Seven important consequences of the October 7th attack

A year ago today, Hamas militants left the Gaza Strip with gunfire and paragliding and rampaged across southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.

The attack triggered a geopolitical earthquake in a region controlled by a senior U.S. official describedjust a week earlier, as “quieter today than in two decades.”

The noise has been deafening ever since.

Israel responded with a heavy air and ground campaign in Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages. About half of them were released, most of them as part of a prisoner exchange deal. There are still 97 hostages in Gaza.

Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local Hamas-run health authorities. Thousands of children are among the dead. Nearly two million people in Gaza, almost 90% of the pre-war population, were forced from their homes and Israel was charged in international courts with war crimes, including genocide.

Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah escalated in southern Lebanon – last week Israel assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.

Tensions between Israel and Iran are also reaching their peak. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, possibly by attacking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rattle oil markets and the global economy.

We take a quick look at how the past year has shaped the outlook for seven key players in this story:

1. The Palestinians. Their plight is certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – notably Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to a possible Palestinian one represented statehood. Sympathy for the Palestinian cause has increased worldwide, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction and the occupation of the West Bank has only worsened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already declining in recent years, has fallen sharply, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on the rise these days.

2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before October 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was in a bind, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred under his watch, further diminishing his support. For months he seemed like an unpopular leader, kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change hands in the middle of a war. He was criticized at home for failing to secure the release of more hostages, but also by far-right ministers who wanted even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating long-time enemy Hezbollah, a policy that 90% of Israelis support, has paid off: it is him is rising again in the polls. How far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.

3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its top officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could still be alive, probably trapped in a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he was wrong if he believed that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a ceasefire or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the north would prompt Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the south. However, it is difficult to imagine that idea Hamas’ stance as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel has been defeated, especially after the destruction inflicted on the Palestinians by the IDF last year. It will be crucial next year to see whether the rest of Hamas can shape any aspect of a postwar Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.

4. Iran. Has Iran also miscalculated? Certainly, in the days after October 7, Tehran did not expect that Israel would launch such an offensive a year later, destroying Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and contemplating a major strike against Iran itself. This puts Iran in a difficult position. As the leader of the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, it must continue to resist through its proxies. But with these proxies now being installed by Israel, “Iran is exposed,” it says Cliff KupchanHead of Research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged the power dynamics and mood in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence has disappeared.” In his opinion, this means that Iran will now probably become more involved in its nuclear program. This program, of course, is something that Netanyahu is known to be desperate to destroy.

5. United States. The Biden administration has remained largely steadfast in its rhetorical, military and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and its supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a ceasefire or raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. partisan splits The question of Israel’s actions in Gaza will not be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access and immigration. But the issue could sway voting at the margins, as some progressives and Arab American voters in key swing states have vowed not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support of Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter locally: Kamala Harris And Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealing with the Palestinians, Hezbollah and Iran.

6. Russia. It certainly didn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see how much of the world’s attention was diverted from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US becomes embroiled in an intractable conflict in the Middle East, the better it is from its position, especially if regional unrest drives up oil prices. But the Kremlin must be careful. If Israel significantly weakens Hezbollah, it could unsettle the situation in Syria, where the group’s fighters represent an important ground force for the Russian protégé. Bashar al-Assad. And if a major Israeli-Iranian war breaks out, Moscow could be drawn deeper into a chaotic situation than it would like – after all, Putin is already fighting a war of his own close to home.

7. The Arab world. Public opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the USA. This was a particular challenge for the regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the United States. In Jordan, for example, Islamist opposition parties supporting Hamas surged in the polls even in a recent tightly controlled election. Saudi Arabia, currently arguably the leading Arab power, is closely monitoring the escalation of tensions between Israel and Iran. Saudi Arabia and Iran are long-standing rivals, but relations have improved recently and Riyadh has no interest in a major war as it seeks to push forward an ambitious economic and social modernization of the country. But Israel may have other ideas.