A whirlpool of violence has engulfed everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. Meanwhile, the west has destroyed any political authority it once had
There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. For Gaza, for Israel, for the wider Middle East, and for everyone else too. Not all hinge points in history are obvious at the time. Three years on from the day it began, and precisely one year since a supposed ceasefire was agreed, this one is now impossible to ignore.
The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.
For Israel, too, there has been a before and after. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cultivated a sense of security, even of impregnability. The ease with which Hamas carried out its terrorist attack, killing 1,200 Israelis, including hundreds of young people at a music festival, destroyed that belief for ever.
Three years on from 7 October, both Israel and Gaza have changed beyond recognition. But the consequences of Hamas’s attack and Israel’s brutal response, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, including 21,000 children, have spread far wider.
Under the pretext of protecting its own borders, Israel has launched wars and military offensives across the region, sending troops into Syria; effectively annexing parts of southern Lebanon, deploying the same tactics there that it used in Gaza; and starting, with the US, an unwinnable war with Iran that has spiralled into a regional conflict affecting all six Gulf states.
The Iran war has sparked a new conflict between the Houthis in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which this week triggered a mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey, dragging two other countries into the maelstrom. Across the Red Sea, some of the same combatants are involved in the war in Sudan and a fresh conflict inside Ethiopia.
More than a dozen countries across two continents are now entangled in a rising number of wars, with overlapping participants and numerous competing interests.
But there is something else, more insidious, that has changed. The rule of international law, tenuous as it was, has been openly replaced by military might. In 2022, western leaders – building a coalition rightly opposed to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – made moral appeals based on the violation of international law. In Gaza, they encouraged and supported Israel, even when it was clear that the rules were being broken. That hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed, not just in the global south but among many millions of citizens in the west.
We have watched this happen in real time. Despite the ban on international journalists, anyone with a phone knew what was happening in Gaza from the early days of Israel’s response. Hundreds of Palestinian journalists have reported on the bombing of hospitals and schools, the bombing of cafes and wells, the killings at food distribution points, the deaths of children and babies. War crimes have never before been broadcast in real time, relentlessly, every hour of every day, around the world.
Gaza has also changed how wars are fought. Israel has pioneered the use of AI to select targets, accelerating our descent into a future for which we are unprepared….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/10/israel-war-gaza-middle-east-world-violence
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