It’s no coincidence that the Hamas breakout from the Gaza Strip against Israel, beginning on Oct. 7, was ultimately of strategic benefit to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In particular, it further distracted U.S. and European military attention away from the Indo–Pacific region at a time when attention toward supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia was waning. The new Middle Eastern conflict drew the commitment of the most modern and powerful U.S. carrier strike group, based around the USS Gerald R. Ford, plus an aviation and logistical commitment to the Eastern Mediterranean and away from easy availability to the Indo–Pacific.
This aligns with China’s extensive strategy aimed at keeping the major Western powers, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, mired in the Euro–Atlantic theater. There, if Euro–Atlantic challenges persist, the United States and the UK—essentially the bulk of the AUKUS (Australia–United Kingdom–United States) alliance—would be forced to deploy key military assets, depriving the Indo–Pacific of their presence and capability.
That isn’t to say that there weren’t sufficient regional triggers for the Hamas breakout to occur.
The 50th anniversary of the October 1973 Arab–Israeli conflict was a milestone that was recognized by Israel and the West as the start of an era of peace. Yet Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and other Palestinian groups couldn’t let that go unchallenged, given that it had frozen their conflict to remove Israel from Palestinian lands.
The Muslim Brotherhood, often referred to by the name of its terrorist wing, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas: Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya; the acronym also is the word for “zeal”), is the oldest Islamic movement in Palestine.
Secondly, Iran—a great sponsor of Hamas—and Hamas itself saw that the expansion of the 2020 Abraham Accords to potentially include normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel would have put the final seal on the relegation of the Palestinian cause to an ever-diminishing priority for the Arab and Muslim world. Moreover, the potential strengthening of Israel’s position in the Persian Gulf would have moved the strategic scales in favor of Saudi Arabia and away from Iran.
It should be recognized that Hamas is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin), just as the Turkish government of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) controlled by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is itself a Muslim Brothers party. The Ikhwan is itself based in Turkey. This means it would have been infeasible for the Hamas breakout—the biggest and most professionally organized military event in its history—not to have been known to the Turkish government.
But for Iran, which has always had cool or hostile (but often pragmatic) relations with Turkey, it was also critical that Saudi Arabia be prevented from building formal relations with Israel, given that Israel regards the primary nuclear and non-nuclear military threat to its existence as coming from Iran. Saudi Arabia and Israel have long had discreet but important intelligence links, but Tehran sees the Abraham Accords and their expansion as intrinsically constraining to Iran.
This means that a number of governments were aware of and complicit in the Hamas breakout, which was clearly well-equipped, with all of its key weapons and ordnance coming from abroad. And although Israel had intercepted much in the way of military components being smuggled into Gaza, it was clear that the vast majority of that supply was missed.
The Egyptian government, according to credible sources, advised the Israeli government on about Sept. 27 that some major action was anticipated to come from Hamas in Gaza. Yet, the Israeli intelligence community and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to respond with an appropriate readiness level in southern Israel around Gaza. That became an internal political issue for the Israeli government the moment the attack began.
The immediate “Band-Aid” was, on Oct. 11, to create a government of national unity in Israel, still led by Mr. Netanyahu, but now including opposition leader Benny Gantz of the National Unity party, and moving immediate Israeli attention away from the clear intelligence failure and giving some unity of command, with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (member of Likud party) giving the leadership triumvirate a sense of purpose.
This all raises a further question: Why did the U.S. intelligence community fail to anticipate a major Hamas response, even in the absence of hard intelligence? The 50th anniversary of the October 1973 War and the reality that the impending normalization of Israeli–Saudi ties would not only deprive the Palestinians of the last of their regional leverage but also unite Israel and Saudi Arabia in their planning to oppose Iran’s aspirations: Both were clear indicators that something would inevitably happen.
Another great beneficiary of the conflict is, or could well be, Russia.
The new war takes the political wind out of the 18 or so months of Western support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and even before the Hamas breakout, that support for Ukraine was waning. Indeed, that reality is critical to China’s need to find another major affair to keep the Western powers engaged in the Euro-Atlantic. But for Russia, it all means a waning of the international support that has kept the Ukraine government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alive.
Mr. Zelenskyy is entirely sustained by the international community. He recognizes that if he is forced into a ceasefire or peace deal to end the war with Russia, he will face immediate consequences from his own military leaders. They are dissatisfied with the loss of some 400,000 Ukrainian lives and the loss of a quarter of the national population through emigration. Mr. Zelenskyy’s personal survival has been dependent on continued foreign military and financial support and the continued prosecution of the war.
It is now possible—as the international support slows and evaporates—that the Ukrainian military could remove Mr. Zelenskyy if he fails to accept a ceasefire and the status quo territorial division (giving Russia back control of its traditional lands in the Donbas and Crimea).
In the meantime, it is in Beijing’s vital interest that the war in the Eastern Mediterranean should be extended as long as possible. Beijing may well push Tehran to force Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to enter the fray with their rocket and ground forces. But this could be a bridge too far for Tehran, given that it could expose Hezbollah to massive losses and expose the hand of Iran—which currently claims to have had no hand in the Hamas breakout—thereby causing direct Israeli retaliation against Tehran.
Thus, the multi-dimensional aspects of the small regional war initiated by Hamas could trigger “accidental” escalations in a number of directions. For the major Western powers, however, the key is to ensure that the new war does not distract them from facing the new strategic breathing space given to economically embattled Beijing.
