DUBAI, Nov 15 (Portal) – Iran’s supreme leader sent a clear message to the head of Hamas at their meeting in Tehran in early November, according to three senior officials: You did not warn us about your attack on Israel on October 7 and we will not be warned go to war in your name.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Ismail Haniyeh that Iran – a long-time supporter of Hamas – would continue to give the group its political and moral support but would not intervene directly, said Iranian and Hamas officials with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity speak.
The supreme leader urged Haniyeh to silence voices in the Palestinian group that were publicly calling for Iran and its powerful Lebanese ally Hezbollah to join the fight against Israel in full force, a Hamas official told Portal.
Hezbollah was also caught off guard by Hamas’ devastating attack last month, which killed 1,200 Israelis. Its fighters were not on alert even in the villages near the border that were on the front lines of the 2006 war with Israel and needed to be called up quickly, three sources close to the Lebanese group said.
“We woke up to a war,” said a Hezbollah commander.
The unfolding crisis marks the first time that the so-called Axis of Resistance – a military alliance Iran built over four decades to confront Israeli and American power in the Middle East – has mobilized on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Hezbollah has been involved in the worst clashes with Israel in almost 20 years. Iran-backed militias have attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria. The Houthis in Yemen have fired rockets and drones at Israel.
The conflict is also testing the limits of the regional coalition, whose members – which include the Syrian government, Hezbollah, Hamas and other militant groups from Iraq to Yemen – have different priorities and domestic challenges.
Mohanad Hage Ali, a Hezbollah expert at the Carnegie Middle East Center think tank in Beirut, said Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 left its Axis partners with difficult decisions to face an adversary with vastly superior firepower.
“If you wake up the bear with an attack like that, it will be quite difficult for your allies to stand in the same position as you.”
Hamas asks for help from the Axis powers
Hamas, the ruling group in Gaza, is fighting for its survival against a vengeful Israel, which vows its destruction and has launched a retaliatory attack on the tiny enclave that has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians.
On October 7, Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif called on its Axis allies to join the fight. “Our brothers in the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and Syria, this is the day when your resistance unites with your people in Palestine,” he said in an audio message.
Signs of frustration emerged in subsequent public statements by Hamas leaders, including Khaled Meshaal, who in a television interview on October 16 thanked Hezbollah for its actions so far but said: “The fight requires more.”
Still, alliance leader Iran will not intervene directly in the conflict unless it is itself attacked by Israel or the United States, according to six officials with direct knowledge of Tehran’s thinking, who did not want to be named because of the sensitive nature of the matter.
Instead, Iran’s clerical rulers plan to continue using their Axis network of armed allies, including Hezbollah, to launch missile and drone attacks on Israeli and American targets across the Middle East, the officials said.
The strategy is a deliberate attempt to show solidarity with Hamas in Gaza and stretch Israeli forces without engaging in a direct confrontation with Israel that could attract the United States, they added.
“This is their way of creating deterrence,” said Dennis Ross, a former senior U.S. diplomat specializing in the Middle East who now works at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank. “A way of saying, ‘Look, as long as you don’t attack us, it’s going to stay that way. But if you attack us, everything changes.”
Iran has repeatedly said that all members of the alliance make their own decisions independently.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on its response to the crisis and the role of the “Axis of Resistance,” a term of disputed origins used by Iranian officials to describe the coalition.
Hamas did not immediately respond to questions sent to Haniyeh’s media adviser, and Hezbollah also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
HIZBOLLAH’S DOMESTIC PROBLEMS
Hezbollah, the most powerful group in the Axis with 100,000 fighters, has exchanged almost daily fire with Israeli forces across the Lebanese-Israeli border since Hamas’s war with Israel, killing more than 70 of its fighters.
But like its backer Iran, Hezbollah has avoided a full-scale confrontation.
The group has calibrated its attacks to keep violence largely confined to a narrow strip of territory along the border, although it has escalated those attacks in recent days, people familiar with its thinking say.
One of the sources said Hamas wanted Hezbollah to push deeper into Israel with its vast rocket arsenal, but Hezbollah believed this would lead to Israel devastating Lebanon without stopping its attack on Gaza.
Hezbollah, also a political movement deeply involved in Lebanese government affairs, knows that Lebanon can ill afford another war with Israel as the financial crisis for more than four years has deepened poverty and undermined the country’s government institutions.
Lebanon’s reconstruction took years after the 2006 war in which Israeli bombings devastated the Hezbollah-controlled south of the country and destroyed parts of its stronghold in the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on November 3 that Hamas had kept its attack on Israel secret from its allies and that this had ensured its success and “did not upset anyone in the Axis.” Hezbollah’s attacks on the Israeli border are unprecedented and amount to a “real battle,” he said.
AMERICA is under attack
The United States also wants to prevent the war from spreading beyond Gaza. After fighting two costly and unfortunate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades, it now has to finance Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion.
President Joe Biden has so far tried to limit the U.S. role in the Gaza crisis primarily to providing military aid to Israel. He has also moved two aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the eastern Mediterranean, partly as a warning to Tehran.
The temperature is rising; According to the Pentagon, at least 40 drone and missile attacks on U.S. forces have been carried out by Axis militias in Iraq and Syria since the start of the Gaza war in response to American support for Israel. US officials say America has carried out three retaliatory strikes against facilities in Syria used by Iran-linked militias.
On Monday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin emphasized the risk of another major front opening in the conflict.
“What we have seen during this conflict and crisis is a mutual exchange between Lebanese Hezbollah and the Israeli forces,” he told a news conference in Seoul. “Nobody wants another conflict to break out in the north.”
ISRAEL LOOKS NORTH
Austin stressed the need to avoid regional escalation when he spoke with his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant over the weekend, according to a readout of the call.
The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.
Two Israeli security sources who did not want to be named said Israel was not seeking to expand hostilities, but added that the country was ready to fight on new fronts if necessary to protect itself. They said security officials believed the biggest immediate threat to Israel came from Hezbollah.
There is deep hostility between Israel and Iran.
Iran does not recognize Israel’s existence, while Israel has long threatened military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to curb its controversial nuclear activities.
According to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, real policy could prevail for Tehran in the current crisis.
“Iran has been committed to fighting America and Israel for four decades without entering into direct conflict. The regime’s revolutionary ideology is based on opposition to America and Israel, but its leaders are not suicidal, they want to stay in power.”
Reporting by Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Laila Bassam in Beirut and Arshad Mohammed in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Beirut; Jonathan Saul in Jerusalem, Idrees Ali in Washington and Phil Stewart in Seoul; Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Tom Perry and Pravin Char
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