At 8:13 a.m., sirens blared across Israel. It was February 28, and the country was once again at war. Israelis have spent nearly a month running to and from bomb shelters, trying to maintain some semblance of normal life. From my home in Jerusalem, sleep is often interrupted by sirens, followed by the sound of rockets exploding overhead. At times, my windows have rattled and the whole building shakes. So far, at least eighteen people in Israel have died.
This reality pales in comparison to what millions of others are experiencing across the Middle East.
Hassan, a twenty-seven-year-old man from Sidon in southern Lebanon, fled his home in the dead of night on Monday, March 2, after Hezbollah fired a small barrage of rockets into northern Israel. This was the third night of the war, and Hassan, who asked for his real name not to be used for reasons of safety, knew the ferocity with which Israel would respond. “The whole situation is humiliating” he explains, adding that his family was “forced into a mad scramble and left our whole life behind.”
Within hours, Israel began bombing Lebanon, targeting the city of Beirut, its suburbs, and several southern villages. More than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed so far, and more than one million have been displaced. Hassan feels lucky to have a place to shelter; he is now living with a friend about twenty-seven miles north in Beirut. Many of those displaced in Lebanon are currently sleeping in their cars or on the streets. For many, this is their second displacement in less than two years; the first was due to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in late 2024.
But it is Iran, which finds itself on the receiving end of a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign, that has suffered the most damage. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dropped more than 7,500 bombs on Iran within the first week alone. On March 8, bombs struck oil depots in Tehran, lighting up the sky with a hellish orange blaze. Al Jazeera reports that at least 1,500 people have been killed in Iran, and 18,551 have been injured. While hundreds of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian army have been killed, many of the dead are civilians, including more than 100 children who were killed after the United States bombed an elementary school in southern Iran.
The Gulf States, once seen as a bastion of stability in the region, have become enmeshed in the conflict as well. Iran has attacked several U.S. military bases in the region, killing seven U.S. soldiers so far. Numerous civilian targets have also been hit, including more than a dozen civilian deaths in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman.
This turmoil comes after Israel once again opted to deploy military might instead of negotiations, promising regime change in Iran, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, promising its population a safer Israel.
Over the past few years, Israel and several Arab countries have shown a willingness to negotiate, particularly under the framework of the Abraham Accords, which, while framed as a diplomatic breakthrough, also further stripped Palestinians of rights by allowing settlements to expand unchecked and sidelining the question of Palestinian statehood. That being said, when it comes to the Axis of Resistance—consisting primarily of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas—concessions have long been off the table as far as the Israeli government is concerned.
In the lead-up to the war, while the United States and Iran were holding talks over a possible nuclear deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aversion to negotiating became clear. He publicly objected to the Americans signing any deal that fell short of requiring Iran to completely dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, stop its funding of proxy groups, and curb its stockpile of missiles. Despite the Islamic Republic’s apparent readiness to dilute its highly enriched uranium and limit future enrichment, Netanyahu sought total capitulation instead of compromise. These massive demands were made while refusing to acknowledge Israel’s own capabilities, which reportedly include an undeclared nuclear weapons program.
Despite progress made between the United States and Iran, Netanyahu eventually got his wish when the United States terminated any possibility of a peaceful resolution and struck Tehran and other parts of the country in a coordinated attack with Israel on February 28. Hours after the war began, Netanyahu justified the operation by saying that the two countries aimed to “remove the existential threat posed by the terror regime in Iran.”
Netanyahu has also used this idea of an “existential threat” to justify the employment of military annihilation over diplomacy with regards to Hezbollah and Hamas. Just days into the war, an Israeli military official declared Israeli forces in Lebanon would “not stop until the [Hezbollah] organization was disarmed.” In Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister also adopted a maximalist stance, stating in February that the IDF would not withdraw “one millimeter until Hamas is disarmed, from weapons, from tunnels, and from other things.”
While Iran and the groups it supports do pose a threat to Israel, made clear by numerous attacks carried out on Israeli soil and rhetoric that calls for the end of the “Zionist regime,” describing this threat as existential is clearly overblown. As evidenced by Hezbollah’s capabilities in response to the current war in Iran, the military wing of the organization has inflicted only minimal damage on Israel. This came only after Hezbollah began retaliating, having upheld their end of the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon for over a year despite Lebanon’s government reporting more than 15,000 violations by Israel.
Four days into the war, the International Atomic Energy Agency stipulated that there was no evidence that Iran was currently developing a nuclear weapon, casting doubt on the imminent nature of the supposed threat of Iran’s nuclear weaponry. It is also noteworthy that over the years Iran has intentionally avoided direct military campaigns against Israel for more than four decades.
Regardless, the belief that Iran—along with its allies Hamas and Hezbollah—presents both an existential and imminent threat has become conventional wisdom in Israeli society. Conveniently, this logic serves as a very strong justification for the Israeli government to forgo negotiations and instead launch wars.
Despite the current war, many of Israel’s sworn enemies have in the past shown willingness to negotiate, proposing concessions that would have likely led to greater safety for Israelis.
The most notable offer came in 2003, in what would come to be known as the Grand Bargain. In a message sent to the United States, Iran offered to normalize relations with Israel, terminate its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and fully cooperate regarding its nuclear program. In exchange, Iran asked for the United States to lift all sanctions, and expressed support for the Arab Peace Initiative—a proposal that offered a normalization of relations between Arab countries and Israel in exchange for Palestinian statehood and a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue. President W. George Bush rejected the Grand Bargain on the erroneous belief that the Iranian government was about to collapse, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejected the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative due to “unacceptable clauses,” chiefly the return to pre-1967 borders, when Israel expanded its territory during the Six-Day War.
In 2015, Iran was once again at the negotiation table with President Barack Obama, this time signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, an agreement that ensured its nuclear program would remain exclusively peaceful in exchange for lifted sanctions. Though President Donald Trump terminated the deal in 2018, Iran continued to abide by the core restrictions for a full year, in hopes that trade with European nations would be able to offset effects of the U.S. sanctions. After sanction reliefs proved futile, Iran resumed enriching uranium.
Hamas has made multiple truce offerings to Israel throughout the past two decades in exchange for statehood based on the 1967 borders. In 2017, the organization amended its charter, again stating it would accept the concept of a two-state solution, adding that its disagreement was not with Jews but with Zionism; Netanyahu rejected the offer, noting that it did not include recognition of an Israeli state, and cautioned that “Hamas is attempting to fool the world.”
Since the beginning of the war on Iran, Netanyahu, along with the Trump Administration, has spoken about the prospect of the regime falling as if it is a foregone conclusion. In a video released by the IDF on March 1, the second day of the war, Netanyahu waxed poetic about his army’s strikes in Iran, claiming they would “smite the terror regime hip and thigh,” adding, “This is what I promised, and this is what we shall do.” Netanyahu delivers a similar promise at the beginning of every military campaign, which inherently contradicts his prior claims that these foes have already been defeated. A mere eight months ago, Netanyahu announced a “historic victory” that would “abide for generations” over Iran at the summation of the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel (and involving the United States) in 2025. In the past year and a half, Netanyahu has also claimed victories over Hezbollah and Hamas. Yet to this day, Israel is still actively fighting all three groups.
While the Axis of Resistance has undoubtedly been weakened over the past two years, fully dislodging any of these groups has proven far harder than the Israeli government has suggested. Israel’s ultimate target, the Iranian regime, distributes power across many individuals and organizations, meaning that the death of the Ayatollah will not automatically trigger its fall. The regime also holds popular support among a non-negligible faction of Iranian society, and, like Hamas and Hezbollah, holds a deeply entrenched ideology that cannot be crushed through a military campaign.
Regardless of the reality of the situation, the government of Israel appears confident in achieving this illusive total victory. Much of Israeli society believes this as well, even after the army has so far failed to achieve its goals in the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran—wars that have exacted massive human costs and severely diminished the country’s international reputation.
Speaking on the first day of the war, Netanyahu said the operation would “lead to peace, true peace.” This opinion is not held only by the political class; according to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 93 percent of Jewish Israelis support the war with Iran, largely due to the belief that a victory would lead to long term security for the country.
But even if Israel were to somehow achieve this type of decisive victory—something experts agree is unlikely—Israel’s history demonstrates that military triumphs rarely breed long-term peace. The idea of peace through strength can be traced all the way back to 1967, when Israel militarily crushed Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War. At the time seen as a triumph, this land grab marked the beginning of the occupation of Palestine, leading to the rapid expansion of armed resistance groups in the occupied territories and in neighboring countries.
In 1982, Israel dealt a severe blow to the Palestine Liberation Organization—at the time the leading force in guerrilla warfare against the State of Israel—during the Lebanon War. Hailed as a resounding triumph, the operation also led Israel to occupy southern Lebanon for the next eighteen years, fueling the rise of Hezbollah.
More recently, Israel has conducted numerous military campaigns in Gaza, including in 2014 and 2021. Both times, Hamas’s rocket arsenal was deteriorated, along with parts of its tunnel network, and the IDF succeeded in killing several top commanders. But these operations also inflicted heavy civilian casualties and structural damage and failed to decisively extinguish the operations of Hamas.
As bombs continue to fall across the Middle East and the death toll continues to climb, the idea that we are only a few bombs away from finally achieving peace cannot be further from the truth.