Iran–Israel proxy conflict

• 1. Introduction

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  The Iran-Israel proxy conflict reached a strange moment in June 2025. The two states fought a 12-day war that drew in the United States. News outlets noticed something odd about it. The militias Iran had armed and funded for years stayed largely silent, and reports described Iran as "isolated in war."

  That silence is the puzzle. Iran and Israel have been locked in a proxy struggle since 1985. Iran backed Lebanese Shia militias, most notably Hezbollah, and Palestinian groups such as Hamas. Israel answered with airstrikes on Iran's allies in Syria, the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, and support for Iranian rebels.

  Yet the two countries were once close. So how did partners turn into enemies? Why would a state build a ring of allies across the Middle East to fight on its behalf? And what changes when the go-betweens step aside and the two governments trade blows directly?

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• 2. Periphery Partners

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  The periphery doctrine explains the strangest chapter of this story. Under it, Imperial Iran and Israel kept close relations because both saw Arab powers as a common threat.

  Then came the 1979 revolution. Ruhollah Khomeini had criticized the Pahlavi dynasty's ties with Israel, and he viewed Israel as a prop of the Shah's regime. His new government cut every diplomatic and commercial link. It withdrew recognition of Israel as a state and began calling it "occupied Palestine." Iran stopped accepting Israeli passports, and Iranian passport holders were banned from travelling there. Khomeini declared Israel an "enemy of Islam" and the "Little Satan."

  The rhetoric did not match the ledger. During the Iran-Iraq War, which ran from 1980 to 1988, Israel was one of the main suppliers of military equipment to Iran. It also provided military instructors.

  Israel even bombed and destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in an action called Operation Babylon. That reactor was considered central to Iraq's nuclear weapons program, so the strike helped Iran's war effort directly.

  The logic that held the two together was temporary. By the 1990s the Soviet Union had dissolved and Iraq had been weakened, and the shared threats were gone.

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• 3. The Palestinian Cause

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  In 1949, the Iranian ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani visited the West Bank and was moved by what he saw among Palestinian refugees. He began speaking for them in the 1950s and 1960s. After the Six-Day War of 1967, he raised funds inside Iran, including zakat, to send to Palestinians.

  The Shah's government was alarmed. Documents from SAVAK, its security service, indicate that officials believed the Iranian public sympathized with the Palestinian people.

  Meanwhile, from the 1960s, many Iranians, both leftist and religious, volunteered to fight Israel alongside Palestinian organizations, including the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some trained in Lebanon and Jordan, then returned home to fight the Shah.

  On the 17th of February 1979, Yasser Arafat became the first foreign leader to visit Iran after the revolution. During his visit Iran severed ties with Israel and expelled Israeli diplomats. The Israeli embassy in Tehran was closed and handed over to the PLO.

  The PLO had its own reasons for enthusiasm. Khomeini had been exiled from his homeland, and he had defeated a militarily powerful enemy backed by the United States. The PLO hoped to repeat that against Israel.

  Palestinians also felt Arab nationalism had reached a dead end. Arabs lost the 1967 war, Jordan expelled the PLO in 1970, and Egypt recognized Israel in 1978.

  The friendship was bumpy. During the hostage crisis the PLO tried to mediate with the Iranian students and failed. When the Iran-Iraq War began, Arafat travelled to Baghdad and Tehran on the 20th of September 1980, afraid the war would distract from the Palestinian cause. That effort also failed, and he eventually sided with Iraq. Iranian leaders kept their pro-Palestinian stance anyway.

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• 4. Birth of Hezbollah

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  When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the leaders of the Lebanese Shia community appealed to Iran for help. Khomeini sent his defense minister and military leaders to Syria. He then concluded that Iran could not fight on two fronts while it was already at war with Iraq.

  So Iran chose a slower route. It helped consolidate Islamist Shia parties into a single political and military organization, Hezbollah. It gave them ideological indoctrination, training and equipment to attack Israeli and American targets.

  The invasion itself fed the movement. Israel did eliminate PLO bases and partly withdrew in 1985. But the occupation sharpened the conflict with local militias and pulled several Shia movements, including Hezbollah and Amal, out of loose guerrilla networks in the south.

  The Sabra and Shatila massacre, carried out by Israeli proxies, had a long-term effect as well. It helped produce a homegrown Lebanese resistance rather than a Palestinian one. By the second half of the 1990s that resistance posed more strategic trouble than the PLO had in the 1970s.

  Hezbollah's 1985 manifesto listed four main goals. One was Israel's final departure from Lebanon "as a prelude to its final obliteration." According to reports released in February 2010, Hezbollah received $400 million from Iran.

  The group was built as a hybrid. Like Iran's bonyads, it set up a welfare network for poor Shiites, with discounted or free medical care, education and cultural events. It grew to hold seats in the Lebanese government, and it runs a radio station and a satellite television station. People have called it a "state within a state." After the Israeli occupation ended in 2000, its paramilitary wing came to be seen as more powerful than the Lebanese Army.

  The fighting did not end with the withdrawal in May 2000. It simmered around the Shabaa Farms region until the 2006 Lebanon War. There, Iranian Revolutionary Guards were believed to have helped Hezbollah, and some sources claimed hundreds of them took part in firing rockets. Hezbollah's C-802 anti-ship missile severely damaged the Israeli warship INS Hanit and killed four crewmen. Israeli media reported that between six and nine Guards operatives were killed, with their bodies flown to Tehran by way of Syria.

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• 5. Four Fronts

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  A report from the Stimson Center describes at least four main fronts that Iran has used: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. The aim, according to the report, is to force Israel to defend on several fronts at once. That reduces its ability to focus on Iran's nuclear or military capabilities. Iran calls the network an "axis of resistance."

  In Iraq, the 2003 invasion unintentionally handed Iran an opening. Tehran gained political influence there and established loyal militias, including Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba.

  Yemen needed a logistics solution. The Houthis took control of Al Hudaydah's port and of Sanaa, and that solved the Quds Force's problem of how to deliver weapons. By 2012 the Revolutionary Guards' Weapons Transfer Unit, called Unit 190, was looking for smuggling methods. It set up an "air bridge" that began with two flights a day. Later an Iranian fleet carried military supplies to the Hudaydah port.

  On the Palestinian side, Iran has backed Hamas since the 1990s. Between 2005 and 2011 it was one of Hamas's main funders and suppliers. Hamas members trained in Iran and in Syria. When the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, Hamas distanced itself from the Syrian government and its members began leaving Syria. Hamas announced on the 10th of December 2013 that it had resumed ties with Iran after a brief cut-off over Syria.

  Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a different story. After Israel and Egypt squeezed Hamas in early 2014, Islamic Jihad saw its power steadily increase with funds from Iran.

  Some partnerships were less durable. In 2008, Sudan and Iran signed a military cooperation agreement, and Iran's defense minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar signed for Iran. In 2015 Sudan severed ties completely by joining the Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni crisis.

  US intelligence officials have said Iran does not seek a broader war. In their reading, the proxies' main goal is to hit Israel and the United States in ways that avoid triggering one.

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• 6. The Syrian Corridor

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  In 2018, Mossad director Yossi Cohen offered a vivid image. He said Qasem Soleimani, "should he be so minded," could drive his car from Tehran to Lebanon's border with Israel without being stopped. The same route would be open to truckloads of rockets bound for Hezbollah.

  The road ran through Syria. Iran had been a close ally of the Assad government and gave it logistical, technical and financial support, training and some combat troops. By the end of 2013, as many as 10,000 Iranian operatives had fought on the pro-government side. In 2018 Tehran said 2,100 Iranian soldiers had been killed in Syria and Iraq over seven years.

  Iran also sponsored Shia militias from across the region, among them the Afghan Liwa Fatemiyoun and the Pakistani Liwa Zainebiyoun. Hezbollah deployed several thousand fighters, and by March 2019 it had reportedly lost 1,677 of them in Syria.

  The victory of Assad in 2017 realized Israel's worst-case scenario, a contiguous axis from Iran and Iraq through Syria to the Lebanese border. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman had warned that "everything possible will be done to prevent the existence of a Shi'ite corridor from Tehran to Damascus."

  Israel's response began quietly. On the 30th of January 2013, Israeli aircraft struck a Syrian convoy allegedly carrying Iranian weapons to Hezbollah. Israel habitually refused to comment on such strikes, a stance believed to spare the Syrian government any need to retaliate.

  The silence broke from January 2017. Israeli aircraft began flying almost daily attack missions against Iranian targets in Syria, dropping about 2,000 bombs in 2018 alone. Former chief of staff Gadi Eizenkot said the decision followed a shift in Iranian strategy in 2016, as the campaign against ISIL wound down. Iran, he said, planned to exploit the vacuum by building bases and bringing in foreign Shiite fighters. In 2017 Israeli intelligence found an Iranian base under construction just 50 km from the Israeli border.

  Eizenkot added that Israel mostly targeted infrastructure and spared personnel, to deny Iran a pretext to retaliate. By January 2019, only a few dozen Iranian military personnel had been killed.

  The corridor would not last. In December 2024 the Syrian government collapsed after a rebel offensive, and IRGC commander Behrouz Esbati admitted Iran had been "defeated very badly."

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• 7. Shadow War

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  In June 2010, security researchers discovered Stuxnet, an advanced computer worm believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. A study by the Institute for Science and International Security estimated it might have damaged as many as 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment plant, about 10 percent of those installed. Iran, for its part, says its adversaries regularly engineer sales of faulty equipment and attacks by computer viruses.

  That same year a wave of killings began. Particle physicist Masoud Alimohammadi died on the 12th of January 2010 when a booby-trapped motorcycle exploded near his car. Hitmen on motorcycles attached bombs to the cars of two senior scientists, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoon Abbasi, on the 29th of November 2010. Shahriari was killed and Abbasi was severely wounded. Darioush Rezaeinejad was shot dead in Tehran on the 23rd of July 2011. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan and his driver were killed by a car bomb on the 11th of January 2012.

  Iran blamed Israel and the United States. Majid Jamali Fashi confessed on state television to killing Alimohammadi and said he had trained at a Mossad facility near Tel Aviv. He was executed in May 2012. Iranian television also aired a half-hour documentary titled Terror Club, built around the televised confessions of 12 suspects.

  Iran's alleged answer came in 2012. On the 13th of February, Israeli embassy staff in Georgia and India were targeted. In India a car bomb injured four people. In Georgia the bomb failed to explode. In Bangkok an Iranian agent lost his legs when a bomb detonated prematurely, which exposed the cell. On the 18th of July, a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria was bombed. Five Israelis and the Bulgarian driver were killed, and Netanyahu blamed Iran and Hezbollah.

  The most cinematic operation came in January 2018. According to reports, Mossad agents arrived at midnight in a truck semitrailer at a secure Tehran warehouse. They cut into dozens of safes with high-intensity torches and carried away 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs. They left before the guards arrived for the morning shift at 7 am.

  Israel said the haul showed that Iran's AMAD Project aimed at nuclear weapons, and that two sites had been hidden from inspectors. The Trump administration then withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions. Yossi Cohen admitted overseeing the operation in a televised interview in June 2021.

  The cyber front kept growing. On the 26th of October 2021, a cyberattack crippled gas stations across Iran, and some hacked screens asked Khamenei "where is the gas." In 2024, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran had created an intelligence unit to counter Mossad. Its leader, he said, was later revealed to be a Mossad agent himself.

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• 8. Direct Fire

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  On the 7th of October 2023, Hamas launched a coordinated surprise offensive on Israel with a barrage of at least 3,000 rockets. About 2,500 militants breached the barrier from Gaza. At least 1,200 people were killed, including 360 at a music festival. Iran reportedly assisted Hamas with planning, though its foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani denied involvement on the 9th of October.

  The fallout spread. Hezbollah and Israeli forces exchanged fire within a day or two. The Houthis fired missiles at Israeli territory. Saudi Arabia suspended talks on normalizing relations with Israel on the 14th of October, and some speculated that Iran wanted to scuttle those talks.

  Meanwhile, an information war accompanied the fighting. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue singled out Iranian accounts on Facebook and X that glorified Hamas's crimes. Researchers documented at least 40,000 bots or fake accounts.

  Then the proxy war went direct. On the 1st of April 2024, an Israeli airstrike hit the Iranian consulate annex in Damascus. It killed 16 people, among them Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior Quds Force commander, and seven other IRGC officers. On the 13th of April, Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes on Israel. Israel struck Iranian military sites on the 19th of April.

  Oil markets took notice too, since Iran is the third-largest producer in OPEC.

  Later that year, Hezbollah's pagers exploded across Lebanon. At least 11 people were killed and 4,000 wounded, mostly Hezbollah members. Among the injured was the Iranian ambassador, Mojtaba Amani.

  On the 19th of October 2024, a drone reportedly targeted Netanyahu's residence while neither he nor his wife was there. He said the proxies of Iran had "made a bitter mistake." Iran's mission to the UN attributed the attack to Hezbollah.

  On the 22nd of June 2025, the United States Air Force and Navy struck three Iranian nuclear facilities as part of the Twelve-Day War.

  The contest has moved into quieter ground since. In February 2026, Israel's Shin Bet and National Cyber Directorate reported foiling hundreds of Iranian cyberattack attempts over the previous year. Most were phishing and account takeovers aimed at officials, defense figures, academics and journalists. The source lists a 2026 Iran War as ongoing, so this story has no final chapter yet.

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