations has now been labeled as Iran\u2019s \u201cAxis of Resistance<\/a>.\u201d Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, and senior military commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or the IRGC, have issued unifying guidance to all the different elements, whether it is Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Oct. 7, 2023, all of these groups were ideologically opposed to Israel, to a degree. But they were also fighting their own conflicts and were not rallying around supporting Hamas. Now, they have all become more active around a common goal of destroying Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iran and Hezbollah, in particular, have a deep relationship, dating back to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon<\/a> in order to thwart cross-border attacks the Palestinian Liberation Organization<\/a> and other Palestinian groups were launching into Israel. The newly formed Iranian IRGC sent advisers and trainers to southern<\/a> Lebanon to work with like-minded Lebanese Shiite militants who were already fighting in Lebanon\u2019s civil war<\/a>. They wanted to fight against the Israeli military and elements of the multinational force comprised of U.S., French and other Western troops<\/a> that were originally sent as peacekeepers to put an end to the fighting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does Hezbollah\u2019s history help explain its operations today?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The relationships between these Iranian experts and Lebanese militants during Lebanon\u2019s 15-year civil war led to the formation of Hezbollah as a small, clandestine group<\/a> in 1982.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the following few years, Hezbollah launched a brutal campaign of terrorist attacks against U.S., French and other Western interests in Lebanon. The group, then known as Islamic Jihad, first attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983<\/a>. That attack killed 52 Lebanese and American embassy employees. However, at the time, U.S. intelligence personnel and other security experts were not clear who was responsible for the embassy bombing. And given this lack of understanding and insight on Hezbollah as an emerging terrorist threat<\/a>, the group aimed even higher later in 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the embassy attack, Hezbollah carried out the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing<\/a> that killed 241 U.S. service personnel. Before the 9\/11 attacks, this was the biggest single act of international terrorism against the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hezbollah was also responsible for the kidnapping and murder of American citizens<\/a>, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief for Beirut. And it carried out airplane hijackings, include the infamous TWA 847 incident<\/a> in 1985, in which a U.S. Navy diver was murdered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, Hezbollah has a long history of regional and global terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within Lebanon, Hezbollah is a kind of parallel government to Lebanon. The Lebanese government has allowed Hezbollah to be this state within a state, but they don\u2019t collaborate on military operations. Currently, the Lebanese military is not responding to Israel\u2019s attacks on Lebanon. This shows how dominant of a force Hezbollah has become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How damaging are Israel\u2019s attacks on Hezbollah?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Hezbollah has clearly taken losses in fighters, but Hezbollah is a far bigger group<\/a> than Hamas and operates on a much bigger physical territory across Lebanon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has far more inventory of advanced weapons than Hamas ever did, and a large fighting force that includes 40,000 to 50,000 regular forces<\/a> organized into a conventional military structure. It also has 150,000 to 200,000 rockets<\/a>, drones and missiles of varying range. It operates a dangerous global terrorist unit known as the External Security Organization<\/a> that has attacked Israeli and Jewish interests in the 1990s in Argentina<\/a> and Jewish tourists in 2012 in Bulgaria<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Israeli military assesses they have destroyed at least half of Hezbollah\u2019s existing weapons stockpile, based on the volume and intensity<\/a> of their operations over the past few weeks. If true, this, would present a serious challenge to Hezbollah\u2019s long-term operational capability that took decades to acquire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What security risks does this evolving conflict present for the US?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Looking at how Hezbollah demonstrated these capabilities over a 40-year stretch of time, and based now on how Israel has hit the militant group, it would not be a stretch to speculate that Hezbollah has ordered or is considering some kind of terrorist attack far outside the region \u2013 similar to what the group did in Argentina<\/a> in 1992 and 1994. What that plot would like look, how many people would be involved, and the possible target of any such attack are not clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hezbollah\u2019s leaders have said that they blame Israel for the attacks on it. About a week before Nasrallah\u2019s death, he said that Israel\u2019s exploding pager and walkie-talkie operations<\/a> in Lebanon were a \u201cdeclaration of war\u201d and the \u201cthe enemy had crossed all red lines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Hezbollah has remained defiant, in spite of the significant losses the group has sustained by Israel these past few weeks. Questions also remain about how Hezbollah\u2019s leadership will likewise hold the U.S. responsible for Israel\u2019s actions. And if so, would that mean a return to the type of terrorism that Hezbollah inflicted on U.S. interests in the region in the 1980s? As recent events have shown, the world is facing a dangerous and volatile security environment in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Javed Ali<\/a>, Associate Professor of Practice of Public Policy, University of Michigan<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Javed Ali, University of Michigan Iran fired at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Oct. 1, 2024, amplifying tensions in the Middle East that are increasingly marked by \u201cescalation after escalation,\u201d as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it. Iran\u2019s attacks \u2013 which Israel largely deterred with its Iron Dome missile defense system, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":37690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[817,46,47,4],"tags":[7481,2122,3666,14757,14695,885,891,886,860],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37689"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37814,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37689\/revisions\/37814"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}