Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA)

The massacres on October 7, 2023, brought the Iranian regime’s three-dimensional strategy of terror, subversion, and psychological warfare into plain view. This culminated in the regime’s April 14, 2024, direct ballistic missile and drone attacks of 300 projectiles, the first direct assault on Israel since the ayatollahs’ bloody 1979 takeover in Tehran. This attack moved the Iranian regime from the shadows onto the center stage in the Middle East.

For decades, Iran has been the world’s leading sponsor and purveyor of international terror. It has supported, supplied, armed, and inspired Islamic terror proxies across the Middle East: Hamas, Lebanon-based Hizbullah, and Yemen-based Houthis among them. As far back as 2008, the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs (then called the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) published Iran’s Race for Regional Supremacy¹ which coined the term “the Iranian octopus,” pointing to its violent regional hyperactivity as the source for regional instability.²

The October 7, 2023 atrocities revealed a bolder, more public Iranian campaign to destroy Israel in a war of attrition, both militarily and by its campaign of international political and psychological warfare. The regime was deeply involved in the planning and execution of Hamas’s massacre and hostage-taking.³ October 7, 2023, and Iran’s subsequent missile and drone attack on Israel on April 14, 2024, more than six months later, prove Iran plans to make good on its long-stated intention of dominating the Middle East and, ultimately, the rest of the world, under a nuclear umbrella.⁴ Iran has also been deeply involved in influencing U.S. and Arab public opinion through perception warfare on media and social networks.⁵

Iranian Funding for Hamas Terror

The Iranian-Hamas connection is decades old. According to Matthew Levitt, former senior counterterrorism official at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Hamas began receiving Iranian regime financial support in 1987. By 1994, Iran had provided Hamas with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of logistical support and training.⁶ By 1999, the Iranian intelligence service MOIS transferred $35 million to Hamas to finance terrorist activities against Israelis and provided terror training in Iran, resulting in a series of 1996 terror attacks on buses. When Iraq could no longer make “pay for slay” (incentive grants for murdering Israelis) to the families of dead, wounded, or jailed Palestinian terrorists, Iran took its place via Hizbullah contacts.⁷

After the 2004 deaths of Hamas leaders Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Iranian support and IRGC guidance increased.⁸ By 2010, three years after Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. Department of Defense reported that money was being smuggled into Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor, the critical passage from Egypt to the Gaza Strip.⁹ After the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, codenamed “Protective Edge,” Iran provided additional rocket technology and tunnel repair funds. In September 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department identified a dual British-Jordanian citizen, Mahir Jawad Yunis Salah, based in Saudi Arabia, who was coordinating the transfer of tens of millions of dollars from Iran to fund Hamas’ Qassam Brigades and activities in Gaza.¹⁰

In 2017, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who replaced the Qatari-supported Ismail Haniyeh, who was subsequently assassinated in 2024 in Tehran, confirmed that Iran was Hamas’s “largest backer financially and militarily.”¹¹

In 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) identified an international network through which the Iranian regime, working with Russian companies, provided millions of barrels of oil to the Syrian government, an Iranian proxy state. The Assad regime, controlled by the Alawite minority, a radical Shiite offshoot, in turn, then facilitated the movement of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) to be funneled to Hamas and Hizbullah.¹² Iran-backed militia groups have attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan 170 times since the October 7 Hamas attack.¹³ Before October 7, attacks on U.S. targets were also frequent.¹⁴

In 2019, it was reported that Iran pledged tens of millions of dollars to Hamas in financial assistance.¹⁵ Former Hamas Politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh claimed in a 2022 interview with Al Jazeera that the terror organization received $70 million per year from Iran.¹⁶

Iran’s Exploitation of the Palestinian Issue Masks its Religious Ambitions

Iran’s policies and motivation to eliminate Israel are ideological and religiously driven. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and, notably, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,¹⁷ invoked the Iranian iteration of the Shiite “end of days” belief that the destruction of Israel and the Jews would trigger the emergence of the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah from occultation, ushering in an era of justice.¹⁸ Some Shiites consider the 1979 Iranian Revolution to be an early sign of the Mahdi’s appearance.¹⁹

The West has been naively and largely oblivious and uninformed of the practical relevance of the Iranian regime’s religious doctrine. The United States and the Western powers have viewed October 7 solely as an extreme expression of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The U.S. political and public discourse has also largely ignored or underemphasized the Iranian regime’s subversion of Western governments and malign psychological influence over their public.

Iran’s war on the West continues its decades-long campaign that began with the Islamic Revolution’s kidnapping of 52 Americans in 1979, who were held for 444 days in Tehran. In August 2024, American intelligence released a statement that Iran is actively attempting to affect U.S. election results.²⁰ Iran created and managed fake online accounts and cyberwarfare against Israel and its other enemies.²¹ Iran is involved in its proxy Hizbullah’s narco-terror arrangement in which Hizbullah raises money for its militia by dealing in drugs and facilitating the drug trade worldwide through its international network.²²

October 7, 2023, and the Gaza war have provided the U.S.-led Western alliance a convenient pretext to focus on solving what they see as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Whether naively or deliberately, they have declined publicly to confront the Iranian threat to the entire Middle East region, which includes its commitment to destroy Israel and its race for hegemony over Sunni and Shiite states and strongholds alike.

The Iranian regime’s most important goal, besides the destruction of Israel and the United States, is the preservation of the government itself at all costs. This explains the regime’s mobilization of its terror proxies and its accelerated atomic weapons program– even at the expense of massive human losses – as a necessary precondition to achieve its objective of Iranian regional and, ultimately, global domination.

Iran’s Aim of Regional Supremacy

The Palestinian cause provides a cover for Iran’s greater ambitions in the region. Iran has branded its propaganda-driven days of solidarity with Palestinians as “Al Quds [Jerusalem} Day,” celebrated annually in Tehran. In a Western sense, solidarity often means sympathy for other parties. In the Iranian mullahs’ version of apocalyptic Shiism, though, solidarity means providing weapons and training for martyrs – those who willingly sacrifice themselves for jihad. That is, the Iranian regime is willing to assist potential martyrs’ “Islamikaze,” to use historian Raphael Israeli’s term,²³ without regard to their survival, just as it did with its Iranian children in its Basij para-military militia, resulting in the deaths of thousands of children. Iran uses and exploits the Palestinian cause to advance its interests.

This is important to understand in forecasting the future trajectory of Iran’s strategic mobilization of its proxies and its pursuit of nuclear capability. Though Israel has weakened Hamas, Hizbullah, the “crown jewel” of Iran’s proxies and front-line defender of its nuclear program, with some 200,000 rockets, missiles, and drones, still constitutes a strategic and even existential threat to Israel.²⁴ Hizbullah, copying what Hamas did in Gaza, rules southern Lebanon and has excavated, with the help of North Korea, a complex of tunnels comparable to or better than those established by Hamas, including wide tunnels that can accommodate vehicles such as the tunnels unearthed by the IDF in the Philadelphi Corridor on the border of the Gaza Strip and Egypt.²⁵ Hizbullah also shares Iran’s Shiite messianism and glorification of jihadi martyrs and also believes that the destruction of Israel will bring about the reappearance of the Hidden Imam (the Mahdi – Messiah).²⁶

This immutable ideology fuels Iran’s desire for regional supremacy, the destruction of Israel, and the subordination of non-Shiites. The West’s lenient interpretation of Iran’s intention to “free Palestine from the Zionists” naively ignores that the Iranian regime’s plans require the destruction of Israel and any state or other political actor that attempts to block the mullahs’ path to victory. Hamas’s use of human shields is not a mistake or a sacrifice made for a “Free Palestine” but an expression of the disposability of human life that the Iranian regime encourages in service of its apocalyptic meta-objectives. This renders the Palestinian issue a weapon for Iranian supremacy, not subject to political or territorial compromise between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Considering this rigid value set bent on destruction and death, there is no choice but for Israel and the West to stand together against the Iranian regime and its proxies in their “long war.”

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Notes