By Abdulkadir Mohammed Surajo
The Middle East is hurtling towards a precipice, and the decades-old shadow war between Israel and Iran is no longer in the shadows. What was once a strategic contest fought through proxies—militias in Lebanon, militants in Gaza, rebels in Yemen—has erupted into direct, unprecedented military strikes between the two nations. This dangerous escalation marks a fundamental shift in the region’s power dynamics, pushing a volatile corner of the world closer to a full-scale conflagration with global consequences. The long-standing policy of “managed conflict” has broken down, revealing the inherent instability of a rivalry built on asymmetric warfare and existential threats.
The roots of this confrontation are profoundly ideological and strategic. Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Israel and Iran under the Shah maintained discreet but mutually beneficial ties, bound by shared security interests in a turbulent region. The ascension of Ayatollah Khomeini radically reconfigured this relationship. Israel was re-cast in the new Islamic Republic’s ideology as the “Little Satan,” a spearhead of Western imperialism and a usurping entity on sacred Muslim land. This ideological enmity provided the fertile ground from which a decades-long conflict would grow. In response, Tehran meticulously cultivated the “Axis of Resistance”—a network of proxy forces designed to project Iranian power, encircle Israel, and pressure the Jewish state without triggering a direct, conventional war that the Islamic Republic knew it could not win.
This sprawling proxy network became the central battlefield of the conflict, allowing Iran to punch far above its weight. The crown jewel of this strategy is Hezbollah in Lebanon. More than a militia, it is a state-within-a-state, boasting a parliamentarian bloc, a vast social services network, and a military arsenal estimated to include over 150,000 rockets and precision-guided missiles. It is, by all accounts, Israel’s most formidable non-state adversary, a fact cemented in the brutal 2006 Lebanon War. Further south, groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza have waged repeated rocket campaigns against Israeli cities, their capabilities significantly enhanced by Iranian funding, training, and weapons transfers. The October 7, 2023, attacks underscored the lethal effectiveness of this patronage. Perhaps most illustrative of Iran’s extended reach are the Houthis in Yemen. Despite being over 1,500 miles from Israel, they have become a strategic nuisance, disrupting global trade by targeting shipping in the Red Sea with sophisticated Iranian-supplied drones and ballistic missiles. For Iran, this strategy offered perfect asymmetric leverage: any attack on its soil risked a devastating, multi-front retaliation from its allied forces, creating a powerful deterrent.
Israel’s counter-strategy has been defined by a doctrine of preemption, technological superiority, and relentless intelligence operations. Dubbed “mowing the grass,” this approach accepts that enemy capabilities cannot be permanently eliminated but must be regularly degraded through military action to maintain security. This has manifested in a relentless air campaign in Syria, where the Israeli Air Force has conducted thousands of sorties to interdict the flow of advanced weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Beyond airstrikes, Israel has relied on a controversial yet effective campaign of targeted assassinations, eliminating key Iranian nuclear scientists and Quds Force commanders with chilling precision. The battlefield has also expanded into the digital realm. Cyber operations, such as the Stuxnet virus that crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, demonstrated Israel’s ability to inflict significant damage without a single soldier crossing a border. Diplomatically, the Abraham Accords of 2020 were a masterstroke, normalizing relations with the UAE, Bahrain, and later others, forging an open anti-Iran coalition that bolstered Israel’s strategic depth and isolated Tehran.
However, this precarious equilibrium, maintained for over two decades, has shattered. The cycle of proxy violence has escalated into overt confrontation, systematically crossing once-unthinkable red lines. The turning point was the April 2024 Israeli air strike that leveled the Iranian consulate in Damascus, a diplomatic facility, killing several senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including a top general. This strike represented a significant escalation in Israel’s “war-between-wars” campaign, striking a target previously considered off-limits. Iran’s response was historic and direct: it launched over 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles from its own territory toward Israel. This was not a proxy action; it was the first-ever direct military assault by Iran on Israel. While Israel’s multi-layered air defense, aided by the US, UK, Jordan, and others, intercepted the vast majority of the projectiles, the psychological barrier had been broken. Israel’s subsequent retaliation—a series of strikes on Iranian soil targeting radar systems and air defense sites around a major nuclear facility—was equally unprecedented. The shadow war was now decisively in the open, exposing the stark vulnerabilities and calculated risks inherent in both nations’ strategies.
This dangerous new phase reveals critical and costly lessons. Iran’s reliance on proxies, while effective for plausible deniability and strategic depth, creates a fragile and sometimes unreliable shield. The degradation of a key group like Hezbollah, which faces growing domestic anger in Lebanon over its role in dragging the country into conflict, directly weakens Tehran’s hand. Furthermore, technology is dramatically reshaping the cost-benefit analysis of modern warfare. Israel’s successful defense against the Iranian barrage came at a staggering financial cost, with each interceptor missile far exceeding the price of the cheap drones and rockets it was destroying. This asymmetry presents a severe long-term economic challenge. The integration of cyber warfare with kinetic operations has also become standard practice, with both sides targeting critical infrastructure, defense systems, and public morale in a continuous, silent battle running parallel to the physical one.
The human cost of this geopolitical struggle, however, is borne not in Tel Aviv or Tehran, but by the civilian populations of the region’s proxy battlegrounds. Lebanon teeters on the brink of total economic collapse, Gaza faces a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, Yemen remains shattered by war, and Syria is a fractured nation. The people of these countries suffer displacement, poverty, and violence, their lives and futures sacrificed in a larger game of regional dominance. The strategic implications are vast and unsettling: a weakened Hezbollah could lead to a violent power vacuum in Lebanon, Israeli strikes deep inside Yemen signal a dramatic and dangerous extension of the conflict’s geography, and the immense economic strain of sanctions and military expenditure is testing the internal stability of the Iranian regime.
The proxy wars between Israel and Iran have long been the defining conflict of the modern Middle East. Now, as the lines between indirect and direct warfare blur beyond recognition, this rivalry threatens to redefine the region through a lens of open, state-on-state conflict. The old rules of engagement have been discarded, and new, more dangerous ones are being written in real time. The world watches anxiously from the sidelines, aware that the next escalation may not be just another manageable flare-up, but the very spark that ignites a regional war with unimaginable global repercussions.
Abdulkadir Mohammed surajo is a graduate of political science from Bayero University kano and a serving corps member at the institute for peace and conflict Resolution (IPCR), Abuja. he can be reached via: Abdulkadirmohammed040@gmail.com
