Two years have passed since the October 7, 2023 operation that Hamas called a “flood”. The operation changed the region, especially the “lawless spaces” where the state has been hollowed out: Lebanon, Assad’s Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and at the center, Iran.
Two years into a war that could have ended months after it began, if Hamas and its backers, particularly what intelligence agencies dubbed the “Beirut Room,” where the operation was plotted and planned, had weighed the consequences, or if Netanyahu and Israel had wanted the war to end.
Hamas convinced itself that “steadfastness” was victory and that Netanyahu would be crushed by the weight of the domestic divisions that had preceded the attack. Their base amplified the illusion and believed in it. Hamas’s most grave miscalculation was assuming that Iran and its proxies would rush to its aid under the banner of a “unity of fronts.”
That never happened. Netanyahu dismantled those “fronts” one by one. Like Hamas, he had no interest in ending the war. Israel hit Hezbollah hard with the pager operation, after which Hassan Nasrallah delivered what sounded like a farewell speech, seemingly aware that it was “game over” for him and his reckless party.
Israel hunted Hamas leaders down. It took out Hezbollah’s top brass after having already begun targeting the party in Syria. Its operations signaled that Iran itself would be next, though its ongoing diversion campaigns kept many guessing.
Some believed that former President Biden would restrain Netanyahu. He did not. Netanyahu escalated. He bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus and assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran under the nose of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In Iraq, those in power saw the imbalance. The militias waned, and some surrendered without a fight. Just yesterday, our paper published a striking investigative report on the Iraqi cliques tied to Iran, which was itself hit by a 12-day campaign.
The report quoted a former Iraqi minister laying Iran’s “Plan B” in Iraq. “New Shiite political players who stayed out of the Al-Aqsa Flood fallout are now trying to rebrand themselves, updating their radical image with a civilian face to escape the danger zone.” He then added: “It’s like a man standing in a sniper’s sights, a laser dot fixed on his chest. He cannot move right or left - any motion could be fatal. The sniper will not tire as long as the target remains frozen.”
In fact, “some militia leaders are now toying with the idea of returning weapons to storage and shaving their beards, which could make them very useful to both Washington and Tehran,” according to the same minister. But that too was misguided - an extension of the consistent misjudgements that followed October 7.
It is misguided because some still pin their hopes on President Trump, or whoever comes after him, reining in Netanyahu, even as recent reports show that under Biden and now Trump, the United States has provided Israel with no less than $21.7 billion in military aid since the “flood” that swallowed its own.
The battle will certainly not end with a ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu and Trump have larger targets: Iran itself, whether by force or sanctions. As for the Houthis, they are a minor detail, and their demise is only a matter of time.
It has been two years. But they felt like an eternity, and it isn’t over.
