In the past three years, following the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the wider region has been marked by conflict, economic turmoil, and a shattering of the balance of power. The network of alliances maintained by Iran, long central to its regional power, has been hit hard and severely weakened. Yemen’s Houthi rebels remain one notable exception.
Many of the leaders of the Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas have been killed, while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was also assassinated in February. Israel occupies most of Gaza, where it has also killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the enclave to rubble. Its military aggression has come at a cost, isolating it from its traditional allies and making it globally unpopular, including in the United States.
The potential for more normalisation deals with Arab countries seems unlikely, at least in the short term. Instead, Israel continues to launch attacks across the region, crossing previously held red lines – such as the 2025 attack on Doha, Qatar – and making many governments around the world view it as the primary source of unrest in the Middle East. Drones and missiles hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas hub and started fires near Dubai airport and at Fujairah’s oil zone.
In September, the Houthis surged down Yemen’s Red Sea coast, taking the port of Mocha and nearby islands. Their gains tightened their grip on the Bab al-Mandeb strait, threatening a key route for global trade and energy supplies that had become even more important amid disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Alongside the loss of confidence in the US as a security guarantor has come a dramatic reordering of alliances and rivalries.
Much of Iran’s network – most notably Hezbollah, whose reputation had long served as a deterrent against Israeli attack – appeared to buckle under Israeli pressure. That, in turn, emboldened an Israeli military push that saw troops invade Lebanon in October 2024 and again in March 2026, and seize Syrian territory during the brief power vacuum that followed Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in 2024. However, now it’s even more so,” Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said of the increased leverage given to external actors, such as Turkiye in Syria and China’s involvement in negotiations over the end to war on Iran, as Beijing finds its own energy supplies under threat.
However, none of this was to overstate Israeli influence, or liken it to a regional superpower, Vakil cautioned. While Israel and the US hoped February’s attacks would swiftly topple Iran’s government, they have instead opened a new front. Tehran now wields economic leverage over Israel, the US and their partners through the Strait of Hormuz, which borders Iran and typically carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, and through Bab al-Mandeb, which is now threatened by its Houthi allies.
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