The situation was volatile enough. But Tuesday night's blast at a hospital in Gaza City has convulsed the Middle East in even greater turmoil.
While the violence between Israel and Hamas has so far been relatively localised, it threatens to set off a chain reaction, dragging in first neighbouring countries and then other, more powerful nations who will seek to defend their own geopolitical interests or exploit the chaos for their own ends.
Any major military incursion on Gaza — however justifiable it might seem to the Jewish state to subdue a genocidal enemy — risks a disastrous escalation on multiple fronts, including dragging the superpowers into the maelstrom.Tuesday night's blast at a hospital in Gaza City has convulsed the Middle East in even greater turmoil
The group's apocalyptic core belief is that the Jewish state has no right to exist, and its militants will fight to the death. The most likely point for immediate metastasis is Lebanon on Israel's northern border. There, Hezbollah — like Hamas, armed and bankrolled by the theocrats of Iran — may be unable to resist joining the fight.
Even for Israel's famously well-equipped and well-trained forces, a war on three fronts would mean severe overstretch. And that could spur the country's old enemies, sensing weakness, to heap further pressure on to the Middle East's only democracy. With oil revenues soaring and all final remaining sanctions relating to Iran's nuclear ambitions lifted this week — thanks to the terms of Barack Obama's 2015 nuclear deal — Tehran has new financial capacity.
Deeply unpopular, presiding over economic decline and shaken by internal human-rights protests led by young women in particular, the regime may lash out in a desperate bid to unite the country against a common enemy — just as the Argentinian president General Galtieri did in 1982 by seizing the Falkland Islands.
Already, the U.S. Navy has deployed its newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, along with a support fleet and thousands of marines to the eastern Mediterranean to warn off anti-Israeli forces. Despite agreeing, during a phone call with Biden on Wednesday, to open the Rafah border crossing and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, Sisi knows that Jordan was destabilised by civil unrest in 1967 after an influx of Palestinian refugees.
Crucial to negotiations is Qatar, a tiny country of just 220,000 citizens, but pivotal thanks to its wealth and global clout. The UK also wields military influence through our aircraft carriers and bases in Cyprus. Already, our Government has offered to share with Israel any intelligence picked up via listening posts and Royal Navy ships.
Putin also has every interest in prolonging the Middle Eastern crisis, which is inevitably distracting Nato's attention from his war of conquest in Ukraine.
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