Iran's disastrous year

English original of article published today in Italian by La Stampa, one year after Hamas's October 7 atrocity

The year since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel has been a tragedy for everyone concerned. It leaves many questions unanswered about what the future might hold for Gaza, for the Palestinians, for Lebanon and for Israel. But one thing is abundantly clear but too often overlooked: the year has been a strategic disaster for Iran.

Every element of Iran’s strategy in the Middle East has either been destroyed or damaged. The proxy forces through which it has sought to destabilise and undermine Israel and the region as a whole have all been badly hit. And, perhaps worst of all, Israel has shown with devastating effect that its spies have penetrated not only those proxy forces but also the heart of Iran’s government itself, succeeding in killing a Hamas leader inside a Tehran guesthouse run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, supposedly the toughest branch of the Iranian armed forces.

Hamas, which until October 7^th last year was governing Gaza and deploying its military forces in a network of tunnels and from bases hidden in schools, hospitals and other civilian sites, has lost most of its forces and military supplies, along with its control over Gaza.

Hizbollah, which for more than three decades has controlled most of southern Lebanon and pulled the strings of Lebanese politics, is still being dismantled, with all its top leaders killed and many of its arsenal of Iranian-supplied rockets destroyed. Even Iran’s proxy in further-flung Yemen, the Houthis, have been attacked by the Israeli Defence Force, as have been Islamic Revolutionary Guard bases in Syria.

It is natural that most attention has been focused on the tragedy in Gaza and especially the plight of Palestinian civilians. It is also natural that many questions are being posed about what Israel intends to do and how it expects this war to end: its tactics have undoubtedly been highly successful, especially with regard to Hizbollah, but its strategy remains disturbingly unclear. Yet this leaves out a central part of the reality, and of the story.

The real, underlying tragedy of the Palestinians, whether in Gaza, the West Bank or in refugee camps in Lebanon, is that none of the warring parties seems to care much about their fate: not Israel, quite clearly, given the way it fights and given its government’s disdain for any idea of a Palestinian state; not Hamas, for it has used them as human shields and it was its atrocities that brought war back into Gaza again; not Hizbollah, whose actions have always been aimed at Israel’s very existence as a state, not at its treatment of the Palestinians; and certainly not Iran, the puppet-master of all these proxy forces and Israel’s ultimate enemy.

Iran’s religious and military leaders may have been happy during the past year to find themselves supplying military drones and other weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine. They may also have been happy to see Iran labelled as being part of a network of autocratic aggression connecting together China, North Korea, Russia and themselves. But these crumbs of comfort cannot make up for the strategic disaster that has been unfolding in recent months.

On each of the occasions when Iran has responded to an Israeli attack by firing missiles at Israeli targets the effect has been minimal. To the wider world this has been a good thing, for it has shown that Iran has no appetite, or capacity, for escalating the conflict into a full-scale war. Yet from Iran’s own point of view these displays of weakness amid strategic disarray merely indicate the country’s vulnerability and, in the new absence of previously powerful proxy forces, impotence.

Two possible consequences follow. One, which has been much discussed, is that Iran may seek to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them, perhaps with Russian help. On its own, however, becoming a nuclear-weapons state would simply balance things out with the already nuclear-armed Israel. It would make Iran less vulnerable to attack or invasion, but it has only been Iran’s nuclear programme that has made an attack seem likely. After Israel’s recent successes, no one can rule out such an attack in the coming weeks or months, or sabotage by more Israeli agents, even though Iran’s nuclear facilities are well protected and dispersed.

The second, perhaps likelier, consequence is that Iran, with the remnants of Hezbollah or Hamas, may now try to plot a major terrorist attack overseas, whether against Jewish targets or American ones. Such an attack would be one of the few ways in which Iran and its proxies can show that they are still to be feared, and would have the added aim of encouraging and inspiring the next generations of fighters to emerge.

From Israel’s point of view, the big gain from this year-long war has been the damage it has succeeded in doing to Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, and the damage its intelligence agencies have done to the confidence and sense of security in those proxies and all those territories. The key question now is whether Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decides to press that advantage home by further major attacks, or whether he concludes that weakening the enemy and re-establishing fear of Israel’s military power has been enough. Iran, especially, is wondering what his answer might be.