What Is the Role of Iran in the Current Israeli-Palestinian Escalation?
Hamas's actions may spread beyond Gaza, despite official efforts by Iran and the US to limit the conflict to that area, potentially affecting Lebanon and Syria.
People stage a demonstration in support of Palestinians and to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza Strip, on May 19, 2021 in Tehran, Iran. Photo by Anadolu Images.
T
he nature and extent of Iran’s involvement in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood have been the subject of divergent interpretations. Some argue that Iran played a direct role in the initiation of the conflict, while others suggest that Iran’s influence was more indirect, aiming to leverage the conflict for its geopolitical interests. As the war escalated, however, Iran’s impact on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict became more discernible.
Iran has greatly improved its relations with Hamas in recent years. Tehran provides Hamas with political, military, and financial support and Iran’s role in Hamas’s ability to carry out such a sophisticated and large-scale operation is undeniable.
In this vein, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met with the head of the political bureau of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Doha a week after the clashes started. Iran also enjoys advanced relations with other armed Palestinian groups, such as Islamic Jihad. While the Hamas-Iran relationship is a marriage of convenience as Hamas seeks external support, the Islamic Jihad-Iran connection is ideologically based.
Senior Iranian government officials have vehemently denied allegations that they were involved in the planning stages of the operation. Iran’s official position seems to be to provide political support after the operation has started. In this manner, Iran seems to have avoided the risk of a direct military confrontation in legal terms and opted for a confrontation with Israel through its proxy forces.
Despite the official statements from Iranian authorities, the security bureaucracy in Iran, especially the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), acts independently of the government. It is known that Hamas has been meeting with Iranian military officials regularly before this operation. It is also true that this operation coincides with Iran’s long-term strategic interests.
At the end of the day, it would be naive to think that Hamas, with all the support it receives from Iran, would engage in something radically contrary to Iran’s regional policy. While it cannot be said that Iran is directing Hamas’s chain of command, it is also not completely out of the picture.
Iran’s aim is to target the normalization between Israel and Arab countries. Indeed, after Hamas’s attack, Ali Akbar Velayati, one of the advisors of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said that “those who are trying to normalize [relations] with Israel should take lessons from these developments.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s airstrikes in Syria have caused serious losses for Iran and the Hamas attack served as a deterrent against Israel in this sense. It is always in Iran’s interest to keep the confrontational motivation against Israel alive in the region; after all, Iran refers to Israel as “Little Satan” (the U.S. being “Great Satan”) and gives it a central position in its ideological propaganda.
What is next?
Along with the debate of whether Iran was involved in this war from the very beginning, another question is where and how Iran will be involved in this war from now on. The dynamics between Iran and the U.S. will have as much of an impact on the war as Israel’s actions on the ground. The unconditional support of the United States for Israel, on the one side, and Iran’s influence over Palestinian groups and its other proxy forces fighting or ready to fight the U.S., on the other, will have a significant impact on the course of the war.
Furthermore, it is also possible that this war could be used by hawkish actors to block new negotiations between Iran and the United States. For now, neither side seems to have backed down from negotiations. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remarks about Iran’s role in the Hamas attack— “We don’t have enough evidence of Iranian involvement”—show that Washington does not want to burn bridges with Tehran. But as the war drags on and intensifies, Iran-U.S. negotiations are likely to fall out of the picture.
It seems likely that Hamas’s operation will have a spillover effect in a wide area, covering Lebanon and Syria although the Iranian and U.S. authorities’ official rhetoric indicates that they want to keep the war limited to Gaza. Lebanese Hezbollah has been attempting to infiltrate through the Lebanese-Israeli border and in recent days there have been exchanges of harassment between the two sides.
Hezbollah had also threatened to fight directly alongside Hamas if Israel launched a ground operation, while it should be kept in mind that the Hezbollah-Iran connection is much stronger and more organic than the Hamas-Iran connection. Other Iranian-aligned groups in the region, such as the Hashd al-Shaabi forces in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, have also declared that they will target U.S. troops throughout the region if the U.S. directly joins the war.
The position of the so-called Resistance Front, or Resistance Front of Islamic Iran, which consists of groups aligned with Iran, in the face of such an expansion has been studied many times before. In the event of a protracted and widespread war, we will have to talk more about the Iranian factor.
