Hamas seized approximately 220 people as hostages, according to Israeli officials. Four have since been released.

For the first time since 2006, the Lebanese are again facing the prospect of a devastating war with Israel, on the back of the current conflict in Gaza. Much of the population does not want, and knows it cannot afford, such a war. Lebanon is still in the throes of an economic collapse that began in 2019. Yet Hezbollah, which dominates Lebanon’s political scene, seems moved less by what its countrymen want than by the strategic priorities of its sponsor, Iran.

The Iranians have worked painstakingly in the past decade to build up a redoubtable deterrence capability on Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza. Hezbollah realizes that a full-scale conflict might weaken its hold over Lebanon and will try to avoid such an outcome. But ultimately, the party will follow Iran’s lead.  

Earlier this year, Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, began referring to a “unification of the fronts” strategy. The idea was that Iran-backed armed groups, joined into the so-called Axis of Resistance, would coordinate operations against Israel, especially in defense of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Last May, amid clashes in Gaza between Islamic Jihad and Israel, Nasrallah described what this meant in practical terms: “The real headline for the resistance response in Gaza is [the creation of] a joint operations room for the resistance groups.”

Collaborative planning and operations have been facilitated by the fact that leading Hamas officials have relocated to Lebanon in recent months, most of them regarded as representing the pro-Iran, pro-Hezbollah wing of the organization. Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the head of Islamic Jihad, which has long had close ties to Iran, is also based in the country. Although support for the Palestinian cause is at the heart of Iran’s and Hezbollah’s identity, many Lebanese, Shiites among them, remain wary. They recall with trepidation how their country suffered during the Palestinian armed presence from the late 1960s to the early ’80s, particularly when Israel’s retaliation against Palestinian attacks destroyed Shiite villages. That Hezbollah has not factored this into its calculations is surprising.

[Read: Is Israel at war with Iran?]

For Hezbollah, one reason for overlooking the domestic discontent may be that throughout the Middle East, Iran’s effort to increase its influence is succeeding. As far back as the early ’80s, Iran understood that if it empowered and backed cohesive armed groups in fragmented societies, especially Shiite groups, it could then push them into the commanding heights of states even where Shiites were not a majority. Hezbollah was the most successful example of this model, but Iran also replicated it in Iraq in the decade after the 2003 U.S. invasion; in Yemen, where it has supported the Houthis; and in Syria, where it backs the Alawite-dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad.  

The Iranian strategy is not entirely sectarian so much as it is linked to a revolutionary vision of Islam and an ideology of “resistance” directed against the United States, Israel, and conservative Arab countries in the region. From the start, the Iranians sought to build relationships with Sunni Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. As the French scholar Bernard Rougier wrote in his book Everyday Jihad, Iran’s ambassador in Beirut helped bring radical Sunni Lebanese and Palestinian clerics together to create the Association of Muslim Scholars in early 1982.

What took place on October 7 was part of a broader effort by the Axis of Resistance to expand its sway over the Palestinian cause. The Biden administration has said it’s seen no evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack, but the point may be a semantic one. Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, as well as the organization’s senior official in Beirut, Saleh al-Arouri, are close to Hezbollah, as is the Islamic Jihad’s al-Nakhalah. Even if the Hamas operation was tightly compartmentalized, Hezbollah must have been aware of aspects of the plan, which means the Iranians were too.

In the past two decades, Iran has taken advantage of U.S. missteps in the Middle East. The U.S. invasion of Iraq eliminated Sunni dominance in the country, allowing Shiite parties with ties to Tehran to seize power. Successive administrations, starting with Barack Obama’s, disengaged from the region. As Obama told The Atlantic in a 2016 interview, “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” As he saw it, the ensuing equilibrium would allow the United States to refocus on regions more vital to its interests.  

Obama’s words must have been music to Iranian ears—a U.S. president acknowledging Tehran’s stakes in the Middle East while downgrading the U.S. role there. The Iranians took advantage of American disengagement to develop their regional alliances. At the head of this effort was Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whom the United States assassinated in January 2020. In Iraq, he cemented ties with militias in the Popular Mobilization Forces, formed in 2014 to fight the Islamic State. Last week, a leading PMF militia, Kataeb Hezbollah, whose leader was assassinated alongside Soleimani, announced that it had joined Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation against Israel and would increase efforts to target the United States.     

Similarly, the conflict in Yemen, which began in 2014, allowed the Iranians to develop relations with Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis, whom they supported in order to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The Houthis are not, strictly speaking, an Iranian proxy force, but they are a part of Iran’s regional network of militias and have close ties with Hezbollah. The Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones either at Israel or at U.S. ships in the Red Sea last week, demonstrating that they are part of the coalition of forces Iran can call on if the Gaza war spreads.

[Read: Hezbollah watches and waits]

In Syria, the Iranians also retain the option to strike Israel from across the Golan Heights. Kheder Khaddour, a scholar of Syria at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told me, “Iran is redeploying [pro-Iranian] militias from northern Syria, including Aleppo, to the country’s south” for a possible conflict there. Israel has bombed the Damascus and Aleppo airports, almost certainly because it anticipates that Iran will open a Golan front in a wider war and use the airports to ferry in weapons.

The Axis of Resistance has shown that Israel is vulnerable—and that if Washington can be made to fear becoming embroiled in a regional war, it will press Israel not to attack Axis members. A week after the October 7 operation, the Israeli journalist Barak Ravid revealed that Iran had warned Israel that, although it did not seek a regional conflict, any land invasion of Gaza would bring about an Iranian intervention. The Biden administration is conducting back-channel talks with Iran, suggesting that the message reached Washington too.

The Americans surely want to avoid another Middle Eastern war in the run-up to the presidential election next year. President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was partly an effort to hold back the Israelis. He warned them to be “deliberate” and to ask “very hard questions” about whether the path they were on would lead to their desired objectives. Hamas’s release of two American hostages and two Israelis seems to indicate that a broader arrangement may be in the works. But the real message of the past two weeks is that Iran has an extensive network in place to back up its challenge to U.S. priorities in the Middle East.

From the suggestion to create an international coalition to fight Hamas to a warning to Iran, here's everything Emmanuel Macron said during his visit to Israel.

Valerie Gauriat reports from the West Bank, where she spoke to Jewish settlers buying guns and learning how to defend themselves after Hamas’ surprise assault on 7 October.

More than 200 people, including civilians and military personnel, are still being held in different locations in Gaza.

Human rights activist Yocheved Lifschitz said 'shalom', meaning 'peace', to Hamas captor as she left.

Hamas freed 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, along with another elderly woman, on 'humanitarian' grounds late on Monday.

I was born and raised in a war. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. The war was always just a few months older than I was.

I have lost friends and family to war. I have seen my neighbors’ dead bodies. I know how it feels to learn that a bomb blast has damaged your school; to sleep and live with the sounds of gunshots and explosions, the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks; to suddenly flee when your neighborhood is targeted; to seek shelter when nowhere is safe.

I am far from alone in this. Children have always been victims of war—of religious conflict, armed interventions, fights between autocracies and democracies. When war comes, children suffer. That doesn’t mean we should accept their suffering as part of the cost of war. It means that their suffering is horrifyingly common.

[From the September 2022 issue: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

As a child, I was taught how to protect myself, how to find safe spots under tables when my school and home were under attack. My siblings, my friends, and I learned how to run and escape targeted zones. We learned how to protect ourselves when we didn’t have our parents and elders by our side. We knew which time of day our city might be bombed. We avoided taking certain roads, thought to be full of land mines, in the hope that we could keep all of our limbs, unlike our neighbors’ kids. We learned to cover our heads with our hands and lie down if there were explosions. We learned to stay away from the windows of our classrooms. Our day-to-day was a gamble; we had to win every day.

In 2020, Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, reported that an average of 25 children had been killed or injured in conflicts daily during the preceding 10 years; most of them were from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—poor nations with broken infrastructure and health-care systems, where millions of children live in nonstandard homes or tents, or on the streets. The First and Second World Wars were devastating for children. In the conflicts of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of children have been killed, wounded, kidnapped, beheaded, raped, recruited by armed forces, or brutally disabled, losing limbs, eyesight, hearing, skin, parts of their face. Girls, in particular, are targets for violence. Many children in war zones experience some mix of anxiety, depression, aggression, behavioral disorders, loneliness, insecurity, and psychosomatic symptoms, and engage in self-harm, according to Save the Children.

I knew war before I was 5 years old. I’ve known its horrors from as far back as I can remember. After two decades of conflict, I fled Afghanistan for America during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, as the Taliban returned to power. Because of the way the war fell apart, I was separated from my mother, my sister, and many other family members. The trauma is still with me. Even now that I live in a much safer country, I still feel scared.

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

My story is the experience of millions of children subject to war. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that 1,500 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded the country last year. The Israeli government has not said exactly how many children were among the approximately 1,400 people killed by Hamas on October 7, but we know that many were among the murdered. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described having seen images of a baby “riddled with bullets … young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms.” And officials have said that nearly 30 Israeli children are among the more than 200 people believed to have been taken hostage in Gaza. Of the thousands of Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on Gaza, more than 2,000 have been children, according to officials in Gaza. Approximately half of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents are children, and many of them did not have access to basic food, water, electricity, and medicine even before the war started, because of a blockade by Israel and Egypt. Now many of them lack safe shelter too, and the humanitarian situation is only getting worse.

In the mid-20th century, international humanitarian law was put in place to protect civilians, and in particular children and women, in war. But too often, that means little. I wish there were more laws and other support systems to save children around the world who live in war zones, and the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who are protecting them.

Children are too young to protect themselves from war. Their trauma is not an individual issue; it is society’s job to keep them safe. When children suffer, we have failed as a society. We cannot save one child by killing another.

Speaking after being released by Hamas, Yocheved Lifschitz said she "went through hell" while in captivity.

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The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new normal in the GOP.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The hard truth about immigration A record of pure, predatory sadism Too many people own dogs. How the media got the hospital explosion wrong

Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed

The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to certify the results.)

Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats.

Although Jordan repudiated these tactics, some of his colleagues blame him anyway, and Americans are now, as Blake wrote last week, in a “long-overdue” conversation about the role of threats in public life, one that “should include a recognition that these threats and intimidation can work, and probably have.”

That “conversation,” unfortunately, is unlikely to continue. Republicans have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own party.

Some of these threats can be dismissed as the result of technology: The frictional costs of threatening people are basically nonexistent. Angry cranks once needed time and materials (envelopes and stamps, or at least a call to an information line) to say awful things. Today, people are surfing the internet with a smartphone—their personal secretary and valet—right by their side, so the interval between having a repulsive thought and expressing it to a target is now functionally zero.

But email and the internet, and political violence in the United States, have been around for a while. Only in the age of Trump have threats become a common part of daily American partisan politics. Almost anyone who is even remotely a public figure now gets them over almost anything, and Trump and his movement have gone quite far in killing any sense of shame for saying terrible things to other people or their families over political differences.

Not only does Trump expressly model this kind of behavior; he and his media enablers provide rationalizations for such threats. Ironically, many of these excuses were once associated with the violent far left a half-century ago: The system is rigged; democracy is a mug’s game; anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy; those in power will never give it up without being subjected to violence and intimidation. But much of it is also out of the far-right, fascist playbook: The elites are plotting against you; anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in on the plot; the only salvation is if We the People engage in violence ordained by God himself.

We’ve seen these illiberal, populist attitudes and beliefs before. What we have not seen in America until now is the capture of a major political party by this kind of paranoia and violence.

The threats around Jordan’s attempt to gain the gavel are also different because the people making them are reaching down into granular, inside-baseball GOP politics. In recent years, some MAGA adherents have made threats against their partisan opponents in order to defend Trump’s honor, or because they were convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, however, the movement is turning on its own. Some people follow internal House conferences as if they are members of the caucus, and treat the election of a speaker—which is important, to be sure—as an existential battle.

Amazingly, these people made threats in support of … Jim Jordan. They are actually menacing other human beings over the ambitions of a loudmouthed, ineffectual member of Congress.

After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee, or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and clearly, American society has plenty of both.

Many Republican legislators are scared, and they should be. Only 25 members of the House GOP conference voted against Jordan on the floor during the last round of voting. Many more opposed making him speaker; in a secret ballot, 112 of Jordan’s colleagues voted against him—which suggests that more than 80 of them feared doing so in public.

It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to vote one way among themselves and then cast a different vote on the floor, especially if the issue is one where the national party is at odds with the voters in a member’s district. Such political calculations, though sometimes distasteful, are common. But democracy cannot function if legislators feel that their lives—and those of their families—are in danger from their fellow citizens. No matter what happens with Trump and the MAGA cult, the Republican Party cannot go on this way, and some of the legislators who spoke up about threats during Jordan’s attempt to become speaker seem to know it.

What they are willing to do about it is less clear. But I wonder if the arrests and convictions for the January 6 insurrection are having their effect: One caller to a representative, after a string of f-bombs and barely veiled threats, made an effort to stipulate that he was speaking only of nonviolent harassment. Perhaps holding such people legally accountable for their actions—whether they intended violence or were just trying to throw a scare into others—might begin to reverse this trend.

Republican elected officials didn’t seem to care very much about such rhetoric when it was aimed at their opponents, and they were only briefly shaken on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob made clear that there was plenty of room reserved on the gibbet for Mike Pence and other Republican leaders. Perhaps they’ll take such threats more seriously now that their internal squabbles could lead to their wives having to sleep with a gun by the bed, but I suspect that the hyper-partisanship and stunning cowardice that brought the GOP to this moment will, as ever, win the day.

Related:

The new anarchy Only the GOP celebrates political violence.

Today’s News

Two more hostages were released by Hamas. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that it facilitated their release. The Philippines accused the Chinese coast guard of “intentionally” hitting its boats in a disputed area of the South China Sea. María Corina Machado won the Venezuelan opposition’s first presidential primary in more than a decade. If allowed to run, she will challenge President Nicolás Maduro in what he has promised will be an internationally monitored election next year.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany try to find ghosts in Manhattan, but all they see is Anderson Cooper’s apartment.

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P.S.

A while back, I said that I would occasionally use this space to revisit some 1980s musical oddities. This week, I want to remind you how very political music videos could be in the Decade of Excess. You’ve probably seen the video for the 1986 Genesis hit “Land of Confusion,” which used Britain’s Spitting Image puppets to portray world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to trippy effect. Reagan made a lot of appearances in words and images in those days, including in Sting’s “Russians,” Men at Work’s “It’s a Mistake,” and others.

But for my money, the best video with a Reagan reference was made by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Better known for its huge dance hit “Relax,” in 1984, the band recorded “Two Tribes,” a song about nuclear war. (I wrote about MTV’s nuclear genre here.) The video features two actors, one obviously Reagan, and the other—and this is the cool trivia part—meant to be the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The two of them beat each other up until the world explodes. The end.

But wait—who? Exactly. Chernenko was leader of the U.S.S.R. for all of 13 months, mostly as a seat warmer in ill health. History has forgotten him, but thanks to a video filmed at the right moment in time, he will live on, forever headbutting Reagan and biting the American president’s ear in an eternal arena match.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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