An Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon, October 2024 (Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty)

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Co-published with The Conversation:

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EA on The Tonight Show: Israel-Gaza-Lebanon, 1 Year On

EA on RTE: Week in Review — Russia’s Agent in Irish Parliament, Dublin’s Upcoming Election, and Israel-Gaza-Lebanon

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The pursuit of closure is human. The murder whodunit ends with the revelation of the killer. The romcom arrives at its Happily Ever After, the crime series with the comeuppance of the villain. Historians wrap up their tales with triumphs and failures.

We pursue closure, be it through joy, sadness, or grieving, so we can move on.

But one year after Hamas’s mass killing of more than 1,100 Israelis and foreign nationals and abduction of 251 others, a year into Israel’s mass killings with almost 42,000 slain in Gaza, there is no resolution.

Indeed, there is no prospect of resolution. Instead, the violence is expanding not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, where Israel is carrying out targeted assassinations, airstrikes, and a ground invasion. The Iranian regime — whose commanders have also been “liquidated” by Israel — has fired missiles on Israeli territory, raising concerns that an Israeli-Iranian war is the next stage of the unresolved.

This anniversary is not as much a question of “How did we get here?” but “How long will this go on?”

And the answer for now is that there is no answer.

Netanyahu’s “Forever War” in Gaza

One could argue that there has never been closure in the region. The announcement of the State of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the mass displacement of stateless Palestinians and a series of wars. Hezbollah and Hamas came out of civil wars within Lebanon and occupied Palestine. October 7 was the descendant of Israel’s defeat of Hamas in a 2021 skirmish, when the Gazan organization’s Mohammad Deif began planning a cross-border ground assault both for revenge and for a reassertion of power.

Still, the execution of the assault was an unprecedented shock for Israel and the region. And it gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the opportunity not for resolution, but for his own political survival.

In the months before October 7, Netanyahu faced a possible trial on bribery charges. So he split Israeli society with an attempt to subjugate the courts to executive power. By the summer, there were mass protests across the country, discord within the Government, and threats by reservists to refuse military service.

The international community pledged support for Israeli security while pressing Israel to remove Hamas from power through political and economic measures. Netanyahu demurred: his aim would be better served through a campaign to “destroy” Hamas.

From the outset, there were queries not just outside Israel but inside it about the endgame for such a campaign. Even if Hamas could be annihilated, who would govern a devastated Gaza? In the absence of that governance, would Israel occupy all or part of the Strip?

In the opening months of the Israeli response, Netanyahu did not need to answer the questions. All he had to do was to sustain the assault, even as the death toll — almost half of whom were women and children — reached the 10,000s and around 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population were displaced.

But in the spring, Benny Gantz — one of the three members of the War Cabinet and former head of the Israel Defense Forces — resigned. He said Netanyahu had put his personal and political interests ahead of the existential needs of the state of Israel.

This summer Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the other War Cabinet member, privately said that Hamas could not be destroyed. Netanyahu’s office publicly denounced him for an “anti-Israel narrative” and threatened his dismissals.

And hundreds of thousands of Israelis were back on the streets. They demanded that Netanyahu put a priority on the return of hostages, around 100 of whom — dead or alive — were still held by Hamas.

But Netanyahu had undermined any prospect of a ceasefire that would return those hostages. On July 31, Israel assassinated Hamas’s lead negotiated and political head Ismail Haniyeh in an apartment in Iran’s capital Tehran. The Prime Minister had overruled Israeli negotiators to demand an open-ended occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, an unacceptable condition for Hamas.

What could he do to escape the domestic predicament?

“Forever War” in Lebanon?

What he could do was open a second front in Lebanon.

Israel and Hezbollah had waged a low-intensity conflict since October 7. Israeli cross-border fire killed more than 350 Hezbollah fighters and around 100 civilians. Hezbollah killed 22 Israeli troops and 26 civilians, including at least 12 juveniles on a football pitch in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in Syria.

Netanyahu needed to escalate conflict into a war. Doing so, he would press the public to offer its support, and he would reconcile with Defense Minister Gallant and the military, who favored an expansion of attacks.

On September 17, Israel detonated explosive-rigged pagers in Beirut and across the country. A day later, walkie-talkies blew up. At least 37 people were killed and thousands wounded.

Then, on September 27, Israel went for the kill. Having already assassinated several Hezbollah commanders, it targeted the leader Hassan Nasrallah and other senior officials. US-made bombs weighing 2,000 pounds (900 kg) levelled a block in southern Beirut. Nasrallah’s body and those of Hezbollah’s senior military officials were later pulled from the rubble.

On October, Israeli forces crossed the border into southern Lebanon in a “limited” invasion which is already proving to be far from limited.

Iran Helps Netanyahu

Hours later, Iran fired 181 ballistic missiles, including hypersonic Fattah missiles for the first time, on Israeli territory.

Facing serious economic problems and international isolation and with a new Government, Iranian leaders had not delivered the promised retaliation for the Israeli assassination of Hamas’s Haniyeh in Tehran. But with Nasrallah dead, and its top commander in Lebanon killed in the same attack, the regime had no choice if it wanted to dispel the appearance of weakness at home and in the region.

Still, as in its April volley of missiles and drones responded to Israel’s assassinations of its commanders, Iran telegraphed the attack. Officials notified Arab countries a day earlier, giving them time to pass the message to US and thus to Israel.

See also Are Iran’s Missiles on Israel Just Another “Demonstration” Attack?

As a result, only two Israeli civilians suffered minor injuries. (In a tragic irony, the only fatality of Iran’s “defense of Palestine” was a Palestinian in the West Bank, killed by falling debris.) A barrage of missiles did hit the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert, damaging a hangar and some buildings, but the Israel Defense Forces said damage was limited.

So, far from portending a direct Iran-Israel War, Tehran’s regime had calibrated to avoid one. Meanwhile, it had strengthened its adversary Netanyahu.

The Prime Minister blustered that Tehran had made a “big mistake tonight….It will pay for it.” But he had reaped a benefit for his open-ended operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Rather than facing any pressure to step aside, he could tell Israelis that he was needed more than ever in the face of Iran’s existential threats as well as the two-front war.

War Without End. Amen.

As I type, reports are building that Israel has assassinated Hassan Nasrallah’s potential successor Hashem Safieddine in an underground Hezbollah headquarters. He would join more than 2,000 others killed in Lebanon, including 127 children and 261 women.

Last week in Gaza, around 120 people perished in 48 hours. Some of them were in a school and in an orphanage used as shelters. Others were in homes in Khan Younis. The death toll since October 7 in the Strip is now almost 42,000, including at least 11,000 children.

In the occupied West Bank, an Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas commander and seven fighters in the Tulkarem refugee camp. There are also 10 civilians among the dead.

And in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights in Syria, two Israeli soldiers have been killed by a drone launched by the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

Perhaps someone can write a script where every senior Hamas figure, including the overall commander Yahya Sinwar, and every Hezbollah leader is killed. Iran’s regime has accepted the loss of its allies and, more concerned about domestic problems, has stepped back from confrontation. The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Sinwar will not be enforced.

Perhaps the scene of closure could be Benjamin Netanyahu pulling himself to his full height on a podium as behind him a banner flutters, “Mission Accomplished”.

But given that slain leaders are replaced, that those who bury their dead do not forget or forgive, that those who have felt the punishment of arms do not forego weapons but embrace them….

Perhaps that is how the story ends.

Or, more likely, never ends.