‘Remarkable’ that Middle East is on the brink of a wider conflict a year into Israel-Hamas war, say observers

On Monday (Oct 7), the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas reached its one-year mark with the death toll in Gaza standing at more than 41,000, most of them civilians.

Ceasefire talks have repeatedly led nowhere. In July, a group of independent United Nations (UN) experts warned that famine had spread across Gaza. More than a dozen Palestinians, mostly children, are known to have starved to death.

Now, the Middle East is on the verge of a wider regional war following a recent escalation in the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Since last month, both sides have exchanged heavy fire after thousands of handheld pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah detonated across Lebanon. These attacks were widely attributed to Israel.

On Sunday, Israel carried out its single biggest bombardment of Beirut since the escalation.

Palestinians have also begun fearing that global attention is shifting to other hot spots like Lebanon and overshadowing the suffering in Gaza, as reported by Reuters last week.

Observers whom CNA spoke to said many people did not anticipate the Israel-Hamas war still not being over and even expanding into the region.

“NO END IN SIGHT”

Daniel Levy, president of independent policy institute the US/Middle East Project and former Israeli peace negotiator, noted how the region is at a tipping point and Hamas has not yet been destroyed despite its weakened state.

“It's remarkable, I think, to many people, that a year into this, the prospect of a broader regional conflagration is not just something that we have to be concerned about, but it's something that is here,” he told CNA’s Asia First programme.

Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R Ford School of Public Policy, also said he did not think this was what people thought the Middle East would look like a year after Hamas attacked Israel.

About 1,200 people were killed that day. Hamas also took 251 Israelis and foreign nationals hostage with the aim of forcing Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

“I don't think anyone anticipated the war looking like this now, with the war against Hamas still unfinished, and obviously the devastation to the Gaza Strip and … the tremendous number of civilian casualties that have happened,” Ali told CNA938 on Monday.

“And there's no end in sight to that war, at least not anytime soon.”Levy noted that while there was a hostage release deal late last November that put fighting on pause for several days, things have gotten worse “despite repeated bursts of apparently unfounded, unwarranted optimism”.

LACK OF EFFECTIVE DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS

Experts criticised the lack of effective diplomatic efforts by the United States and the international community to end the war.

“Every single person in that territory basically has been displaced. People have been living without the most basic of conditions and needs for almost a year now,” said Levy, who penned a piece for the Guardian in August saying that the US diplomatic strategy on Israel and Gaza was not working.

“And yet, there’s really not been an effective diplomatic effort to use leverage by the US as the lead actor to bring this to a close,” he added.

Ali pointed out that over the past year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has either ignored US President Joe Biden’s advice or decided that the political fallout from ignoring him “isn’t that significant”.

With the US presidential election taking place in a month’s time, Ali said Biden will not do anything to damage their relationship.

US Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump will also have to be “very cautious” in talking about this, given the potential ramifications for what continues to be a tight race to the White House, Ali added.

UN “DEEPLY CONCERNED”

Meanwhile, the toll that the war has taken on Gazans has been at the forefront of Jens Laerke’s mind.

The deputy spokesperson at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently received a photograph of a little girl from Gaza from a Palestinian photojournalist.

The girl had a scar across her face and lost an eye in an attack while she was in school.

“It's a shocking photo, but when I stayed with that photo, I could see her mother behind, and she were combing her hair gently and she had a smile on her face - and it was this amazing ability to live on, still take care of your children,” Laerke told CNA’s Asia First.

“It just kind of beamed out of that photo - the love that the mother had for this child, and at the same time, the tragedy that is in front of that little girl in the future … it is deeply, deeply tragic on a very personal level for people living there.”

When asked how the UN and other aid groups will cope if another humanitarian crisis breaks out in Lebanon, Learke said the UN is stretched in every part of the world.

He appealed to the international donor community to provide humanitarian aid to those in Lebanon. The UN last week launched an appeal for more than US$400 million.

“We’re deeply concerned by this escalation where one attack becomes a pretext for the next attack, and it's a never-ending vicious cycle that just spins downwards. And the real victims of this are the civilian population, the children, the families and so on.”

The UN has been thinking about how to communicate the deterioration of the crisis over the past year, Laerke said, given that more than 100 people have been killed every day in a small and densely populated area of 2 million people.

He noted that Gazans do not even have the opportunity to flee and become refugees, like in other parts of the world.

“The brutal and very rapid response from Israel has made Gaza, frankly, one of the darkest spots on the planet, and certainly one (of the worst) – if not the worst – humanitarian crises I have seen during my time with the UN and during our time doing humanitarian affairs,” he added.