Israel is following the most dangerous path — and it makes perfect sense.

By properly going after Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Israelis will be inviting a bonafide six-front war on themselves — and that does not include Iran. But the price for not is even greater.

Israeli soldiers operating in northern Israel, on the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah joined the Israel-Hamas war 24 hours after it broke out (photo: IDF/X)

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It has been nearly a year since the State of Israel and its residents were horrifically shocked on October 7th — and during the last 11-plus months, the Israelis have had multiple off-ramps to end this war.

That is if you think this conflict only features Israel and Hamas. Unfortunately, it does not.

In a few months or years, this episode might be accurately rebranded as the First Israeli-Iranian War. The Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings on October 7th were merely a convenient way to catch Israel off-guard as it was preparing to officially normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which would have included an American-packaged nuclear program for the Saudis (Iran’s archenemy).

Indeed, that is precisely what happened. Israel was not prepared for war in the Gaza Strip. It routinely ignored flashing-bright-red warning signs of Hamas’ intentions. While Israel’s political echelon cooperated with Hamas demands for Qatari money, its military brass failed to anticipate an all-out war with Hamas. We all know how that ended.

But Hamas is ultimately an Iranian tentacle. In other words, Iran controls Hamas, and Qatar probably does to a certain extent as well. If you remember back on April 1st of this year, an IDF airstrike on an “Iranian consulate building” in the Syrian capital of Damascus killed several of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, including two generals — one of whom was considered an “architect” of October 7th.

Nevermind that this Iranian regime has made the Jewish state’s annihilation a cornerstone of its gushing, publicly stated doctrine.

In other words, Hamas is Iran and Iran is Hamas; the cowardly (but also smart) Iranian regime simply uses proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere as a way to keep reprisal attacks off Iranian soil and shield Iran from the geopolitical responsibility of profusely destabilizing the Middle East.

In recent months, Iran has upped its ante in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) to galvanize thuggish, down-on-their-luck Palestinians into sparking a Third Intifada against Israel. The Iranians have been using the Jordanian-West Bank border to smuggle in weapons, but Israel thus far has done a good-enough job of quelling what Israeli security officials have been incessantly stressing is a burgeoning pressure cooker in the Palestinian West Bank.

This would constitute a sixth front against Israel in this war, the other five being Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. All of these proxies in all of these countries are chiefly sponsored by Iran, which knows that it does not stand a chance against Israel head-to-head. So far, the Israeli-Iranian bout looks like a heavyweight-strawweight matchup. For those not so much into the sport of boxing, there are 17 weight classes, ranging from heavyweight (no upper weight limit) to strawweight (105 pounds and under).

Iran is of course the strawman, even though it sits on massive oil and gas fields and a territory nearly 80 times larger than Israel, plus a populace ninefold that of the Jewish state. Tiny Israel, with no real natural resources and historically surrounded by genocidal enemies, has emerged as the heavyweight, eating the Iranian regime as a nosh in between breakfast and lunch. Beta’avon. (That’s Hebrew for: “Bon appetit.”)

In recent years, killings, reported suicides, and deaths in mysterious circumstances have put an end to important Iranian “personalities” — including prominent space scientist Ayoub Entezari, who was said to have been poisoned in the circumstances similar to nuclear scientist Kamran Mollapour at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.

In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the mastermind behind Iran’s nuclear program, was killed in an ambush near Tehran. A remote-controlled machine gun mounted on a vehicle was apparently used in the attack, equipped with a camera that utilized artificial intelligence and facial recognition to target Fakhrizadeh.

The automatic gun reportedly “controlled by satellite” struck him 13 times from a distance of 150 meters (490 feet). The gun was so accurate that not a single bullet struck his wife, who was seated next to him.

The murder of Fakhrizadeh was preceded by other officials earlier that same year, attacked within 20 minutes of each other. The first was killed, and the second was injured. Those strikes were followed by the assassinations of a senior general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a senior engineer at an Iranian nuclear facility.

The list goes on: Tons of secret documents related to the Iranian nuclear program were smuggled out in an intelligence catastrophe that left Tehran with no choice but to claim that the documents were unimportant — as was the breaching of security systems in Iran’s top nuclear reactors, including by cyber attacks and setting fires to disrupt operating systems.

What’s more, the death of now-former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi a few months ago in a helicopter crash was explained away in fatalistic terms without any official announcement of the final results of the investigation.

This past April, when Iran launched some 185 drones, 110 surface-to-surface missiles, and 36 cruise missiles at Israel in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Syria earlier in the month, the Iranian attack caused no material damage — and Israel responded by carrying out a successful strike inside Iran, targeting the Iranian province of Isfahan (the site of numerous nuclear facilities).

Then, at the end of July, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated while sleeping in a Tehran building at a location believed to be totally beyond the reach of his adversaries, what the Iranian regime considered its “safest” area.

Iran has said that Haniyeh was killed by a “missile” — because admitting to its own people, no less to the world, that the Israelis easily infiltrated one of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ most-secured compounds and planted bombs there two months prior, would further expose the Iranian regime’s weaknesses, failures, and undoings.

While Israel covertly toys with Iran, the Islamic Republic literally told Israel — via Hungary — that it has decided to attack the Jewish state in response to Haniyeh’s assassination within its borders, because nothing says “We don’t really want to go to war with Israel” like broadcasting your next moves to your enemy.

Experts on Iran recently told a Saudi news channel that they believed Tehran’s strategy of unifying different fronts against Israel has failed since October 7th. Iran expert Jaber Rajabi said that the Iranian regime has not managed to achieve major goals despite its extreme declarations.

While Iran and its proxies have formulated military plans in recent years against other, less-advanced adversaries, going head-to-head with Israel is a different matter entirely. Rajabi explained that the IDF has extensive experience in various wars. Meanwhile, Iran and its proxies rely on guerrilla warfare and irregular conflicts for their training.

The Iranian leadership is also trying to mitigate severe economic issues and, as such, watched very closely when Israel lit up one of Yemen’s Houthis-controlled ports a few weeks ago, in response to a Houthis’ fatal drone attack in Tel Aviv. It is believed that Israel could destroy at least 30 percent of Iran’s oil fields in short order, while Iran’s attempts to hit Israeli targets in third-party countries almost always fail.

The Iranian regime is nothing short of a joke, run by a Jihadist cleric and his cronies while the Persian people — with a rich, elaborate history and culture — suffer. And Israel knows this more than anyone. It is why the Israelis are using the October 7th debacle as proper justification for going after Iran — the Middle East’s chief destabilizer — starting with its proxies in Gaza (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and now in Lebanon and Syria (Hezbollah).

The brilliant operations attributed to the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) and the IDF this week — remotely detonating thousands of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies — illustrate that Israel knows what it holds in the cards. And this is not the end. It can be assumed that future blows to Hezbollah could be even more severe and surprising.

At the same time, by properly going after Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Israelis will be inviting a bonafide six-front war on themselves — and that does not include Iran. Hezbollah is Iran’s “baby” — by far its most prized proxy — and historically, it is not positioned in Lebanon to launch a war against Israel, but to help deter Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

With the Iranian regime’s support, Hezbollah vastly augmented its arsenal from about 10,000 rockets at the end of its 2006 war against Israel, to today’s 150,000-to-200,000 range, plus several hundred precision-guided munitions and an array of Iranian-made attack drones. At the outset of a conflict with Israel, today’s version of Hezbollah would be capable of firing at least 3,000 rockets per day, and then settling in on 1,000-to-1,500 per day. Comparatively, in the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets per day.¹

But now, Israel has a unique opportunity to take a serious fight to Hezbollah. This is the war that Israel’s military and security apparatus has been devising for years, persistently engaged in exercises and plans for the Third Lebanon War and possibly the First Iran War.

“This war starred in the dreams and nightmares of chiefs of staff, generals, and especially intelligence personnel,” as renowned Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal put it.²

And rightly so. Hezbollah presents Israel with two clear strategic threats: the first, declared intentions to invade northern Israel with significant forces, seize territory, and carry out mass killings and kidnappings. The second, and more complex, is the threat of Hezbollah’s precision-guided munitions.

With Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad largely curtailed (but still not totally defeated) in Gaza, the Israelis now have the bandwidth — plus international legitimacy — to take care of Hezbollah, which joined the Israel-Hamas war exactly 24 hours after October 7th “in solidarity with Gaza.” Yeah, and Dick Cheney really became a Democrat because Donald Trump “can never be trusted with power again.” Not all of us can afford to be so naive.

Surely, though, an all-out war with Hezbollah will be far more difficult for Israel and Israelis than the Gaza conflict has been. As Nadav Eyal described it: “Civilian formations in Israel are not prepared for a prolonged war with Hezbollah, despite all the warnings over the years.”

But, if we assume that an all-out war with Hezbollah is inevitable — and we have plenty of reasons to — it is far better for Israel to attack when the country is relatively ready for the fight, having already degraded Hezbollah during the last 11 months (again, in response to the terror group joining the Israel-Gaza war that Hamas, with Iran’s blessing, started).

Ultimately, Israel knows that a dramatically weakened Hezbollah means a dramatically weakened Iran, paving the way for Israel to approach the supreme prize: substantial military action aimed at preventing, or at least profoundly pushing back, the Middle East’s Nazis (Iran) from nuclear proliferation, which would quite literally change the face of the region (and perhaps the entire Jewish world).

Hence why Israel is following the most dangerous path in this war.

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1. “Israel’s Great Strategic Failure.” Tablet.

2. “זו המערכה שהתכוננו אליה.” Ynet News.