The State of Israel is fighting the Palestinian Hamas terror organization in Gaza, but that is just one front in an ongoing war against terror groups and their sponsors. In fact, Israel currently faces at least five enemies on five fronts. They are:
1. Hamas – Gaza and the West Bank. Israel has invaded Gaza and is determined to destroy Hamas’s capabilities there. But Hamas also has terror cells in the West Bank, and they have carried out several attacks in the weeks since the war started.
2. Hezbollah – Lebanon. The Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah has been launching sporadic attacks on Israel’s northern region since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Israel has kept its response restrained, but faces the prospect of a broader war.
3. Syria. Syria has been formally in a state of war with Israel for decades. Russia and Iran have turned Syria into a puppet after intervening for Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, and there have been attacks on Israel from across the Syrian border.
4. Houthis – Yemen. Iran backs the Houthi rebels — whom President Joe Biden delisted as a terror group in 2021 — and they have been firing missiles and launching drones against Israel, as well as seizing ships and threatening Red Sea shipping lanes.
5. Iran. Iran is the force behind all of the terror groups and client states attacking Israel; the rest of the Arab world had been moving toward peace with the Jewish state, under the Abraham Accords. Meanwhile, Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons.
The list could be longer, since there are Iranian-backed militias in Iraq that are attacking U.S. forces as a proxy for Israeli targets.
Israel also has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and participates in the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. None of those countries has abandoned peace with Israel since the start of the ongoing war.
All of the enemies that Israel faces, in fact, are controlled by the Iranian regime. Hamas has been disappointed that its attack on October 7, while celebrated by protests in Arab cities and on western university campuses, has not let to broader Arab support.
Israel also faced five enemy armies in its War of Independence in 1948, when invaders tried to destroy it at the moment of its birth.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
