'These scars will last for a very long time': How the Middle East changed in a year

Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza In July last year, Mohammed Alhayek, 26, had just qualified as a practising doctor in Gaza city. Having already completed two levels of German, he planned to move to Germany to specialise in surgery. But on October 8, the bombs started falling. Over the past year, the Middle East has been rocked by one of the largest and most violent crises in its modern history. On October 7, Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip went into southern Israel , killing more than 1,200 people and taking aboiut 240 as hostages. More than a hundred remain held in Gaza, according to UN estimates. Israelis were caught by surprise by the failure of their security services. The assault – named by Hamas as Operation Al Aqsa Flood – was “decided by the leadership of the Islamic Resistance in Gaza, and no one knew about it whether in Iraq, Lebanon or Yemen,” said Mohammed Al Tamimi, leader of the True Promise Corps, one of the factions in an alliance known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. “The decision was purely Palestinian.” The attack occurred as the US was taking new steps to strengthen Israel’s position in the region, such as its inclusion in a proposed Middle Eastern Nato, according to Hazem Ayyad, a Jordanian political researcher who specialises in Palestinian affairs. Iran-backed Shiite armed factions in Iraq were among many in the region caught off guard by the October 7 attack, a commander from one of the groups told The National . In Israeli reprisals for the attack since, more than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza, and tens of thousands wounded. The fighting has displaced almost all of the strip’s population from their homes and destroyed swathes of its infrastructure. Mr Alhayek's family was among those forced to flee their home and moved to a tent further south in Gaza. Instead of going to Germany, he found himself volunteering at hospital wards overwhelmed by casualties from Israeli air strikes. Doctors were not spared: after a 48-hour shift in April, he returned to work at the Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah to find his colleague and friend Khaled Abo Amra had been killed in a strike on their home, alongside 10 members of his family. “I will never forget him,” Mr Alhayek told The National. Eventually, he used the $25,000 he had saved to fund his studies in Germany to pay for the passage of five members of his family into Egypt . He escaped in early May, but before others were able to join him, Israel took over the Rafah border crossing. Mr Alhayek is alone, while his family remains stuck in the town of Az Zawayda in central Gaza. “I am doing my best to help them with what I can,” he said . “At the same time, I am focusing on my studies. It is very difficult.” Meanwhile, the war spread across the region. At least 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon following an escalation in Israeli air strikes against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah , which joined in the conflict to support Hamas. In the occupied West Bank , 695 people have been killed over the past year, as violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinian communities has risen sharply and forced thousands of people from their homes. The changes that the region has undergone over the past year have been sudden and brutal, and will alter its course for many years to come. In interviews with The National , three serving Arab diplomats, analysts, members of Iraqi militant groups and government officials described how the October 7 attacks and the subsequent war has re-centred Palestine as the key issue in ensuring long-term regional peace and security. They speak of the difficulty of reaching that aim, given the wide gap between the policies of the current Israeli government and neighbouring countries. Arab countries and other regional middle powers such as Turkey broadly support a two-state solution – something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has worked to undermine by encouraging the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank. These settlements are illegal under international law. Iran and Israel remain at loggerheads, both promising further military escalation . While the question of how this will play out remains ambiguous, what is clear is that the conflict has gone from a struggle between Israel and Hamas to a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran that threatens the whole region. The past year has tempered the appetites of countries in the region to forge full-scale relationships with Israel. Normalisation had been the flavour of the month before Hamas’ October 7 attacks, especially in the Gulf, analysts and government officials said. According to an Arab diplomat serving in the Middle East, the Gulf countries had viewed normalising relations with Israel as the best way to secure the region, believing it would remove the instability caused by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a long-time barrier to better economic growth and trade ties. But Hamas pushed back. A trip by US President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia in August last year, as Gaza remained under siege, was to push for Riyadh to join the Arab normalisation pact with Israel. Hamas considered building those relationships as, “an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian cause,” Mr Ayyad told The National . “The attack was intended to foil the American effort to crown Israel as the region’s chief without any hope for a Palestinian state. Its aim was corrective.” Since then, Gulf nations have voiced more clearly their conditions for forging diplomatic relations with Israel. Last month, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that the kingdom would not recognise Israel without a Palestinian state. “I don’t think that the recent developments will be a stimulus for more normalisation agreements,” Dr Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Jeddah-based Gulf Research Centre, told The National . “The Saudi position is an example of a clear setback in the normalisation process. The inhumane Israeli actions have complicated the position and made any new normalisation agreement a more complex affair.” All the same, of the Arab countries that had normalised relations with Israel before October 7, none have completely severed diplomatic relations. Turkey has stopped imports and exports with Israel – a trade previously worth billions of dollars a year has been halted under growing domestic anger over the war in Gaza. Yet Ankara has not cut its diplomatic ties with Israel, and experts sais the two counties are likely to rebuild their relationship when there is a new government in at least one of the nations. “When there is a change of government, we are basically hoping to resume the relationship with Israel, or repair the damage that has been done to Turkish-Israeli regulations,” said Bilgehan Ozturk, a foreign policy researcher at SETA, an Ankara-based think tank close to the Turkish government. The problem is that without a ceasefire agreement, there is little thought being devoted to what exactly will happen to the territory when the war finally ends. Although a deal put forward by the US , Qatar and Egypt is on the table, Israel is insisting on continuing the war until it – in Mr Netanyahu’s words – “destroys Hamas”. That goal may have been made only harder by the violence prompting a new generation of young people to resist Israel. Meanwhile, Gulf states are working on how to include Iran in the equation of the Middle East. Meetings in Doha in recent days between Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and senior Arabian Gulf ministers, including Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan , have been partly focused on ensuring that Iran and its proxies do not include the Gulf in any future attacks on Israel and its allies in the region, according to an Arab diplomat. While Gulf countries maintain strained relations with Israel and the West, they are also trying to find ways to better talk to Iran. The Arab Gulf states, “are seeking a strategy of political hedging,” Javad Heirannia, a Tehran-based political analyst, told The National . “They don't want to get involved in the Iran-Israel conflict, and for this reason they are improving their relations with Iran.” After talks last week in Doha with Gulf leaders chaired by Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Iran’s Foreign Ministry released a statement that spoke of, “finding ways to co-operate for the region’s development and prosperity.” Such a statement would have been unlikely a few years ago, but following a normalisation between Tehran and Riyadh in March 2023, the two sides of the Gulf are talking more frequently. That said, Iran’s posturing against Israel has not brought it overwhelming popularity in the region. According to a survey by the Arab Barometer research network published in July this year, Iran’s position on Palestine and entry into the conflict has not gone down well. “Arab Barometer’s latest 2024 data suggest that opposing Israel’s war on Gaza and opposing Iran and its regional proxies’ and allies’ policies in the region are not mutually exclusive positions,” the organisation said. In Iraq , the Hamas attack and Israel’s response sent fear through the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sundani that it would bring an end to the nearly one-year lull in militia attacks against the US troops. He had tried to maintain the pause since taking office in October 2022. “We are concerned that the Hamas operation could motivate these groups, or at least use it a pretext, to resume attacks against the Americans, particularly after the way they reacted to it,” a senior Iraqi government official told The National at the time. Indeed, two days later, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, specifically the True Promise Corps, claimed the first attack against US troops stationed at Ain Al Assad air bases in Anbar province. The attacks against the US troops later expanded to Syria, where many Iran-backed armed factions have been operating for years, over Washington's support for Israel's bombardment of Gaza. According to Mr Al Tamimi, Iraqi armed groups immediately started co-ordinating with Lebanese Hezbollah to form a joint operation command , “to co-ordinate the attacks with other brothers from the factions within the Axis of Resistance in support of Gaza. The leaders of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq were in constant contact with Hamas through brothers in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut.” But that activity has had significant repercussions and a destabilising impact on Iraq, which has found itself in a delicate balancing act between the US and Iran. For Baghdad, the surge in militia activity has been a source of deep concern and embarrassment. The attacks on Iraqi soil, carried out by drones and missiles, have not only antagonised Washington but also dragged Iraq deeper into the geopolitical struggle between Iran and the West at a time the nation is trying to emerge from decades of war and mending its diplomatic relations regionally and internationally. Mr Al Sudani’s government, dependent on US military aid and seeking to maintain its diplomatic relations with Washington, has struggled to rein-in these groups. At some points, the tit-for-tat attacks between the US and militias strained the relations between Baghdad and Washington, risking the loss of crucial support and threatening Iraq’s already fragile sovereignty. Meanwhile, credibility of and trust in western governments and institutions across the region have taken a major hit over the past year, experts interviewed by The National said. For months following Hamas’ attacks, residents of the Middle East were presented with western governments reiterating support for Israel, even as the death toll in Gaza soared. They saw the UN unable to implement ceasefires voted on by its highest decision-making bodies. Israel blocked humanitarian aid heading into the strip. Only in more recent months have western governments begun to call for a ceasefire. For many, it’s too little, too late. Many in the region have described a double-standard in what they see as western countries’ full backing of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, compared with the apparent lack of interest as the Palestinian death toll mounted in Gaza. “Arabs have begun to recognise this duality in western discourse, so today there is rejection whenever western countries criticise Arab countries regarding human rights issues and other things,” said another Arab diplomat serving in a western capital. The distrust and loss of credibility has extended from the US – regarded with suspicion over the 2003 invasion of Iraq and long-term support for Israel – to European nations such as Germany that previously had positive images in the Middle East, according to Nadim Houry, executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative think tank. “There will be a huge level of distrust vis-a-vis the west at the level of societies,” Mr Houry told The National . “But I've also been in meetings and conferences where I've heard political elites, including from Gulf countries, saying that we will [now] just not tolerate any western even mentioning human rights in front of us.” The violence in Palestine and now the intense conflict in Lebanon have, “shattered the fragile trust not only in the USA and some European countries, but also in the whole system of human rights and the international community and international organisations,” a third Middle East diplomat told The National . What may have more wide-reaching consequences is that Arabs do not see the West as caring about the loss of trust and credibility. “I do not see that the West realises that it has lost Arab public opinion,” the second diplomat said. “At least, let me say that it has lost the new Arab generation, but if the West wakes up one day and realises that they have lost Arab public opinion, they must start building trust again, because the relationship between them is now characterised by mistrust.” One way to do that would be for western countries to follow those such as Spain and Norway in recognising a Palestinian state, the third diplomat said. For years, the region’s young people have been struggling with domestic and economic issues such as unemployment and poor governance. But the Israeli reprisals for the October 7 attacks have triggered and re-politicised the younger generation, said Mr Houry of the Arab Reform Initiative think tank. “The pre-October 7 status quo, at least, will not necessarily be sustainable,” he said. “But I don't actually really think we know where we're going …. what will be the meaning of this repoliticisation of a younger generation in the region – how will that evolve? For me, for me, the jury is still out.” The question is how long that politicisation will last and whether it can evolve from anger, sadness and frustration manifested in actions such as boycott movements, into clearly influencing countries’ policies in the region. “Yes, the war has renewed the need to find a real political agreement to the Palestinian issue,” said Dr Sager. “But the most important question is whether this interest and pressure from public opinion will continue, and evolve into a significant pressure factor on Israel to force it to offer concessions, or whether this interest and pressure are a temporary phenomenon.” As well as the geopolitical changes over the past year, the region has been ravaged both physically and psychologically. In Lebanon, a country scarred by several wars, economic crisis and an enormous explosion of Beirut’s port in 2020 are reliving another hell. “The psychological damage and physical damage has touched several generations at once,” said one of the Middle Eastern diplomats, who added that the harm had been exacerbated by western weapons supplied to Israel by western governments. “The use of the most recent weapons and munitions … is leaving evident psychological scars on the population of Palestine and Lebanon and all those who are watching or living through this. These scars and damage will last for a very long time.” In Gaza, people building normal lives – having children, pushing forward in their careers – have been displaced into makeshift camps and fear for their lives every day. Famine and disease have spread across a broken population. His savings gone, Mr Alhayek is using an online fundraising platform to try to fund his studies in Germany. He is far away from his family. “They have nothing to do,” he said. “They are just waiting for the war to end.”

'These scars will last for a very long time': How the Middle East changed in a year

The war in Gaza and Lebanon has changed the region's geopolitics and the lives of its people