Has Israel ended the multifront threat?

Will Israel's enemies worry more about their own interests or Iran’s ‘ring of fire’?

By YONAH JEREMY BOB JANUARY 16, 2025 14:23

DEMONSTRATORS HOLD posters of (from left) former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh alongside former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and of Nasrallah next to former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, at a protest in Tunis. Israel is now regionally stronger, but internal divisions are deeper, the writer argues. (photo credit: Jihed Abidellaoui/Reuters)

Since 2021, when Hamas fired rockets on Israel to “retaliate” for Israeli actions it was unhappy with relating to the Temple Mount and east Jerusalem, Israel has experienced a growing multifront threat.

This grew to include Hezbollah and Syria in April 2023, when rockets were fired on Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria all around the same time to retaliate for disputes between Israel and Palestinian rioters on the Temple Mount.

But the apex of this multifront threat was the October 7 war, which forced Israel to fight significant and extended wars simultaneously both versus Gaza and Lebanon as well as on five other fronts against: Iran, proxies of Iran in Syria, Yemen’s Houthis, proxies of Iran in Iraq, and the West Bank.

With the November 27 ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran being expelled from Syria with the fall of the Assad regime in December, and the January 15 ceasefire with Hamas – has Israel ended the multifront threat?

The theory behind the multifront threat, or “ring of fire” as its architect Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Chief Qasem Soleimani coined it in 2017, before his assassination in 2020, was simple: to overwhelm Israel simultaneously on many fronts.

Protesters, mainly Houthi supporters, raise their weapons during a rally to show support to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Sanaa, Yemen December 27, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/KHALED ABDULLAH)

Soleimani and Israel’s other enemies knew that one on one, none of them could directly defeat or even seriously challenge Israel.

But if they all started to attack at once, they might overwhelm Israel by forcing it to split its forces and by striking all parts of the home front at once, which each of them could not necessarily reach on their own (Hamas could hammer the South and Hezbollah the North but it was unclear that either could seriously harm the whole country.)

The battle against Iran's proxies

Collectively, Iran’s proxies could possibly defeat Israel just by the sheer number of moving threats from different spots, or at the very least could force Jerusalem into various strategic concessions which would improve the power and standing of Tehran’s axis.

By February 2023, the Jerusalem Post had been told by defense sources that the Islamic Republic was expected to take more aggressive and risky actions to exploit the multifront threat against Israel.

At select points over the last 15 months, Iran and its proxies may have thought that the multifront strategy had borne fruit.

---

---

It was not just the 1,200 Israelis Hamas slaughtered and the 250 it took hostage on October 7, 2023.

It was also the 10,600 rockets which Hamas fired on central and southern Israel, including sometimes hundreds a day on Tel Aviv, from October 2023-January 2024, with some continued rocket fire from time to time throughout  2024.

Israel decided to allow Hezbollah to destroy portions of its northern territory, including evacuating over 60,000 residents from their homes for 13 months to escape rocket fire.

From mid-September to late November 2024, a full third of northern Israel spent significant time under lock down under rocket fire from Hezbollah.

For a year, Israel endured periodic ballistic missiles from Yemen’s Houthis, many of which would send two to three million people in the center of the country into bomb shelters in the middle of the night.

While 2024 is somewhat improved compared to 2023, the combined level of Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis from the West Bank in 2023-2024 has been off the charts.

And of course, soldiers were periodically killed by drones from Syria and Iraq.

But that has not been the majority of the story and certainly is not the end of the story.

Israel ultimately brought Hezbollah to its knees. 13 months after promising not to drop out of the war unless Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Lebanese terror group – now without its assassinated leader Hassan Nasrallah, left with its tail between its legs.

The terror group remains the strongest power in Lebanon, but at least at this moment, is agreeing to political compromises with more moderate forces in Lebanon which it would never have dreamed of prior to the war.

The Assad regime, and Iran’s foothold in Syria are gone.

Iran threatened to immediately attack the Jewish state a third time after IDF aircraft destroyed most of its best air defenses, some of its ballistic missile production, and one nuclear site on October 26 – but  never did (to date.)

Hamas promised it would only negotiate about a return of hostages if the IDF first withdrew from Gaza, but eventually cut a ceasefire deal in which the military will remain in part of Gaza until all (or at least most) of the hostages are returned.

All 24 of Hamas’s battalions had been taken apart by the IDF by June 2024.

And Hamas war architects Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif were both killed, along with Ismail Haniyeh and most of its pre-war leadership.

There are open questions about whether, after the ceasefire, Hamas will retain full control of Gaza, or whether in order to receive aid to rebuild, it will need to accept some hybrid rule with the Palestinian Authority and other regional and global parties.

Is all of this enough to have convinced Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and other anti-Israel forces that the multifront strategy awoke the sleeping Israeli lion and blew up in their face?

In addition to avoiding any major altercation with Israel for the next year and possibly years as a tactical matter to find time to rebuild and rearm, will at least some of these various enemies conclude strategically that they should limit any conflict with Israel, if any, to their own specific interests?

Put differently, given that Israel has more power and leverage on nearly every front (it is far weaker today in global legitimacy than at any time in decades) than it did before October 7, has the theory of multifront war with Israel been disproven?

Prior to October 7, Israel was afraid to fight with Hezbollah even about moving a small tent 10 meters into an open field in Israeli territory, lest a small conflict trigger a larger Hezbollah rocket onslaught.

Might different parties also draw different conclusions with some being less interested in conflict with Israel, but Iran possibly merely altering its conflict strategy to new avenues, including the nuclear weapons path, global terror, and cyberwarfare?

It is too early to say and a lot of what various parties conclude depends on whether Hamas’s threat from Gaza remains reduced and whether Israel succeeds in a broader normalization initiative with the Saudis.

Some observers also believe that some of Israel’s enemies, even after the beating they have received, still view Israel as more beatable given October 7 and the punishment which the home front took for 15 months.

But there is at least hope that one strategic positive change from this war may be getting Israel’s enemies to think twice about whether joining someone else’s war with Israel is in their interest.