As Israel unleashed a sweeping military response to the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Hamas, it aimed punch after punch at the power of Iran, the militant group’s longtime sponsor, and its other proxies and allies in the region.
The result has been a rapid and systematic degradation of Iran’s clout across the Middle East over the past 2½ years, a seismic change that led directly to this weekend’s devastating attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel.
“Certainly the Oct. 7 events were a turning point in this long conflict between Iran and Israel,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an expert on Iranian politics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. “I think it provided Israel with the argument or justification to deliver a strong blow.”
The most devastating hit so far came this weekend when President Donald Trump and Israeli leaders launched a wave of attacks on Iran, killing Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and inflicting widespread destruction. But the war, while still in its early stages, is part of a much longer continuum of events that have severely weakened Iran, Hezbollah and other proxy militias, and upended political balance in the region.
“It’s a very bloody, a very violent but transformative moment that the Middle East is going through,” said Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow focused on the Middle East at Chatham House, a British think tank. “We don’t know where this will end up.”
The war in Gaza was the wellspring
The damage to Iran’s power radiated from the war in Gaza, where Israeli forces followed Hamas after militants killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages during the Oct. 7 attacks. Israel has since killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry, which is under Gaza’s Hamas government and which does not distinguish between militants and civilians.
The conflict quickly expanded, though, to include other groups in the Iran-sponsored Axis of Resistance.
In Lebanon, the powerful militant group Hezbollah had long been considered Iran’s first line of defense in case of a war with Israel. It was believed to have some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and the group’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah once boasted of having 100,000 fighters.
After Oct. 7, the group launched rockets across the border to Israel, seeking to aid its ally Hamas. That drew Israeli airstrikes and shelling and the exchanges escalated into full-scale war in the fall of 2024.
Israel inflicted heavy damage on Hezbollah, killing Nasrallah and other top leaders and destroying much of the militant group’s arsenal, before a U.S.-negotiated ceasefire nominally halted that conflict last November. Israel continues to occupy parts of southern Lebanon and to carry out near-daily airstrikes.
Hezbollah was further weakened when rebels overthrew the regime of key ally Syrian President Bashar Assad, cutting off a major supply route for Iranian weapons.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, also sponsored by Iran, joined the expanding conflict, firing rockets at vessels in the Red Sea and targeting Israel. U.S. warships and the Israeli military returned fire.
Israel left the status quo behind
As the conflict expanded, leaders of Iran and its proxies failed to recognize that Israel had abandoned the long-tense status quo and was trying to engineer a fundamental shift, Mansour said.
The toll on Iran escalated last June when Israel launched a surprise offensive aimed at decimating Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program while Iran and the U.S. were in negotiations for a nuclear deal. The 12-day war that followed saw bombing attacks of Iran’s energy industry and Defense Ministry headquarters.
Iran’s weakened proxy groups largely stayed on the sidelines as their sponsor came under direct attack last year. So far in the new war, they’ve done much the same.
“It’s very much about survival” for Hezbollah and the other Iran-backed groups, Mansour said. He noted that over time the Axis had become less driven by top-down orders from Iran, and the groups have become more autonomous. “And survival to them is based on calculations that aren’t necessarily about Iran’s survival.”
Since Israel and the U.S. launched a barrage of strikes on Iran Saturday, Tehran’s allies and proxies in the region have had a minimal role in the response.
Hezbollah appeared to change that early Monday, even though the group has been under great pressure by Lebanese officials not to enter the fray in defense of Iran out of fear of another damaging war in Lebanon.
Hezbollah issued statements condemning the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and mourning the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then it hinted it might get involved. Early Monday, it did, firing missiles across the border. Israel promptly retaliated with strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut. It was the first time in more than a year that Hezbollah has claimed a strike against Israel.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the strikes were carried out in retaliation for the killing of Khamenei and for “repeated Israeli aggressions.”
How might other proxy groups react?
How other proxy groups could react to Khamenei’s death remains to be seen. Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said Israel’s actions since 2023 may give such groups pause.
“Previous bouts of conflict since Oct. 7 appear to have underlined the existential risk associated with making yourself a target,” Lister said in an email responding to questions from The Associated Press.
In Iraq, a coalition of Iran-backed militias calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed several drone strikes targeting U.S. bases in Irbil, the capital of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north. The extent of damage caused by the attacks is not clear. But the Kurdish region has seen widespread power outages after a key gas field that supplies much of the region’s electricity stopped operations, citing security concerns.
Two officials with different Iran-backed militias in Iraq told the AP that a meeting took place two months ago between Iranian officials and allied Iraqi militias to make plans for a response in case Iran was attacked, including distributing tasks among the Iraqi armed groups.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. One of the officials said it was decided that the response would target U.S. forces and interests in Iraq’s semiautonomous northern Kurdish region and in neighboring Jordan.
There’s often a misconception that Iran issues orders to its proxy militant groups and they all fall in line, Boroujerdi said. But independent decisions the groups have made so far to stay clear of the conflict are a sign of the overall weakening of Iran’s network.
“The dominoes started to fall with the October 7 events,” Boroujerdi said. “Just take note of everything that has changed since then in terms of the balance of power.”
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Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.
