After being at war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, Israel is now in a ceasefire against all three enemies.

The Israel Defense Forces has certainly caused significant damage to its adversaries on all those fronts, but by no means has the threat dissipated.

While ceasefires brokered by US President Donald Trump — and largely imposed on Israel — are officially still in place, they remain extremely precarious.

The direction of all the post-October 7, 2023, wars is up in the air, but there are truths we can identify in order to make sense of what has been accomplished, where Israel stands, and what could happen in the next stage.

Israel has not won in Gaza…

Speaking at a conference one year ago, then-strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer promised that in twelve months’ time, Israel “will have won” the war that began on October 7.

In Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials have been consistent about the aims of war, beyond the return of all the hostages — “that Hamas can no longer act, that it no longer has governance or military capacities and that Gaza cannot be a threat to Israel.”

“Hamas will be disarmed — either the easy way or the hard way,” Netanyahu threatened on another occasion.

None of those aims has been achieved. Hamas continues to hold almost half of Gaza’s territory, but more importantly, governs virtually every Gazan.

And its leaders say openly they won’t give up their weapons. “Criminalizing the resistance, its weapons, and those who carried it out is something we should not accept,” senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said in February, only the latest in a series of Hamas officials to make clear that talk of disarmament is a fantasy.

Since then, Nickolay Mladenov, leading Trump’s Board of Peace, has been talking with Hamas leaders for weeks, and gave the group until April 11 to accept the Board’s proposal for it to gradually hand over all of its arms.

Instead, the terror group submitted a counteroffer to the Board of Peace, insisting that the issue of its weapons only be addressed as part of a framework culminating in the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Hamas is showing no sign of loosening its grip on Gaza, and there is no evident path to removing it as the most powerful force in the Strip. Israeli officials might engage in the occasional palaver about going back to war in Gaza, but there is absolutely nothing indicating that a return to high-intensity combat against Hamas is a possibility anytime in the foreseeable future.

Hezbollah, hammered by Israeli assassinations and a limited ground invasion, agreed to a humiliating ceasefire in November 2024. Under the terms of that truce, Hezbollah was required to vacate southern Lebanon and be replaced by the Lebanese military, as well as give up its weapons.

A new, anti-Hezbollah government came to power in the wake of the ceasefire, which tasked the Lebanese army with disarming Hezbollah by the end of the year. Far less capable than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Armed Forces has done some work in clearing some sites of weapons in southern Lebanon, but has not touched the bulk of the group’s arsenal in the rest of the country.

Still, the assessment in Israel was that Hezbollah was so badly beaten, it would remain cowed for the foreseeable future. After all, it didn’t do anything during the 12-day war in June 2025.

But Iran’s Revolutionary Guards quietly rebuilt Hezbollah’s military command, plugging gaps with Iranian officers and changing the command structure.

Hezbollah surprised Israel by showing its renewed fighting spirit, jumping into the US-Israeli war with Iran on March 2, firing hundreds of rockets and drones at northern Israel.

Israel responded by sending thousands of troops into Lebanon in a steadily expanding offensive. Many saw this as the opportunity to finally deal Hezbollah the fatal blow Israel failed to deliver in 2024.

When Trump imposed a halt to the campaign against Iran, Israel insisted that it would keep fighting Hezbollah, and that now it could shift its full focus on the........

© The Times of Israel