On December 10, in a Palestinian refugee “camp” within the Lebanese city of Tyre, there was a major explosion at a mosque associated with Hamas. Despite the terrorist group’s initial claims to the contrary, the explosion came from a large cache of munitions and arms it stored beneath the house of worship. At the funeral for a Hamas operative killed in the blast, a gunfight ensued, possibly between Hamas and Fatah. These events are evidence of a much more troubling fact: the Gaza-based jihadist group has been building up its forces in Lebanon so that it can attack Israel from multiple fronts during the next war. Yoni Ben Menachem explains:

This new Hamas infrastructure was already used during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021, when their operatives fired several rockets at northern Israel. . . . Hamas’s military infrastructure in Lebanon includes several hundred Palestinian operatives in the Palestinian refugee camps and was established with the approval of Hizballah and Iran and with the blind eye of the Lebanese government.

Hamas’s working theory is that Israel should be militarily engaged on two simultaneous fronts in the event of a war on the Gaza Strip border. This would prevent Hizballah from being held responsible for attacking Israel from southern Lebanon.

The Israeli security establishment assesses that at the moment, the goal of Hamas’s military infrastructure in Lebanon is mainly to harass Israel by firing rockets in a measured manner that would not lead to war in southern Lebanon.

According to Israeli security sources, Iran is instructing Hamas operatives in southern Lebanon how to manufacture rockets and drones. Hamas’s manufacturing system in Lebanon is part of the organization’s “construction department” and includes several workshops under the command of Majed Khader, who was based in Turkey and was transferred to Lebanon last year. . . . Workshops and rockets are hidden in civilian buildings, including in residential buildings and businesses.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.