The Gaza Strip is currently divided between the Israeli-held zone (green) and Hamas territory (red). (Screenshot from Channel 14)
More than 25 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and the consequent multi-front Middle East war, and more than one year after Israel and Hezbollah reached a ceasefire agreement on Nov. 27, 2024, Israel faces a complex geopolitical and security situation.
In the north, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is engaged in continuous covert and overt operations to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping. The Shi’ite terrorist militia has been dealt multiple blows, first by the Mossad’s twin attack 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. On Sept. 27, the terror group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in his Beirut bunker. On Nov. 23, the IDF eliminated Haytham Ali Tabataba’i in a missile strike on the Lebanese capital – Hezbollah’s chief of staff had been designated by the US Department of State as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2016. Washington was offering a $5 million US bounty for information on him.
Though diminished, 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 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 guerrilla tactics and bomb-making, Hezbollah will resume its terror campaign attacking Lebanese armed forces’ vehicles with IEDs (improvised explosive devices), said Rubin.
Israel has made a huge investment to literally alter the landscape of its 120-kilometre-long northern 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 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 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 Mohammed, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa and Ismail Haniyeh.
In October, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas. In exchange, Hamas released 20 living Israeli hostages. On Oct. 22, the terrorist-linked group Samidoun hosted a panel discussion in Athens with the newly released top Hamas operative Abdel Nasser Issa. Known as a student of Hamas’s notorious chief bombmaker Yayha Ayyash (1966-1996), aka “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.
On Nov. 24, Palestinian Islamic Jihad turned over a coffin with the remains of Dror Or. Staff Sgt. Ran Gvili and Sudthisak Rinthalak are the last two people murdered on Oct. 7 not yet returned. Rinthalak, an agricultural worker at Kibbutz Be’eri near the border of the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, was among the more than 40 Thais killed and 31 kidnapped in Hamas’s attack.
Also in November, a flight of 153 Gazans landed in Johannesburg, after departing from Ramon Airport near Eilat. Shimi Zuaretz, a spokesperson for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) – 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 destination in which to settle or to return to their 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 Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition faces a mounting campaign to reestablish Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Daniella Weiss, head of Nachala Movement Israel, whose stated aim is to settle further into Judea and Samaria, wants to begin Jewish settlement in Gaza within “months.” According to Weiss, more than 600 families – more than 2,500 people – 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 Katif in 2005 as the catalyst that allowed Hamas to seize power from the Palestinian Authority two years later. In turn, that violent coup laid the way for the catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023, attack on cities and kibbutzim bordering Gaza.
The Gaza Strip’s 365 square kilometres are today uneasily divided into Hamas- and Israeli-controlled sectors. Israel will not allow Türkiye or Qatar to send troops to monitor the ceasefire, nor are any other countries keen to send boots on the ground. US President Donald Trump envisions a $500-million military base near Qiryat Gat, called the US Civil-Military Coordination Centre, to assist in Gaza’s future governance and patrol of the territory.
Clan and Bedouin tribal groups in Gaza are engaged in a violent internecine struggle with Hamas. And 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 Mohammed Abu Mustafa, who kidnapped Shiri Bibas and her children Kfir and Ariel from Kibbutz Nirim on Oct. 7. 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 children in the same safe room where Vital-Kaploun was murdered.
Troops of the elite Nahal Brigade captured six Hamas gunmen who surrendered after a 24-hour search that followed the IDF’s collapsing of the tunnel in Rafah where the terrorists were hiding, forcing them to emerge from a shaft, the military reported. The men were taken to Israel to be questioned by the Shin Bet Klali (General Security Service). A photo released by the IDF showed four of the operatives in the army’s custody, hands tied behind their backs, next to an armoured vehicle.
“At the end of a 24-hour pursuit, all 17 terrorists who attempted to flee the underground terror infrastructure in eastern Rafah were either eliminated or apprehended,” the IDF announced. At least 30 Hamas terrorists were killed trying to flee from tunnels in Rafah last month.
Environmental issues are also impacting the complex situation. Last month’s winter rain flooded Gaza’s tent encampments. In Iran, a severe drought has depleted the reservoirs that provide its capital city, Tehran, with drinking water.
Symbolizing the Ayatollah regime’s crumbling control, on Nov. 12, protesters garbed in military uniforms of the Shah’s regime unfurled the banned pre-1979 lion and sun Pahlavi national flag in a Tehran metro station. Commentators have posited that the next revolution may come soon, if the taps run dry.
Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide based in Jerusalem.