Gaza, Lebanon, West Bank: Why Is Israel Fighting So Many Wars?

While Israel’s devastating war with Hamas in Gaza attracts the most attention, its military has also been fighting for months on several other fronts, making this one of the most complex periods of conflict in the country’s 76-year history.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the military has been raiding and striking militant groups in several Palestinian cities, killing about 600 people since October, in the deadliest campaign in the territory for more than two decades. On Wednesday, Israel began one of its biggest maneuvers in the territory in recent months, simultaneously invading three cities to capture or kill militants.

Along the Israel-Lebanon border, Israel has been exchanging rocket and missile fire with Hezbollah, a militia allied with Hamas and backed by Iran, in fighting that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border and killed hundreds.

And Israel’s yearslong shadow war with Iran has burst into the open, with each side striking the other directly in April, leading to fears that a relatively contained war in Gaza might end up setting off an all-out war involving Iran, its many proxies across the Middle East and even the United States.

Why are various groups fighting Israel, why is it using force to deal with them, and why is it taking so long for these wars to end?

Why Israel is still fighting in Gaza.

Despite the destruction of much of Hamas’s military infrastructure and tens of thousands of deaths, there is no end in sight to the war in Gaza, partly because Israel has set itself a high threshold for victory: the eradication of the Hamas leadership and the rescue of roughly 100 hostages still held by the group. By contrast, Hamas has a low threshold: It seeks to survive the war intact, a modest goal that allows it to weather a level of devastation that might have caused other groups to surrender.

Hamas’s extensive subterranean tunnel network also makes it hard for Israel to win. Some of the group’s leaders are thought to be deep beneath the ground, surrounded in some cases by Israeli hostages, making it challenging for Israel to find the leaders, let alone attack them without harming its own kidnapped citizens.