More than 180 Iranian missiles rained down from the skies over Israel on Oct. 1 in the second large-scale attack by the Islamist regime this year.
Israeli leadership has vowed to meet the historic escalation with retaliation, a move that could threaten to further connect a number of regional conflicts into one sprawling war to engulf the Middle East.
In the wake of Iran’s missile barrage, strategic discussions have thus increasingly turned from Israel’s grinding campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah to the so-called “axis of resistance,” a loose confederation of terror groups trained and equipped by the Iranian military.
That axis has launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, killed U.S. troops stationed in Syria, terrorized northern Israel with daily rocket and mortar attacks, and disrupted a trillion-dollar shipping route.
But what exactly is the axis of resistance?
The title was first adopted by Iranian state media in 2004 as a propaganda tool for supporting insurgent violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.
Since then, the title has become a kind of official sobriquet, with several regional leaders and groups actively identifying with the term as part of an effort to keep hardline Islamism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism in the Middle East mainstream.
The axis now includes the terror groups Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as insurgent militia groups in Iraq, government forces in Syria, and Iran itself.
Axis powers frequently share weapons and funding as they work jointly toward the destruction of Israel in a manner that has allowed them to overcome even Sunni–Shia distinctions and regional factionalism.
That said, the group is far from a cohesive unit, and the individual groups often act on their own plans without consulting one another.
That fact was best demonstrated by Iran’s apparent lack of forewarning about the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
A 2024 report by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated, “Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor [have] foreknowledge of the Hamas attack against Israel.”
Israel has invested in considerable defenses, and its alliance with the United States has ensured that it is sufficiently equipped to fend off the axis members’ continued attacks on its homeland.
Israel is also involved in ground invasions of both Gaza and Lebanon, and it has conducted airstrikes against targets in Yemen and Syria. Those Israeli operations are beyond the scope of this article. Here, we focus on the dynamics and history of the axis alone.
Iran
Since its revolutionary founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has set itself against the United States and Israel.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s unelected supreme leader since 1989, has sought to further that antagonism through outright support of the axis violence in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023. Under his reign, Iran’s foreign ministry described the Oct. 7 attacks as part of “legitimate struggle” against Israel.
Although the regime appears to have had no forewarning about the attacks, it has outfitted the other powers with missiles, training, and financing for years, acting as a coordinating center for Islamist terrorism throughout the region.
Indeed, authorities in Tehran are better suited than most to keep cash and weapons flowing to proxy groups throughout the Middle East, owing to the regime’s lucrative arms deals with Russia and oil trades with the Chinese Communist Party.
What’s more, the regime has stepped away from the sidelines to directly support Hamas and Hezbollah’s war against Israel, firing nearly 300 ballistic missiles and drones at Israel in April and another 180 missiles on Oct. 1.
Although Tehran maintains a force of about 610,000 active military personnel and another 350,000 in reserves, it continues to rely on its unconventional warfare elements and asymmetric capabilities because of a lack of modern air force and naval units.
Its drone and missile program has, therefore, long been a crown jewel of sorts, and the regime maintains long-range missiles capable of reaching Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report described Iran’s missile arsenal as “the largest and most diverse” in the Middle East, consisting of more than 10,000 missiles.
Among that arsenal is the Shahed 136 drone, with a range of 1,600 miles, which the Russian military has used widely in Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in 2022.
The medium-range Shahab-3, based on a North Korean design and with a range of about 800 miles, forms the backbone of the force. It is now being augmented with more advanced technologies.
Among those advanced capabilities is the new Fattah-2, which Iran has described as a hypersonic weapon capable of evading some missile defense systems.
Although the hypersonic claims have not been validated at this time, Iran’s apparent use of the Fattah-2 did result in a discernible increase in effectiveness during the regime’s Oct. 1 attack on Israel, in which 32 missiles appear to have made it past Israel’s Iron Dome defense system and struck the ground in and around an Israeli air base.
To that end, the United States has been quick to supply Israel with a THAAD missile interceptor system and complement of troops to operate it, as the U.S.-made system is more suited to intercepting high-altitude missiles than the Iron Dome, which is designed primarily to guard against low-altitude rockets.
Hamas
It was Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, that led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which terrorists crossed the border and killed about 1,200 Israelis, including nearly 800 civilians, and captured nearly 250 more.
Founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, driving its rival Fatah from power. It has since fought numerous skirmishes with Israel, as well as a brief but costly war in 2014.
During the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, the group also blacked out Israeli surveillance towers and fired roughly 5,000 rockets into Israel on the same day.
Hamas boasted an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 fighters at the beginning of the war, although Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza has significantly crippled the group. Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed by Israeli forces on Oct. 16.
Israel claims that it has killed about 12,000 Hamas members since the conflict began, but those numbers remain unverified.
Although much of Hamas’s military equipment consists of small arms and shoulder-fired rocket launchers, the group created a highly evolved network of tunnels spanning hundreds of miles beneath civilian infrastructure throughout Gaza.
Its small arms are primarily weapons built by Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea, which highlights another key problem for Israel and the international community: Hamas’s continued relations with several high-profile world powers.
While the group is designated as a terror organization by the United States and many of its allies, that distinction is decidedly murky. Hamas’s political wing, for example, is not designated as a terror group by some nations. Others, meanwhile, recognize Hamas as the legitimate political authority in Gaza. Those nations include China, Russia, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
Hezbollah
Hezbollah began to emerge in Lebanon in 1982, eventually coalescing into a single entity from several different radical Islamist groups in the mid-1980s.
With the support of Iran, Hezbollah has engaged in terror attacks on Israeli and U.S. forces for four decades and now operates effectively as a shadow state, unchecked by Lebanon’s official government.
Hezbollah boasts the largest non-state military in the world. Its then-leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who was recently assassinated by Israel, said in 2021 that the group had 100,000 fighters. Most estimates place the group’s arsenal at about 150,000 rockets during the onset of the current conflict with Israel.
Like Hamas, Hezbollah has developed skills in fighting out of tunnels that it dug into the countryside in southern Lebanon, where it launches regular attacks on Israeli civilians. Also, like Hamas, Hezbollah fought a brief war with Israel in 2006.
Since Oct. 8, 2023, Hezbollah has fired daily rocket barrages into northern Israel in support of Hamas and claimed it will not cease operations until Israel withdraws its troops from Gaza.
Hezbollah’s arsenal is primarily Iranian-made and enters Lebanon through the northern border with Syria, where the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad has proven happy to overlook such operations.
While large, the group’s arsenal is overwhelmingly made up of previous generations of Iranian rockets with a short range and poor accuracy. Regardless of their apparent weaknesses, however, older models of Iranian unguided rockets such as the Fateh-110 have proven more than capable of raining down terror on civilian populations in northern Israel.
Beginning in September, Hezbollah began deploying the Fadi-1 and Fadi-2, short-range rockets with higher payloads.
Likewise, the group now appears to be further developing its use of small drones such as the Hudhud-1, a unit manufactured in Yemen and measuring only about one meter (about 3.3 feet) across. This drone can conduct both surveillance and loitering munition attacks.
The Houthis
Emerging in Yemen during the 1990s, the Houthis rose to prominence by denouncing the local government as a pawn of Saudi Arabia and the United States and were involved in a brutal civil war there from 2014 to 2022.
Like Hamas, the group has adopted an ideology and slogan espousing the goals of destroying Israel outright: “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.”
In November 2023, the Houthis declared support for the war against Israel and since then have engaged in hundreds of rocket attacks and a slew of hijackings aimed at disrupting international commercial shipping in the Red Sea, through which some $1 trillion of goods normally pass every year.
The Houthis launched their first long-range missile attack on Israel in October 2023, and on Sept. 14, Houthi missiles landed in central Israel for the first time.
With an estimated 20,000 fighters in Yemen, the Houthis are perhaps the most battle-hardened and technologically advanced of the non-state axis members. They are equipped with thousands of long-range missiles and drones that are either made in Iran or based on Iranian designs.
Among the group’s arsenal are the Samad and Waid-2 drones, with a range of 1,100 and 1,600 miles respectively. Central to the group’s success has been the Quds series of cruise missiles, which are all based on Iranian designs and have a maximum range of more than 1,240 miles.
Like Iran, the Houthis claimed in September to have targeted Israel with a hypersonic missile that successfully penetrated the embattled nation’s air defense systems.
Israeli authorities said that the missile appeared supersonic rather than hypersonic, as it did not change trajectory mid-flight as would be expected of an advanced hypersonic missile. Israeli authorities said that nine people were injured in the attack.
On the Sidelines: Iraqi Militias and Syrian Government Forces
Remaining largely on the sidelines of the current conflict are the Iran-backed militias active in Iraq and the government forces of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.With the exception of a January attack that killed three U.S. service members stationed near the Syria border, Iraqi proxy groups have not engaged in direct fighting, focusing instead on local issues in a restive Iraq.
Similarly, Assad has focused on his consolidation of power and the continuation of fighting with pro-democracy rebel groups that rose up against the government with U.S. backing in 2011.
Israel’s Outsized Defense Capabilities
Pound-for-pound, Israel is one of the best armed countries in the world, along with having the direct financial and military backing of the United States and other allies.Along with an array of long-reaching ballistic and cruise missiles and aircraft, Israel has dozens of next generation F-35 stealth jets, capable of flying undetected into hostile territories 1,000 miles away to deliver precision strikes.
The first layer, Iron Dome, is designed to shoot down short-range projectiles, such as Hamas rockets, with a range of up to 45 miles. Israel says it has a success rate of more than 90 percent.
The second layer, David’s Sling, fires interceptors worth $1 million each, with a range of up to 185 miles, and has been used mainly to bring down Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon and aimed at Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
The third layer is the Arrow system. Designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, such as those that were fired at Israel by Iran on Oct. 1, it has a range of 1,490 miles. It also has been used to take down missiles fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
