As early as December 27, 2023, speaking to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, defense minister Yoav Gallant said: “We are in a multifront war and coming under attack from seven theaters.” He added that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were taking action on six of them.

On July 1, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu elaborated on this to a group of visiting US leaders. Israel, he told them, is engaged in defending itself on at least seven fronts, all Iranian-inspired and supported. He listed them: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq, Syria and the West Bank, and Iran itself. Iran has dubbed them the Axis of Resistance.

Yet even though all seven look to the Iranian regime for financial and military support, and act under its guidance, to regard the Axis as anything like a unified or integrated opponent would be to misread the situation. The alliance is, in fact, inherently unstable, and therefore vulnerable.

In mounting its bloodthirsty incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas certainly did not realize it was biting off more than it could chew. Its leadership must have calculated that the organization could absorb an inevitable and massive Israeli retaliation. They certainly never foresaw that they were dealing themselves a death blow. In the event, Hamas’s military strength has been literally decimated by Israel’s defense forces, and whatever shape a ceasefire deal may take, Hamas will never rule in Gaza again.

The Iranian regime became interested in Hamas in the early 1990s, when the organization broke with Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo Accords. It became clear that Hamas was one hundred percent rejectionist, and........

© Eurasia Review