While the Gaza Strip has been the primary focus of the latest explosive round of unrest that has gripped the Middle East for more than four months, new violent fronts have erupted in several countries and seas. 

Major powers such as the United States and Iran have both said they sought to avoid a wider conflict, but the growing clashes threaten a war that spans multiple theaters, nations, and actors. 

In Gaza, the main belligerents are Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement, which sparked the deadliest-ever flare-up of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict by launching an unprecedented surprise attack on its foe on October 7.  

Joining Hamas, however, are several other armed Palestinian factions,  including Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement. 

Though diverse in their ideologies and broader interests, these militias have largely united in their common goal of defeating Israel, which continues to advance in Gaza despite fierce resistance and growing international pressure over mounting civilian casualties. 

Israel has come under fire from another familiar front in the north. In Lebanon, the powerful Hezbollah movement has launched a sustained campaign using rockets, drones, anti-tank missiles, and other weapons to strike the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which have conducted their own steady series of cross-border operations by land and air. 

This border is one of the most volatile fronts outside of Gaza, given Israel’s history of invasions against Lebanon and the IDF’s current assertions that it would not return to the pre-October 7 situation in the north. Hezbollah, for its part, has threatened to unleash an even wider arsenal of weapons that includes precision-guided munitions capable of striking anywhere in Israel. 

Hezbollah is part of the broader Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance,” which has risen up elsewhere against Israel as well as the regional military presence of the United States, Israel’s top ally. 

A coalition of such militias has banded together under the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” banner, striking U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria with rockets and drones on a near-daily basis since mid-October. Key players in this coalition are Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah and the Nujaba Movement, as well as other powerful Iraqi factions such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Badr Organization and Ashab al-Kahf, itself believed to be a coalition of other forces. 

Complicating matters, many of these units are part of Iraq’s state-sponsored Popular Mobilization Forces, a paramilitary umbrella of largely Shiite Muslim militias that came together to battle the rise of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) but has grown increasingly hostile toward the U.S. amid worsening tensions between Washington and Tehran. 

The U.S. has launched several rounds of airstrikes against these militias in Iraq and Syria. Still, the most serious response came earlier this month after three U.S. soldiers died in a drone attack at the Jordan-Syria border. The White House has vowed to continue its offensive to deter further attacks, but commanders on the ground have also expressed their commitment to expelling U.S. troops from the region at a time when Baghdad was under considerable pressure to address hostility toward the U.S. military presence in the country and Damascus outright called for its immediate departure. 

Another well-armed Axis of Resistance power apparently undeterred by U.S. action is Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement. Ansar Allah seized the Yemeni capital in early 2015 and resisted a yearslong U.S.-backed, Saudi-led campaign to reinstall the country’s internationally recognized government. With a fragile yet sustained ceasefire in place since April 2022, Ansar Allah began turning its missiles and drones against Israel shortly after the Islamic Resistance in Iraq’s campaign began against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. 

The following month, Ansar Allah expanded its campaign to include targeting commercial vessels accused of having links to Israel. The group has since launched dozens of attacks against ships of various flags and countries of origin, disrupting trade in the crucial trade corridors of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. 

The U.S. has taken direct action here, too, teaming up with the United Kingdom and receiving support from several other partners to launch airstrikes across military sites in Yemen. And yet the attacks continue, with Ansar Allah, like other Axis of Resistance actors, vowing to press on until Israel halts its offensive in Gaza.

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