Israel Faces a Complex Security Situation

More than 25 months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre and the consequent multi-front Middle East war, Israel today faces a complex security scenario.

In the north, the IDF is engaged in continuous covert and overt operations to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping. The Shi’ite terrorist militia was dealt a double whammy by the Mossad’s twin attacks on Sept. 17-18, 2024, nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper, in which thousands of hand-held pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives exploded across Lebanon and Syria. A second blow fell on Sept. 27 when the Shi’ite group’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in his Beirut bunker.

Though bloodied, Hezbollah is not a spent force according to Michael Rubin – a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute who specializes in Iran, Turkey, and the broader Middle East. Writing in the National Security Journal, Rubin notes that notwithstanding the targeting of its senior leadership, Hezbollah’s financing – diaspora-linked laundering from Europe, Africa and South America and new backing from Turkey – remains resilient.

He cautions that unless Lebanon’s toothless President Joseph Aoun cuts off the money supply and disarms Hezbollah by the year’s end, the country will slide into a renewed insurgency. Trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in guerilla tactics and bomb-making, Hezbollah will resume its terror campaign attacking Lebanese Armed Forces’ vehicles with IEDs.

But Israel cannot rely on Lebanon’s central government to assert control in the border area south of the Litani River. The Jewish State has made a huge investment to literally alter the landscape of its 75-mile-long frontier into a formidable physical barrier, and to blow up cross-border tunnels. Similarly, during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1985 to 2000, several strategic mountain peaks were literally bulldozed to no longer loom over the Upper Galilee. However, the fiasco of Oct. 7 has shown that static positions provide limited deterrence against lightning strikes by well-trained guerillas.

In the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, Hamas – an Arabic acronym for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamia” (the Islamic Resistance Movement) – also refuses to disarm. There, too, the situation remains unclear, complicated by Israel’s assassination of the terrorist group’s leaders Yahya Sinwar, his brother, Muhammad, Muhammad Deif, Marwan Issa, and Ismail Haniyeh. The latter was killed in a brazen bombing in Tehran on July 31, 2024.

In October, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the first phase of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas. In exchange, Hamas released 20 living Israeli hostages. The Jerusalem-based Middle East Media Research Institute reported that in Athens on Oct. 22 the terrorist-linked group Samidoun hosted the newly-released top Hamas operative Abdel Nasser Issa. Known as a student of Hamas’s notorious chief bombmaker, Yayha Ayyash, a.k.a. “The Engineer,” Issa was serving two life sentences for his involvement in two suicide bombings in 1995 that killed 20 Israeli civilians and wounded more than 100.

Earlier this month, a flight of 153 Gazans landed in Johannesburg after departing from Ramon Airport near Eilat. Shimi Zuaretz, spokesman for COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) – the Israeli body that runs civil affairs in the West Bank, confirmed that the Palestinians transited through Israel “after COGAT received approval from a third country to receive them.” That third country was South Africa.

Some 200,000 Gazans are currently living in limbo in Cairo, unable to either find a final destination to settle or return to their destroyed homes. Together with the estimated tens of thousands of combatants and civilians killed in the Gaza war, these numbers indicate the ongoing depopulation of the destroyed coastal enclave.

With an election on the horizon in the first half of 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shaky coalition faces a mounting campaign to reestablish Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Daniella Weiss, the influential head of Nachala Movement Israel, whose stated aim is to settle further into Judea and Samaria, has declared her goal is to begin Jewish settlement in Gaza within “months.” According to Weiss, over 600 families had already registered for an initiative to settle in new beach towns.

Many Israelis fault Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal of 9,000 settlers from Gush Qatif in 2005 as the catalyst which allowed Hamas to seize power from the PA two years later. That violent coup in turn laid the way for the catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023, attack on cities and kibbutzim bordering Gaza.

The Gaza Strip’s 365 square kilometers are today uneasily divided into Hamas- and Israeli-controlled sectors. U.S. President Donald Trump envisions a $500-million military base just inside Israel to assist in Gaza’s future governance and patrol the territory. But Israel will not allow Türkiye or Qatar to send troops to monitor the shaky ceasefire. Nor are any other countries keen to send boots on the ground.

Clan and Bedouin tribal groups in Gaza are engaged in a bloody internecine struggle with Hamas. But without more weapons, they may prove too weak to prevail against the seasoned guerillas.

The London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported on Nov. 15 that IDF commandos on motorcycles are targeting Palestinians who participated in the abduction and holding of Israelis during the Oct. 7 attack. Among the Mujahideen Brigades terrorists gunned down in Khan Yunis was Mohammad Abu Mustafa, who kidnapped Shiri Bibas and her children, Kfir and Ariel, from Kibbutz Nirim during that rampage. Also recently eliminated was Muhammad Abu Shaar, who broke into Adi Vital-Kaploun’s residence at Kibbutz Holit and murdered the Canadian-Israeli woman in front of her 4-year-old son, Negev, and 4-month-old toddler, Eshel. Shaar then recorded himself holding her babies in the same safe room where she was murdered.

Environmental issues also impact the complex scenario. Last week’s winter rain flooded Gaza’s refugee encampments and turned them into a cesspool of despair. In Iran, a severe drought has depleted the reservoirs that provide the capital Teheran with drinking water.

Symbolizing the Ayatollah regime’s crumbling control, on Nov. 12, protestors garbed in air force uniforms of the Shah’s regime recently unfurled the pre-1979 lion and sun Pahlavi national flag in a Tehran metro station. The spark to ignite the next revolution may come imminently when the taps run dry.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide based in Jerusalem.