Hamas Attack Rewrites Rules In The Middle East

Risk of wider war grows as US, Israel and its enemies respond to attack

- Yaroslav Trofimov

Saturday's attack on Israel by Hamas militants, who killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped many more back to the Gaza Strip, has upended fundamental assumptions about the Middle East.

Now, as Israel, its enemies and its main partner, the U.S., respond to these shocking events, the new-and untested-rules of the game risk turning the bloody confrontation between Israel and Hamas into a much wider war.

Israel's expected land operation against Hamas in Gaza, and the reaction to it by Iran and its group of allied Islamist militias around the region, could determine the new balance of power in the Middle East and the new set of understandings about the region's future.

"Hamas inflicted this surprise, devastating attack because it wanted to change the equation, not just between Hamas and Israel, but also between Israel and the axis of Iranian supporters and Iranian proxies," said reserve Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, a former head of research for Israeli military intelligence. "Israel now wants to change the equation, too, but in the other direction if we kick Hamas out of Gaza."

Should Israel manage to eliminate Hamas as Gaza's dominant force, it would reverse one critical aspect of the fallout from Saturday's events: the crumbling of the long-cultivated perception of Israel's superior military and intelligence prowess. After swiftly breaching costly Israeli border fortifications and overrunning military bases, Hamas gunmen went on a killing spree-causing the worst loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust.

The attack destroyed another assumption, long cultivated by Hamas's backers such as Turkey and Qatar, and accepted by many in the West and even inside parts of the Israeli establishment: that the Islamist group had somehow moderated its original ideology, which seeks the elimination of any Jewish presence between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.