After being at war with Hamas
..the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood,..., Hezbollah and Iran, Israel is now in a ceasefire against all three enemies.
The Israel Defense Forces has certainly caused significant damage to its adversaries on all those fronts, but by no means has the threat dissipated.
While ceasefires brokered by US President Donald Trump
...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
— and largely imposed on Israel — are officially still in place, they remain extremely precarious.
The direction of all the post-October 7, 2023, wars is up in the air, but there are truths we can identify in order to make sense of what has been accomplished, where Israel stands, and what could happen in the next stage.
ISRAEL HAS NOT WON IN GAZA...
Speaking at a conference one year ago, then-strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer promised that in twelve months’ time, Israel "will have won" the war that began on October 7.
In Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have been consistent about the aims of war, beyond the return of all the hostages — "that Hamas can no longer act, that it no longer has governance or military capacities and that Gaza cannot be a threat to Israel."
"Hamas will be disarmed — either the easy way or the hard way," Netanyahu threatened on another occasion.
None of those aims has been achieved. Hamas continues to hold almost half of Gaza’s territory, but more importantly, governs virtually every Gazook.
And its leaders say openly they won’t give up their weapons. "Criminalizing the resistance, its weapons, and those who carried it out is something we should not accept," senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said in February, only the latest in a series of Hamas officials to make clear that talk of disarmament is a fantasy.
Since then, Nickolay Mladenov, leading Trump’s Board of Peace, has been talking with Hamas leaders for weeks, and gave the group until April 11 to accept the Board’s proposal for it to gradually hand over all of its arms.
Instead, the terror group submitted a counteroffer to the Board of Peace, insisting that the issue of its weapons only be addressed as part of a framework culminating in the establishment of a Paleostinian state.
Hamas is showing no sign of loosening its grip on Gaza, and there is no evident path to removing it as the most powerful force in the Strip. Israeli officials might engage in the occasional palaver about going back to war in Gaza, but there is absolutely nothing indicating that a return to high-intensity combat against Hamas is a possibility anytime in the foreseeable future.
...OR IN LEBANON...
Hezbollah, hammered by Israeli liquidations and a limited ground invasion, agreed to a humiliating ceasefire in November 2024. Under the terms of that truce, Hezbollah was required to vacate southern Leb
...The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. Only one of those statements is an exaggeration....
and be replaced by the Lebanese military, as well as give up its weapons.
A new, anti-Hezbollah government came to power in the wake of the ceasefire, which tasked the Lebanese army with disarming Hezbollah by the end of the year. Far less capable than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Armed Forces has done some work in clearing some sites of weapons in southern Lebanon, but has not touched the bulk of the group’s arsenal in the rest of the country.
Still, the assessment in Israel was that Hezbollah was so badly beaten, it would remain cowed for the foreseeable future. After all, it didn’t do anything during the 12-day war in June 2025.
But Iran’s Revolutionary Guards quietly rebuilt Hezbollah’s military command, plugging gaps with Iranian officers and changing the command structure.
Hezbollah surprised Israel by showing its renewed fighting spirit, jumping into the US-Israeli war with Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for
spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan.The abbreviation
IRGCis the same idea as
Stürmabteilung (or SA).The term
Supreme Guideis a the modern version form of either
Duceor
Führeror maybe both. They hate
on March 2, firing hundreds of rockets and drones at northern Israel.
Israel responded by sending thousands of troops into Lebanon in a steadily expanding offensive. Many saw this as the opportunity to finally deal Hezbollah the fatal blow Israel failed to deliver in 2024.
When Trump imposed a halt to the campaign against Iran, Israel insisted that it would keep fighting Hezbollah, and that now it could shift its full focus on the resurgent group.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir described the fight against Hezbollah as the military’s "primary combat zone."
And Netanyahu insisted in early April that the Iran ceasefire "does not include Lebanon."
Less than two weeks later, it did. Trump announced a 10-day ceasefire in Lebanon, and Netanyahu was left to defend his willingness to agree to the truce by pointing out how much Israel has done in weakening Hezbollah over the last two years.
Trump then announced a three-week extension to the ceasefire, amid efforts to get Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun to Washington to meet directly with Netanyahu.
Israel is still fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and on Wednesday carried out its first strike in Beirut in nearly a month.
Yet nothing Israel is doing is putting Hezbollah’s survival as a political force or military organization in danger. If anything, the dynamics since the Iran war have been working in Hezbollah’s favor.
Before the campaign, Israel had the legitimacy to attack Hezbollah across the country, while the Shiite group took its lumps quietly. Now Israel has limits on where it can operate due to the ceasefire, while Hezbollah is striking Israeli troops with increasing bravado.
And no peace agreement is about to emerge between the Lebanese state and Israel. Aoun can’t even agree to meet Netanyahu, given the Hezbollah threat of violence.
...OR IN IRAN
On the first day of Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu said that "the goal of the operation is to put an end to the threat from the Ayatollah regime in Iran."
The core of that effort was to target the nuclear and ballistic missile program.
Though Netanyahu didn’t lay it out explicitly as a war aim, it was clear that he hoped — even expected — that the regime would fall. Israel, he said, would "create conditions that will enable the brave Iranian people to cast off the yoke of this murderous regime."
"This operation will continue as long as necessary," Netanyahu promised.
Iran’s military and leadership were badly damaged, without a doubt.
But US intelligence assesses that Iran likely still has access to around 70 percent of its pre-war ballistic missile stockpiles, and around 60 percent of its missile launchers.
Iran’s nuclear program, hit hard in June 2025, wasn’t set back in any meaningful fashion this time around. American assessments indicate that the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer. Iran’s 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium remain in the country, with no agreement or plan to remove it.
Moreover, military capabilities can be rebuilt, especially if — in the context of an agreement with the US — money is flooding into a country that has consistently shown it will prioritize rearmament over the welfare of its citizens.
Nor are there any indications that the regime is facing collapse. It has shown coherence and stability, and now even Netanyahu has stopped talking about the Iranian people rising up.
An agreement with Trump would cement the regime’s standing even further and allow it to start easing economic pressures facing the public.
Netanyahu himself admitted that Israel "has more goals to complete," in a video statement released after the ceasefire between the US and Iran took effect.
Trump section can be read at the link, but the reporter thinks he does not want to fight anymore.
THERE WILL BE NO RELIEF FOR ISRAEL’S RESERVISTSFaced with enemies on its borders that aren’t going anywhere, Israel has chosen the most manpower-heavy response.
It isn’t looking to defeat Hamas or Hezbollah on the battlefield through a sharp and decisive ground campaign. For years, that approach guided tiny Israel in its wars against Arab armies, allowing reservists to get back to their jobs and families after wars that lasted only weeks, at most.
Instead, Netanyahu has chosen the strategy of buffer zones over Israel’s borders — in Gaza, Lebanon, and in Syria. Each one needs multiple brigades to maintain, on top of demands along the border and in the West Bank.
That burden, as it has since October 7, 2023, falls on reservists as well as active-duty formations. Reserve brigades are carrying out their sixth extended deployments in 2.5 years, making it impossible to get back into routine at home, school, or the office.
And the major potential reservoir of ground troops isn’t going to be tapped either. Some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible for military service, but have not enlisted. The IDF has said it urgently needs 12,000 recruits — mostly combat troops — due to the strain on standing and reserve forces caused by the multi-front war of recent years.
A coalition bill that would ostensibly increase military conscription in the Haredi community ultimately enshrines continued exemptions for full-time yeshiva students. Even that flawed legislation faces an uncertain future.
According to a Haredi news site, Netanyahu recently requested that ultra-Orthodox lawmakers agree to put off the unpopular legislation until after the 2026 elections, telling senior ultra-Orthodox lawmakers in a private meeting that his coalition does not have a majority to push the bill through.