There are groups backed by Iran in the Middle East

The Middle East is not a proxy of Iran, but rather a network of axis alliances in the non-religious region

The Secretary of State issued a warning this week that the United States would act swiftly if it came under attack from Iran or its proxies in the Middle East.

The U.S. has said there is no direct evidence that Iran was involved in the Hamas attack against Israel. Analysts say that there are clear links between Iran and the attacks carried out by Hamas.

Ali Barakeh, a senior Hamas official from Lebanon, told NPR that while Iran knows that Hamas fights Israel and offers them support, they do not deny it. we don’t take orders from anyone.”

The axis of resistance is a multi-pronged network of different forces supported to varying degrees by Iran.

The “axis of resistance” has a loose-knit alliance that includes government in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq and Sunni and Shia Muslim groups that are all close to Iran.

The Iranian regime and its Quds Force, a subset of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard corps, have grown this network more on the basis of shared resistance to Western powers and Israel.

In Lebanon, Iran-backed Hezbollah operates both as a Shia Muslim political party and militant group. There are serious tensions along Israel’s northern border where Hezbollah is active, especially in southern Lebanon, where it wields significant power.

The rebels in Yemen are also on the axis. The war in Yemen began more than a decade ago and is supported by Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon said last week that it had shot down missiles in Yemen that were headed for Israel.

The relationship with Iran is different for each axis group. There are differences between them and one another. In Gaza, both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — a smaller, rival militant group that does not engage in the political process — are considered part of the alliance. The Islamic Republic gave most of the budget to the PIJ.

“It is important to remember that Hamas is not a proxy of Iran in the way that Hezbollah is,” says Ghattas, who is also a distinguished fellow at the Columbia Institute of Global Politics and spent two decades covering the region as a journalist for the BBC and the Financial Times.

According to reports in the international media, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah met senior officials from Hamas in Beirut Wednesday to discuss the situation in the Middle East. They stated their goal was to achieve a real victory for the resistance in Palestine and Gaza and to halt Israel’s brutal aggression against the people of Gaza.

Mohanad Hage Ali, a Beirut-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told NPR’s Scott Simon that the “unity of fronts” of Iranian-backed proxy groups is “a kind of NATO for militant groups” in the region, requiring allied organizations to step in and provide military support should any other member groups face an existential threat.

Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, told NPR’s Ailsa Chang, “It’s quite likely that Hezbollah knew of the preplanning The Iranians have a proxy force deployment in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and also in Gaza, and all of them were involved in the training and planning of the Oct 7 attacks.

“I think that Hezbollah would find it difficult not to intervene, given the cost of the conflict, and what it means for Lebanon,” Hage Ali told NPR.

“If this situation continues, and women and children and civilians are still killed in Gaza and the West Bank, anything will be possible,” Abdollahian said.

He said they have enough missiles, rockets and drones to get them from anywhere. “They have their own weapons and they have their own training, that’s why they decided to go ahead with this operation.”

The Foreign Minister’s Concerns on the War in the Middle East and the U.S./Mexico Correspondence with the Report on the “Resistance Front”

Iran’sMinister of Foreign Affairs is interviewed byNPR and there are additional highlights. The interview was conducted through an interpreter.

We don’t want the conflict to spread. Actually, we’re advising everybody and encouraging them to move toward the stopping of war crimes as soon as possible. You know, the situation is complicated. It’s difficult for our region to tolerate the fact that 7,000 civilians have been killed as the result of the bombardments of the Israeli regime. With the continuing crimes of the Israeli regime the whole region has been turned into a powder keg.

They have to decide for themselves. At any moment, anything can happen. We think that the U.S. should abandon its support of the Israeli regime. Israel’s political and security systems have completely collapsed according to our information inside the region. The Israeli citizens have no trust whatsoever in [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his security and political system. Right now, the only thing functional in Israel is their war machine that is also being run and controlled and managed by the U.S. Of course, if I were to be fair, I’d say Netanyahu also has his own role to play. If the war stops then he will fall in less than a day.

About the foreign minister’s past comments about launching “pre-emptive action” via members of the “resistance front” and the subsequent barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon

Some days ago, I had a meeting with [the head of the political wing of Hamas], Mr. Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar. He said that they stand ready to combat the army of Israel for a long period of time, militarily. He claimed that they have a chance of coming to an agreement with Israel to keep the civilians away from conflict. It will be like this: We hit their military, they hit our military. It will be just between the military people, leave the civilians out of it We have been prepared to do it for a long time. We held talks with the officials from the sultanate on how we can help with prisoners who are not in the military. I raised the issue with Mr. Ismail Haniyeh. He said we have no motivation, no reason to keep those non-military prisoners. So, as soon as there’s a ceasefire, we’re going to identify them, to somehow separate the military from the non-military and release them.