As Iran and Israel battle, the rest of the Middle East fears what is next

ISTANBUL – Across a swath of the Middle East, fighter jets and missiles regularly streak across the sky.

The newest war in the region,

this time between Israel and Iran,

has once again put millions of people in the crossfire of a conflict that they want nothing to do with.

The war has embroiled two well-armed, long-time enemies who are ethnic and political outliers in the region but whose fight, many of their neighbors worry, could swiftly spill beyond their borders.

“We are constantly afraid, and the psychological toll has been heavy,” said Ms Rawan Muhaidat, 28, a mother of two in the town of Kafr Asad in northern Jordan.

The sight of Iranian missiles overhead, and the booms of air defences shooting them down before they reach Israel, have terrified her children, who cower between her and her husband as they worry that their home could be struck.

“Every time a rocket passes and explodes, we think: This is the one,” Ms Muhaidat said.

On June 21, US President Donald Trump granted Israel’s request that America intervene by having its forces

attack three nuclear sites in Iran

, he said, including a nuclear enrichment facility buried deep underground.

Experts said such a move could push Iran to retaliate against US military bases or allies across the Middle East, or to activate proxy forces – like the Houthis in Yemen – to snarl trade routes or damage oil infrastructure, harming the global economy.

“We’re opening a Pandora’s box,” Dr Narges Bajoghli, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, said before Mr Trump’s announcement.

“Iran is not going to raise the white flag of surrender.”

The war highlights how significantly the power structure across the Middle East has shifted in recent years.

Just over a half-decade ago, Israel largely focused on its conflict with the Palestinians while waging a shadow war with Iran through occasional assassinations and other covert attacks.

But it avoided direct confrontation, partly for fear of retaliation from the network of militias that Iran supported in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

At that time, most Arab countries shunned Israel, a Jewish-majority democracy, for its treatment of the Palestinians, and many resented the predominantly Persian Iran for what they considered its destructive meddling in the Arab world.

But a few Arab states began to see Israel as a potential partner in dealing with their own concerns about Iran and established formal diplomatic relations.

That picture has now changed.

The deadly surprise attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in October 2023 heightened Israel’s sense of vulnerability, and the country has become increasingly aggressive in striking out against perceived threats far beyond its borders.

For Iran, the wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and the 2024

ouster of president Bashar Assad of Syria

, decimated its regional proxy network and left it even more isolated.

Powerful Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, pursued their own diplomatic tracks with Tehran to decrease tensions.

Now, they also hope to avoid a war in their neighbourhood that could put them in the cross hairs because of their partnerships with the US.

The current conflict began on June 13, at a bad time for the international institutions that were established to try to contain such hostilities.

Israel’s war in Gaza, which began after

Hamas’ 2023 attack,

has killed more than 50,000 people and caused widespread destruction and hunger in Gaza.

Few seem to expect that the warring parties in the new conflict will be held accountable for killing civilians or striking hospitals, as Israel has done repeatedly in Gaza – sometimes because Hamas has built tunnels beneath them – and as Iran did in Israel on June 19.

Expectations are low that action by the UN Security Council will stop the war, not least because the US would almost certainly veto any measure that called for its end.

And Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told senior European officials during talks in Geneva on June 20 that Iran would not negotiate under fire.

Mr Trump dismissed the European efforts anyway, saying: “Iran doesn’t want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us.”

The lack of international action to stop the war has left Mr Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu free to proceed as they choose, Dr Bajoghli said.

“We’re entering a new international era, a new world order, and it seems to – in some ways – be an old world order of force and the law of the jungle, but with 21st-century technology and weaponry,” she said.

Israel initiated the war

with a multi-pronged surprise attack that damaged Iranian military and nuclear sites, largely destroyed air defences and killed top nuclear scientists and military officials in their homes, as well as a number of civilians.

Iran has responded by firing barrages of ballistic missiles at Israel, some of which have struck civilian apartment towers. At least 224 people have been killed in Iran and 24 in Israel.

Mr Netanyahu has said that Israel launched the attack to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, which Israel would consider an existential threat. He has also suggested the more expansive goals of regional transformation and regime change.

“We are changing the face of the Middle East, and that can lead to radical changes inside Iran itself,” he said on June 16.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful.

US intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran has not decided to seek a nuclear weapon, although that could change if the US bombs Iran’s underground enrichment facility in Fordo or if Israel kills Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

For his part, the Ayatollah has threatened to retaliate if the US strikes Iran.

“The harm the US will suffer will definitely be irreparable if they enter this conflict militarily,” he said in a televised address on June 18.

The war is hugely unwelcome in the rest of the Middle East, where other governments would prefer to put the region’s conflicts behind them so they can rebuild what has been destroyed and focus on strengthening their economies.

There is little affinity for either of the warring parties. Most Arab states shun Israel, and even governments that have established diplomatic relations with it have condemned how it has fought in Gaza and its attack on Iran.

But that does not mean they support Iran.

In a predominantly Sunni Muslim region, most Arab governments see Iran’s revolutionary Shiite theocracy as anathema, and many people in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere resent Iran’s interventions in their countries.

Many Middle East leaders have complicated reactions to the war, said Dr Dina Esfandiary, the lead Middle East analyst at Bloomberg Economics, a research group.

“Officials in the region are quietly glad that Iran’s top brass is being taken out bit by bit, that Iranian proxies and their leaderships are being taken out bit by bit,” she said.

“That, from their perspective, gets rid of one of the real threats in the region for them.”

But many also fear an expanded role in the Middle East for Israel, she added, given the tremendous military and diplomatic support it receives from the US.

That leaves other countries wondering, she said: “Where is Israel going to go next?” NYTIMES