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Palestinians gather to receive aid outside an UNRWA warehouse earlier this month in Gaza.
Israel bans main Gaza aid agency despite warnings from US
The Israeli Parliament on Monday voted to ban the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, from operating in its territory — despite warnings from the Biden administration that doing so could impact US policy toward Israel. The Knesset even voted to designate UNRWA a terror group and to prohibit Israeli authorities from having contact with the agency.
UNRWA is the main humanitarian agency in Gaza, and this could impact millions of people who depend on it for aid. Critics of the legislation, which includes allies of the Jewish state, have expressed concern it will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the local health ministry now says over 43,000 Palestinians have died amid the war over the past year. Foreign ministers from Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the UK on Monday expressed “grave concern” over the Israeli move.
This comes roughly two weeks after Washington told Israel it had 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or risk cuts to military support from the US.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Millersaid Monday that the US urges Israel not to implement the legislation, underscoring that UNRWA is playing an “irreplaceable role right now in Gaza, where they’re on the front lines of getting humanitarian assistance to the people they need it.” Miller said there’s nothing that can replace UNRWA amid the current crisis.
Israel accuses UNRWA of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack, which killed roughly 1,200 in Israel and saw hundreds of hostages taken. A UN investigation that concluded in August said nine UNRWA employees may have been involved in the attack and all were fired. Several countries suspended funding to UNRWA over the allegations, but most have since restored funding, but not the US.
We’ll be watching to see how this legislation, which won’t take effect for 90 days, impacts the US-Israel relationship.
Meanwhile, across the border, Hezbollah has elected Naim Kassem to succeed Hassan Nasrallah as secretary general after Nasrallah was killed in September.
Kassem was already one of the group's leading spokesmen, often conducting interviews with foreign media. Critics say he lacks his predecessor's gravitas, but the man considered most likely to succeed Nasrallah, Hashem Safieddine, was also killed in recent weeks as Israel ramps up its efforts to dismantle Hezbollah.
An Israeli infantry soldier inside a Jewish home in Kibbutz Be’eri that was destroyed by Hamas in their October 7, 2023 infiltration of southern Israeli communities. This community was attacked by Hamas infiltrators who killed some 100 people out of 1000 who lived in this community on October 7, 2023.
Seven key consequences of the Oct. 7 attack
A year ago today, Hamas militants shot and paraglided their way out of the Gaza Strip and went on a rampage through southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages.
The attack set off a geopolitical earthquake in a region that a top US official had described, just a week earlier, as “quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
The noise ever since has been deafening.
Israel responded by unleashing a ferocious air and ground campaign in Gaza that sought to destroy Hamas and liberate the hostages. About half of them have been freed, the majority of those in a prisoner swap deal. Ninety-seven hostages are still in Gaza.
Israeli forces have weakened Hamas as a fighting force in a campaign that has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, according to local, Hamas-run health authorities. The dead include thousands of children. Close to two million Gazans, or nearly 90% of the pre-war population, have been displaced from their homes, and Israel has faced accusations of war crimes, including genocide, in international courts.
Meanwhile, months of cross-border clashes with Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon have recently escalated – Israel last week assassinated the group’s leader and launched an invasion of Lebanon.
Tensions between Israel and Iran are reaching a crescendo as well. Iran recently fired hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond, potentially by striking Iranian oil facilities, in a move that could rock oil markets and the global economy.
We take a brief look at how the past year has shaped prospects for seven key players in this story:
1. The Palestinians. Their plight is most certainly back on the global agenda after years of being overlooked as Israel moved toward normalizing its relations with more Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia – in deals that paid only lip service to eventual Palestinian statehood. Global sympathy for the Palestinian cause has risen, particularly among young people in the West. But Gaza has suffered immense destruction, and the occupation of the West Bank has only deepened over the past year. Support for a Palestinian state among Israelis, already waning in recent years, has plummeted, while the forces most hostile to that outcome in Israel are on a roll these days.
2. Benjamin Netanyahu. Before Oct. 7, 2023, the Israeli prime minister was on the ropes, facing corruption trials and mass protests over his judicial reforms. Then, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust occurred on his watch, cratering his support further. For months, he seemed to be on borrowed time, an unloved leader kept in power only by Israelis’ reluctance to change horses in mid-war. He faced criticism at home over failure to secure the release of more hostages, but also from far-right ministers who wanted to see even harsher reprisals in Gaza. Shifting the focus to defeating longtime foe Hezbollah, a policy 90% of Israelis support, has paid dividends: He is rising in the polls again. Just how far an emboldened Netanyahu is willing to go now is a big question in a region on fire.
3. Hamas. The terror group has lost thousands of its fighters and two of its most senior officials over the past year. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar may still be alive, likely confined to a tunnel beneath the rubble of Gaza. Still, he miscalculated if he thought that global pressure would force Israel to negotiate a cease-fire, or that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel from the North would cause Netanyahu to ease up on Gaza in the South. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the idea of Hamas, as an ideology of armed resistance against Israel, has been defeated, especially after the destruction that the IDF has visited upon the Palestinians over the past year. Over the next year, it will be crucial to see if the remainder of Hamas can shape any aspect of a post-war Gaza and whether it reconstitutes itself in any way.
4. Iran. Did Iran miscalculate too? Surely in the days after Oct. 7, Tehran didn’t expect that a year later Israel would be going on an offensive like this, smashing Iran’s No. 1 proxy in the region (Hezbollah) and mulling a major strike on Iran itself. That puts Iran in a tricky spot. As the leader of the “axis of resistance” against Israel, it has to keep resisting via its proxies. But with those proxies getting rolled up by Israel now, “Iran is exposed,” says Cliff Kupchan, head of research at Eurasia Group. “Iran misjudged power dynamics and sentiment in Israel. The IDF killed Nasrallah and severely degraded Hezbollah. Iran’s forward deterrence is gone.” That, he says, means Iran is likely to lean more heavily into its nuclear program now. That program, of course, is something Netanyahu is famously eager to try to destroy.
5. United States. The Biden administration has been largely unwavering in its rhetorical, military, and financial support for Israel, although it has also occasionally angered Israel and Israel supporters by pushing – ineffectively – for a cease-fire, or by raising concerns about the civilian death toll in Gaza. Partisan splits over Israel’s action in Gaza won’t be central to the upcoming presidential election – it will be decided by concerns about the economy, abortion access, and immigration. But the issue could affect the vote at the very margins, with some progressives and Arab-American voters in key swing states pledging not to vote at all in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel. The outcome of the election itself will matter on the ground: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are both strong supporters of Israel, but Trump would give Netanyahu a much freer hand in dealings with the Palestinians, with Hezbollah, and with Iran.
6. Russia. It certainly hasn’t hurt Vladimir Putin to see so much of the world’s attention drawn away from his invasion of Ukraine. And to the extent that the US gets wound into an intractable conflict in the Middle East, so much the better from his perch, especially if regional jitters push up oil prices. But the Kremlin has to be careful. If Israel severely weakens Hezbollah, it could shake things loose in Syria, where the group’s fighters are a major ground force for Russia’s protégé, Bashar Assad. And if a wider Israel-Iran war erupts, Moscow could get drawn more deeply into a messy situation than it likes – after all, Putin’s already fighting a war of his own closer to home.
7. The Arab world. Popular opinion is strongly critical of Israel and the US. That has been a particular challenge for regimes in Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel and are close partners of the US. In Jordan, for example, even in a recent tightly controlled election, Islamist opposition parties that support Hamas surged in the polls. Saudi Arabia, arguably the preeminent Arab power now, is warily watching as Israel-Iran tensions escalate. Saudi Arabia and Iran are longtime rivals, but ties have been improving recently, and Riyadh has no interest in a wider war as it tries to move ahead with an ambitious domestic economic and social modernization drive. But Israel may yet have other ideas.Are Israel and Hezbollah on the brink of all-out war?
While the cross-border fire forced about 60,000 Israelis and 100,000 Lebanese from their homes, neither side was inclined to escalate the skirmishes and risk a full-scale war, knowing the destructive consequences of such a showdown. Israel had little appetite to open a second front against Iran’s most formidable proxy while it was actively fighting a grinding war in Gaza. Meanwhile, neither Hezbollah – under growing domestic pressure amid public discontent with Lebanon’s enduring economic crisis – nor its patrons in Tehran – now betting on regional de-escalation to obtain sanctions relief and bolster the regime’s stability – had an interest in going to war on behalf of Hamas.
But after nearly a year of contained clashes, something shifted in Israel’s strategic calculus that led it to dramatically raise the stakes and expand the confrontation with Hezbollah last week.
First came the attacks on Sept. 17 and 18 using remotely detonated Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, which not only killed dozens and injured thousands of the organization’s members but also crippled its communications network. Two days later, the IDF assassinated Hezbollah’s top military commander, Ibrahim Aqil, along with the entire chain of command of the group’s elite Radwan unit while they were holding an in-person meeting in a residential building in Beirut. (Aqil’s predecessor, Fuad Shukr, had been killed by an Israeli strike in the same Beirut neighborhood back in July.)
Then, on Monday, Israel launched a massive aerial campaign targeting Hezbollah strongholds across the country – primarily in southern Lebanon but also in the eastern Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut’s Dahiyah suburb – and destroying tens of thousands of rocket launchers and weapons depots. More than 550 people (including at least 50 children) were killed that day alone – nearly half the total number of Lebanese fatalities during the entire 2006 war with Israel. One of yesterday’s airstrikes also took out the commander in charge of Hezbollah's rocket and missile division.
As many as half a million Lebanese have already fled for the north as Israel looks set to intensify its bombardments over the coming days and weeks, threatening to expand the conflict even further.
What changed? What is Israel’s new endgame? And will Israel’s actions or Hezbollah’s response trigger an all-out war?
Two fronts, no more
Here’s what didn’t change: Some 60,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes for almost a year. That may not sound like a lot, but in proportional terms, it’s the equivalent of the entire population of the state of New Mexico (2.2 million) being evacuated for a year.
These people have grown frustrated at their inability to sleep in their own beds – or send their children to their schools – and they’ve become a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Although the Israeli government regularly vowed to do something to allow them to return home, everyone understood that confronting Hezbollah was a distraction Israel couldn’t afford while the fight against Hamas was still ongoing.
But major military operations in Gaza are now winding down. While a negotiated cease-fire remains out of reach, the Israelis have so thoroughly degraded Hamas’ offensive capabilities, destroyed its tunnels, and decapitated its leadership that there’s not much more left for them to accomplish in the Strip. The IDF is accordingly withdrawing most troops from Gaza, freeing them to be deployed elsewhere (read: to the north) if needed.
Moreover, while most Israelis blame their government for the failure to secure the release of the hostages held by Hamas, there is widespread public support for a campaign to return displaced residents to the border areas threatened by Hezbollah. This is critical for the embattled Netanyahu, who can leverage the opportunity to galvanize his fragile coalition, boost his popularity amid mounting domestic tensions, and extend his tenure in office. He also has a chance to rewrite his legacy and become the prime minister who neutralized the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, instead of the one who oversaw the worst intelligence and military failure in the country’s history.
Escalate to de-escalate
Despite its expansion of the bounds of escalation, Israel’s government does not appear to be trying to provoke a full-fledged war, destroy Hezbollah, or occupy any (let alone all) sovereign Lebanese territory. Its goal, made official last week, is more limited: to fulfill its promise to return the approximately 60,000 displaced residents of the northern border communities to their homes and prevent Hezbollah from threatening their safety in the future.
The problem is that since Oct. 8, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has publicly insisted on conditioning a cease-fire in northern Israel to a cease-fire in Gaza, and the odds of the latter being agreed to anytime soon are slim to none (with Netanyahu and Hamas honcho Yahya Sinwar sharing the blame).
Israel is accordingly seeking to force Nasrallah to decouple Lebanon from Gaza, stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its northern communities, and move its troops and weapons stockpiles away from Israel’s border in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Established at the end of the 2006 war, this resolution calls for the withdrawal of all armed forces in the 18-mile stretch between Israel’s border and Lebanon’s Litani River.
The big question is whether Israel’s escalations over the past week are a prelude to a ground invasion to secure this buffer zone in southern Lebanon or a pressure campaign intended to compel Nasrallah to stand down without said invasion.
My take? Israel would strongly prefer not to have to resort to a large-scale ground incursion. The full-fledged war that it would cause entails much higher costs and risks than Israel wants, and Netanyahu is gambling the devastating show of force will render it unnecessary. Having said that, if the coming days and weeks of escalating military pressure fail to get Nasrallah to fold or trigger an unacceptably retaliatory escalation from Hezbollah (e.g., successful strikes on military installations, critical infrastructure, or cities, mass civilian casualty attacks, assassinations of military or political leaders, etc.), Israel would probably be willing – and certainly ready – to go all the way to achieve its objective.
Hezbollah’s dilemma
Nasrallah made a strategic blunder when he tied Hezbollah’s fate to a Gaza cease-fire. Again and again, he doubled down by publicly insisting on this linkage. Now his organization has been dealt the worst blow in its history, and he’s stuck with no good options to respond.
There’s no doubt that Nasrallah feels compelled to reciprocate Israel’s escalations, but Hezbollah has no effective means to do so without risking all-out war against an overwhelmingly superior adversary. Unlike the bounded confrontation we’re currently seeing, a full-scale war would entail intensive and sustained strikes by both sides on each other’s critical and state infrastructure (including electricity and energy assets, ports, and airports) as well as densely populated civilian areas. It would also feature Israeli tanks and boots battling inside Lebanon.
That is a war Hezbollah knows it can’t possibly win – and one that both the Lebanese public and the group’s Iranian backers desperately oppose. This is especially true after the events of the past week, which have severely degraded the group’s military capabilities, eliminated most of its leaders, dented its morale, and compromised its power to coordinate a response.
At the same time, Nasrallah has no face-saving way to walk back his threats to continue attacking Israel until there’s a Gaza cease-fire. But what good is keeping his word to the Palestinians if Hezbollah gets destroyed in the process?
What I expect, therefore, is neither full capitulation nor full defiance. Nasrallah will keep up his tough rhetoric and refuse to comply with UN Resolution 1701, but Hezbollah will quietly bow to the pressure to let up its attacks against northern Israel. The IDF’s intensifying air campaign, meanwhile, will turn southern Lebanon into a ghost town as civilians and fighters continue to evacuate the area, making it easier for a small contingent of Israeli troops to eventually set up a buffer zone with minimal resistance and allowing the 60,000 displaced to return home. Hezbollah’s deterrence will suffer greatly, but the tip of the Iranian spear in the Levant will live to fight another day.
Danger ahead
Of course, I could be wrong. There’s a lot of uncertainty and it’s ultimately a close call, with lots of room for accidents and unintended escalations.
But even if I’m right and all-out war doesn’t break out between Israel and Hezbollah, the regional situation will still remain exceptionally dangerous. Other Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen are determined to continue the fight. The two-state solution is all but dead. Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank are being driven to desperation, their prospects of living normal lives deteriorating wildly before our eyes. The powerless Lebanese are watching as their moribund economy takes yet another hit. The impact all of this is having on the Arab public mood, normalization efforts with Israel, and radicalization and extremism cannot be overstated.
All the regional leaders I've met in New York for the UN General Assembly over the last 48 hours have told me that this is the most flammable they’ve seen the Middle East since 1967. They’re right. As I wrote last January, “The region is no longer quiet, and it won't be for ages.”
Biden's exit overshadows Netanyahu's US visit
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
How will Biden dropping out of the presidential race overshadow Netanyahu's US visit?
Oh, was it happening today? I didn't notice, I was so busy focused on Biden dropping out. No, clearly, it is a massive benefit for Biden that it is now less of a deal. Probably means less demonstrations, means less media coverage. It is a big problem, right? I mean, you've got the US top ally in the Middle East, Israel, the leader is clearly disliked by Biden. Kamala Harris not showing up to preside over Senate. She's, you know, otherwise disposed at a prearranged meeting in Indianapolis. And then you've got Netanyahu going down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the guy that he wants to become president, former President Donald Trump. All of that is problematic for Biden but less problematic because US political news at home is so overwhelming and headline-worthy.
Can the China-brokered agreement between Hamas and Fatah help bring Palestinian peace?
Unclear. I mean, the fact that Hamas, which is seen as a terrorist organization, and rightly so in my view, by the United States, by most of the West, and certainly by Israel, now has a peace agreement with Fatah, definitely brings the Palestinians closer together. But frankly, since October 7th, the Palestinians have only become more radicalized as a population; just like in Israel, the Jews have become more radicalized as a population, both less interested in peace. The rest of the world is very interested in peace, but very hard to get from here to there. I do think there is a chance that we can still get that six-week agreement because the Knesset is going to be out of session until October, which means that Netanyahu doesn't have to worry about getting thrown out of office if he has a six-week agreement and goes back to fighting, the far right, by the time they could throw him out, the Knesset would be back in. That's interesting and worth looking at.
After a long hot summer of French politics, is the Olympics a rallying moment for Macron?
Not at all. He can't get a government together. That has proved very challenging for him. 2027 still looks like the end of centrism in France, at least for a while. Not going to stop me from watching the Olympics though.
FILE PHOTO: A soldier stands at Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, near the Gaza coast, June 25, 2024.
US to scrap Gaza pier project
US military officials announced Wednesday they would dismantle the floating pier they had attempted to operate off the coast of Gaza, ending a difficult, expensive, monthslong mission to provide aid to civilians in the enclave.
Troubled from the start, the $230 million pier was announced in March but did not come online until May. It was only operational for about 20 days and has faced multiple challenges due to rough waters. It is currently anchored in the Israeli port of Ashdod.
When it was functional, it was used to deliver about 8,000 metric tons of aid — roughly equivalent to what humanitarian agencies say needs to enter Gaza every day.
The pier was pitched as a way to ensure Gazans on the verge of starvation could access food, medicine, and clean water while allowing Israel to continue its military campaign against Hamas. A UN-backed global hunger monitor reported last week that over 495,000 people are facing the most severe level of food insecurity, approximately 22% of the population, and hunger is widespread.
UNRWA funding cuts threaten Lebanon's Palestinian refugees
GZERO went inside the Shatila Camp in Beirut, one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps, to better understand what the loss of UNRWA funding would mean for the people who call it home—the teachers, doctors, and local government workers who rely on UNRWA to provide basic services, like education, healthcare, and clean water to residents. The agency says it has enough funds to last through June, but it will need to make some tough choices after that.
“The reason UNRWA still exists after 75 years is because there is no political solution,” says Dorothee Klaus, URWA’s Lebanon director, “It is time to find a solution for Palestinian refugees to live in dignity like everybody else.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
Gaza protests highlight the need to build cooperation vs. confrontation, says Eboo Patel
It’s time for college students to rethink how they protest, says Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, a nonprofit that works with hundreds of campuses to foster healthier dialogue. In a wide-ranging interview with Ian Bremmer for the latest episode of GZERO World, Patel criticizes the confrontational culture on campuses, urging a shift from romanticizing conflict to embracing cooperation. He challenges the dichotomy of oppressors and oppressed, advocating for a more nuanced approach to diversity that resembles a potluck of ideas.
“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
College campuses are actually the perfect venues for this kind of dialogue, Patel says, and professors and administrators can leverage their intellectual backgrounds to foster the kinds of productive dialogue that students need more than ever. Everything else, like demanding the disbanding of campus police, Patel says, is nothing more than a distraction.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- US inching away from Israel on Gaza war ›
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- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›
Covering Columbia's campus protests as a student and GZERO reporter
The past few weeks of student protests, counter-protests, and police activity at Columbia have been the tensest moments the University has seen in over 50 years. What’s it like to be a student and graduating senior during this historic moment?
When GZERO writer Riley Callanan began her senior year at Barnard, the women’s college within Columbia, she never expected it would end this way: thousands of student protesters, an encampment and takeover of an administrative building, the attention of the national news media, armed police officers swarming campus, and, ultimately, a canceled graduation ceremony. Now, as she tells colleague Alex Kliment on GZERO World, instead of senior galas and grad parties, Columbia students are having intense debates over the Israel-Palestine conflict, antisemitism, and free speech.
Callanan has been documenting it all—from the early protests on the academic quad to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delivering on her library steps. GZERO correspondent Alex Kliment sat down with Callahan to hear more about what it’s like to be a college senior in 2024, what she saw during the protests, and what happens after graduation.“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- With summer looming, where will student protesters turn next? ›
- From the inside out: Is Columbia’s campus crisis calming down? ›
- Chaos on Campus: Speaker Johnson's visit fans the flames at Columbia as protests go global ›
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- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›