After October 7: How Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response broke the world

It has been a year since the horrific events of October 7, 2023. What has happened since is best described as a global tragedy.

The scale of the immediate suffering is staggering. From the 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas on October 7 to the over 40,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in the war since, the human toll of the conflict is terrible and growing higher. Though the past year should have discredited the idea that there can be any stability without a solution that satisfies both Israeli and Palestinian national aspirations, a negotiated settlement seems further away than ever.

And as the dramatic military escalation of the past few weeks illustrates, the consequences of October 7 are traveling wider and wider. The Middle East is aflame, with Israeli soldiers fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon and direct hostilities between Israel and Iran, Hezbollah’s patron. The risk of a full-scale regional war is growing — if we are not already in one.

Zooming even further out, the year since October 7 has seen dire developments for the entire world.

America’s disastrous mishandling of the conflict has not only failed to stop the bloodshed, but also done serious damage to its already-frayed credibility as a guarantor of the rules-based international order — weakening global support for Ukraine’s eminently just defensive war against Russia and strengthening China’s attempts to undermine pillars of global stability.

The war has also created new forms of global instability. The Houthi militants in Yemen have wreaked havoc on global shipping, demonstrating how a well-positioned terrorist group can pose a serious threat to the global economy using relatively low-cost weapons. A global surge of Islamophobia and antisemitism has further scarred divided Western democracies, and internal divisions between pro-democracy political factions over Gaza have weakened their capacity to stand united against rising anti-democratic forces.

To call the past year a global tragedy is not to distract from the most immediate victims, the Israelis and Palestinians killed and immiserated by bullets and bombs. These are the protagonists of any moral story about the past year of war, the people who should be placed first in any accounting of the past year’s events.

Rather, it is to put the full range of consequences into view: to show that events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting. This is not a world war, but it is a global tragedy, one whose horrors are not yet done being revealed.

Life for ordinary Gazans was difficult prior to October 7, thanks to a combination of Israeli restrictions on trade and movement and Hamas’s theocratic governance. But since then, Israel’s military response has made it unbearable.

Nearly 42,000 Gazans have been killed since October 7, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health. That’s about 2 percent of the Gaza Strip’s entire population, the proportional equivalent of 6.5 million Americans dying in a war. Israeli estimates of Hamas fighters killed — between 17,000 and 18,000 — suggest around 60 percent of the dead are civilians.

Some have called the death data into question on the grounds that Hamas controls the health ministry. However, its numbers have proven accurate in previous conflicts and provide at least a rough approximation of the total death count.

In fact, it’s likely an understatement. Official data compiled by Al Jazeera shows at least half of all homes in the Strip are damaged or destroyed; so too are 80 percent of “commercial facilities” and 85 percent of school buildings. In May, a UN agency estimated that there were likely 10,000 Palestinian dead trapped under the rubble and that it might take as long as three years to recover all of the bodies.

Israel’s bombs and bullets, together with its intentional disruption of humanitarian aid, has made life in Gaza unbearable.

Ninety percent of Gazan residents have been displaced from their homes. Food is so scarce that nearly every Gazan has trouble finding it in adequate amounts, per an international expert report released in June. UN data from around the same time found that 50,000 Gazan children were suffering from acute malnutrition. Gaza’s health infrastructure has collapsed, thanks in part to Israeli bombs destroying a majority of Gaza’s hospitals. Rates of disease are skyrocketing; an April report from Doctors Without Borders found that the number of diarrhea cases had increased by 25 times over the pre-war baseline.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli extremists both in and outside of government have used the war in Gaza as a pretext to accelerate their colonization campaign.

Since October 7, there have been over 1,000 violent attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers. This is an “all-time high” rate of settler violence, per a report by the International Crisis Group. Yet despite this spiking violence, Israel has arrested a fourth of the number of Jewish suspects in the West Bank as it did in 2022 — the year before the current far-right government took power.

Some leaders in the current government — like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir — are themselves settler radicals, and they have pursued their goals via policy throughout the war. In 2024, the Israeli government officially seized more than nine square miles of land from Palestinians — the most in any year since the 1990s Oslo Accords gave Palestinians a measure of self-determination in the West Bank.

The past year, in short, has been hell for Palestinians. And there is no respite in sight.

After Hamas fighters slaughtered 1,200 Israelis in cold blood last year, the group was not only expecting an Israeli response, they were counting on it. Any extended Israeli campaign in Gaza would surely come with massive civilian casualties, a level of death that would rally the Palestinian population to Hamas’s side and isolate Israel internationally.

Based on classified evidence “described by more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries,” the Washington Post concluded that Hamas planners aimed to “strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response.”

Israel fell right into their trap.

Since October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly declared his war aim to be destroying Hamas. Nearly everyone credible agrees that this is, in the most literal sense, impossible: Israel does not have the capability to wipe the organization off the earth in any kind of reasonable time frame. So no one knows what Netanyahu means by “destroying” Hamas. He has never really explained it.

The result is that, if the war were to end tomorrow, Hamas would still be intact and the dominant power in the Gaza Strip. It will almost certainly be able to reconstitute itself as the governing force in Gaza again, owing in part to rising support among the Palestinian population. Thirty-six percent of Palestinians currently support Hamas, per the authoritative Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll — nearly twice as high as the support for their more moderate rival Fatah (21 percent). Prior to the war, Fatah commanded a small plurality in the same poll (26-22 percent).

If Israel has bought security through bloodshed in Gaza, it is only a temporary reprieve. The foundations of its security problem — a political status quo in which dispossessed Palestinians turn to terrorist groups as an act of “resistance” — remain intact.

Absent a political solution that gives Palestinians hope for peaceful coexistence, Israelis will always have reason to fear an attack. The war has obliterated any hope of such an agreement in the immediate term, with polls displaying record-low levels of support among Israelis for pursuing one. Even if their opinion shifts after the war, as it likely will when the trauma of October 7 fades, wartime settlement growth and land grabs in the West Bank deepen the logistical barriers in the way of any kind of agreement.

More broadly, Israelis are generally hopeless about their government’s ability to manage both the conflict with the Palestinians and their own basic needs. A series of failures, ranging from an inability to support Israelis displaced on October 7 to the failure to return the hostages, has made Israelis question whether their government is up to the most basic tasks of governing. One recent poll found that only 17 percent of Israelis expressed a high degree of trust in their government.

At the same time, the long-evident authoritarian tendencies of the Netanyahu government have asserted themselves during the war.

In the weeks and months immediately following October 7, there was a crackdown on dissent from the government’s line on the war. Arab Israelis and left-wingers were harassed and even arrested. Ben Gvir’s ministry approved permits for pro-war protests but not anti-war ones as the minister himself called for a full ban on pro-peace demonstrations.

This climate has changed as the war went on. Israelis recently staged a massive ceasefire protest, which organizers say was the largest single-day demonstration in the country’s history.

But other problems have arisen. After Israeli authorities arrested soldiers accused of torturing Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman military base, far-right demonstrators stormed the base to try and free them by force. Sitting members of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, actually joined the group who breached the fence.

The event, widely described as Israel’s January 6, illustrates just how deep the rot in the country’s democracy runs and how war, as it so often does, is damaging the principles that free government depends on.

Israel’s recent blitz assault on Hezbollah, including the killing of its longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah and much of its senior leadership, has done serious damage to a group that has been firing rockets at Israel since October 8. It also displaced about 60,000 Israeli citizens from their homes along the northern border.

Targeting Hezbollah, which is deeply integrated into the Lebanese population, comes at a high cost in civilian lives. And we’ve seen in many recent wars that tactical victories do not amount to strategic success. Israel’s ultimate goal — breaking the Iran-led “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis in Yemen — has not yet been accomplished. It’s possible that, in pursuit of this goal, Israel begins a process of escalation that evolves into a region-wide conflagration.

The most obvious catalyst is the current Israeli ground operations inside Lebanon.

Were Israel to escalate and send in larger numbers of troops for a Gaza-style invasion, the immediate result would be a very bloody conflict in which large numbers of civilians are sure to die. In the longer term, Israel might get trapped into another long-term occupation of Lebanon. The last one, which stretched from 1982 to 2000, ended in Israeli defeat and the rise of Hezbollah to power inside Lebanon. A more recent war in Lebanon, in 2006, was less bloody but still widely seen as a failure — prompting an official inquiry into why Israel’s military performed so poorly against Hezbollah.

Were the current Israeli operation in Lebanon to look too successful, Iran would treat it as a major threat. Hezbollah is Iran’s most important regional proxy, the group’s large rocket arsenal a powerful deterrent against any Israeli attack on Iranian interests. Were Hezbollah to look like it was on the brink of a military rout, Iran might unleash both other proxies and its own military to try and turn the tide. This would mean a full-scale open war between Israel and the Iranian alliance — far greater in scope than this week’s missile barrage on Israel.

Such a conflict could lead to any number of disasters. One of the scariest scenarios involves an Iranian dash for a nuclear bomb.

The more military success Israel has against Iran’s proxies, the more likely Iran is to believe that its homeland is at risk from an Israeli strike. It is already close to building a nuclear weapon — able to create enough fissile material for one in “one or two weeks,” per Secretary of State Antony Blinken — but seemingly preferred to remain on the nuclear brink rather than crossing it. A wider war with Israel might change that, leading to a development many have feared for decades: a Middle East with two hostile armed nuclear powers.

These dire outcomes are not inevitable. It’s possible that Israel steps back from the brink of full war in Lebanon or that Iran has been so cowed by Israel’s extraordinary success in penetrating Hezbollah that it doesn’t respond aggressively.

But betting on the best-case scenarios in war is dangerous. The only thing we can say with confidence is that the new Middle East is extraordinarily insecure, brought to the precipice of region-wide catastrophe by post-October 7 developments. Whether it tips over the brink remains to be seen.

The Biden administration has taken a strange and confusing approach to the Gaza war.

After initially expressing unconditional support for Israel, the administration has criticized Netanyahu’s approach, becoming suspicious that the prime minister lacks a credible strategy for ending the war. Yet as it has worked for a ceasefire, the US has steadfastly refused to put major pressure on Israel to get it to back down — declining to use its biggest stick, cutting off military assistance, to pressure Jerusalem to end the war.

The result is an American policy that is seen by much of the world as doubly hypocritical. The US claims to support peace while providing the weapons to wage war, and it seems to treat war crimes differently based on whether an ally or an enemy is perpetrating them.

Whatever sympathy Israel garnered from much of the world after the horrors of October 7 has been erased by the horrors it has perpetrated in Gaza. Polls as well as votes at the UN show an overwhelming global consensus that the war needs to end immediately, with only the United States and a handful of aligned countries supporting the Israeli line.

When South Africa filed an International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, many in the West scoffed. Yet the South African litigators enjoyed widespread support among residents of the global South, where elites and mass public alike overwhelmingly see Israel as a violent aggressor and America as its superpower enabler.

For years now, global South countries have chafed at what they see as Western hypocrisy when it comes to war and peace. America and its allies trumpet a “rules-based international order,” yet go ahead and invade Iraq without UN authorization because they’ve decided that they want to.

In a 2023 speech, former NSC official Fiona Hill warned that this sentiment had become a major problem for American policy in Ukraine: that however correct America might be about Russia’s unjustified war, it had lost the credibility to claim to be standing on behalf of sovereignty and international law. This made many countries wary of joining America’s pro-Ukraine efforts, seeing it less as a defense of a vulnerable country than a means of advancing Western geopolitical interests relative to Russia’s.

The US approach to the Gaza war has supercharged this sentiment. How can the US claim to be standing for international law in the Donbas, many ask, when it is enabling its client in Jerusalem to commit atrocities?

Research suggests that these allegations of hypocrisy can, in fact, matter, undercutting both domestic and international support for American policies. And as America’s global standing weakens, its competitors — not only Russia, but also China — are trying to take advantage.

“With every civilian casualty from an Israeli airstrike, the West’s arguments in defense of a rules-based order ring hollower in the global South,” writes Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Affairs. “If, at some point in the future, Xi [Jinping] makes the fateful decision to invade Taiwan, he will surely hope that his stance on the Gaza war has made it more likely that the global South will line up behind Beijing rather than Washington.”

The Gaza war has not only thrown the Middle East into chaos and weakened America’s position relative to authoritarians. It has also given rise to new sources of global chaos, ones that could further destabilize a world order already facing major challenges.

The first of these threats is the Houthi campaign on shipping in the Red Sea and Mediterranean. The Yemeni rebel group, part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” has been launching cheap rockets and drones at ships passing through since last fall — actions it claims are designed to target Israeli shipping and put pressure on Israel to end the war.

In actuality, the target selection has been fairly loose. The Houthis’ objective appears to be less opening a new front in the Gaza war than in using it as a pretext to demonstrate their power and capabilities. Their strikes have done comparatively minor damage to shipping, but the threat that they might sink a ship has wreaked havoc on a cornerstone of the global economy.

Moreover, there’s a real fear that the Houthis have set a precedent that other militant groups could potentially mimic.

“The peril posed by the Houthis is not just that shipping in the Red Sea will continue to be dangerous. Their campaign also sends the message that the global maritime order is crumbling and those violating its rules can do so with impunity,” writes Elisabeth Braw, an expert on maritime security at the Atlantic Council think tank. “If these forms of aggression are not deterred, they will continue to grow in quantity and will be joined by new forms.”

But aggression in the sea lanes is not the only demon unleashed by the Gaza war globally. It has also led to a rise in hatred and division inside countries across the world.

One the most dire manifestations of these internal divisions is rising Islamophobia and antisemitism. In the United States and elsewhere, there has been a spike in hate crimes directed at both Jews and Muslims — including even deadly violence.

This is sadly common during times of heightened Israel-Palestine conflict: The passions raised by the issue push unstable, violent people toward action. But given how intense this round of fighting has been, qualitatively different from anything that has come before it, the surge has been more intense.

Separately, major divisions have emerged inside global political factions. In the United States, for example, anger over Biden’s war policy has alienated Muslim and Arab American voters — a critical bloc in the swing state of Michigan. This could possibly play a material role in the November election, that tensions over Gaza might lead to the return of Donald Trump, a man who personifies global disorder, to the presidency of what remains the world’s most powerful country.

We are, in short, already living in a world fundamentally reshaped by Hamas’s October 7 murder spree and Israel’s bloody reprisal, with no sense on the horizon that what’s broken will be repaired.