ISRAEL’S war has expanded on all fronts. For a whole year, a determined offensive turned Gaza into ruins. But the September 17th pager blasts marked the point after which the focus of operations shifted to Lebanon. Stepping up at the same time are Israeli raids in the West Bank and Houthi strikes on Israel, including a missile strike targeting Ben-Gurion Airport that the Houthis explicitly stated was meant to coincide with PM Netanyahu’s flight back home from New York, meaning the Houthis have turned Israel’s policy of targeted assassination back on them.
I can say with complete certainty that this is not where the expansion of violence will end. We are beyond the point at which de-escalation is possible and the long-dreaded scenario of war between Israel and Iran is currently in the making. The question is, how bad will this conflict ultimately get? Likely, the Middle East is about to experience the mother of all its wars (it’s already happened in Europe, as Ukraine is Europe’s biggest war since 1945). The region is a patchwork of faultlines and what started in Gaza on October 7, 2023, is causing it all to unravel. If we look at the character of all the chess pieces lined up, we can foresee the nature of the fighting in store for the Middle East.
The most important fact to realize is that the war is not going to spread across the region but instead through the region, meaning most places will not see direct fighting. Gaza, where most fighting till now has been confined, is an extremely tiny strip of land. Lebanon is a small country and Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah are mostly in southern Lebanon. The other potential battlegrounds are the West Bank, Houthi-controlled western Yemen, the Golan Heights and Israel itself, all tiny fractions of Middle East territory. But they are not the only places that will see action. Lebanon’s entry into the conflict means that war has now penetrated the corridor stretching between Israel and its arch-enemy Iran, a vast region comprising Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. All three unstable and violence-ridden countries are going to become an open battleground if Iran goes to war with Israel and its Western allies. Expect to see lots of airstrikes and commando raids, as well as denial activities against Western maritime presence in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, possibly even the Eastern Mediterranean.
The coming war is not going to be anything like ISIS’s heyday, when the Islamic Caliphate was trying to conquer as much territory as it could and various forces fought to reclaim it. Instead, the fighting will remain concentrated in small spaces or scattered across wide distances, just as it has been the past year. But its potential scale will be huge. Most of the Middle East’s wars in recent memory have been between local sectarian groups. But the current unfolding conflict is a veritable clash between civilizations. On one side is Israel and the forces of the West on standby. On the other is the network of groups united under the banner of Iran’s Axis of Resistance. Both sides have one goal: to counter the other.
How many innocents will be caught in the crossfire? Ukraine and Sudan have hosted massive humanitarian crises as fighting spread across spaces home to tens of millions. But if the Middle East is not going to be like that, then surely most of its population will be unscathed save for the unlucky inhabitants of strategic locales like Gaza and South Lebanon, right? Actually, the knock-on effects of the great confrontation underway will be huge. That includes economic devastation as trade links and energy supplies come under fire. Also, allegations that Iran threatened to attack Arab states if they hosted strikes against Iran suggest nations of the Middle East may end up trying to destroy each other, with fire raining down on cities and economic hubs. Certainly, wars of a certain stature are difficult to contain within just a few countries. That’s the grand lesson of 1914 and 1939.
Furthermore, the main war may cause various other conflicts in the Middle East to flare up. Added stress can make pre-existing sectarian tensions boil over into violence. We’ve seen Donald Trump use hurricanes Helene and Milton to rile up anti-immigrant sentiment in America, because that is what disasters do. Iraq and Syria are likely to plunge back into full-scale violence under the shadow of combat between major powers. Finally, since Iran is now nuclear-latent, another thing to brace for is the arrival of Iran’s first nuke or a desperate Israeli/NATO action to counter the possibility.
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
