Under fire IDF is fighting on many fronts-but the hardest may be at home

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, described the conflict Israel was engaged in as a “multi-front war” this month.

- Peter Beaumont

Israeli forces were fighting Hamas inside Gaza and engaged in daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah on the northern border with Lebanon. A low-level conflict, mainly consisting of airstrikes, was continuing with Iranian-backed forces in Syria. Israel had also been targeted – albeit ineffectively – by drones fired

But the date of Gallant’s comments was significant. He was speaking on 2 April, the day after Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Within two weeks, Israel would add another front to the conflict after Iran launched 300 missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for that attack.

The opening of a new front with Iran raises serious questions, and not just about whether the country has the capacity to fight multiple adversaries in what appears to be an open-ended state of conflict.

The reality is that while Israel has planned for at least a decade for a war that might involve simultaneously fighting in Gaza and against Hezbollah in the north, the assumptions about how that campaign would be conducted appear to have been mistaken.