Warmongering and warmaking are ever more prevalent in the Middle East. In the center of the conflict is the State of Israel and the United States of America, with escalating conflict leading to countless deaths.
Incessant bloodshed in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, and battles inside Lebanon—all involving Israel with the implicit support of America.
There is a growing confrontation in the region after the U.S. and Israel jointly attacked Iran in late February. Analysts had previously warned that the move could draw in other countries and that conflict would subsequently spread throughout the region.
The current phase of the conflict was triggered by the coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, opening a dangerous new front in an already volatile region. The attacks set off immediate retaliation from Tehran and drew in its allied forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The expansion into Iran underscores a broader pattern of Israeli military escalation, enabled by the United States, pulling the region into a bigger risk of a multi-front war.
“A month has passed since a devastating war, which we warned against and which most Lebanese feared would erupt, seeing it as imposed on our country,” said Nawaf Salam, the Lebanese Prime Minister, in a Cabinet transcript posted on X.com.
Mr. Salam said there is no justification for dragging Lebanon into wars that belong to other countries. He warned that Israeli actions point to broader objectives, including expanded occupation, buffer zones and mass displacement of people currently exceeding one million.
He said he will be rallying Arab and international support to intensify diplomatic efforts to halt violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty and international law.
In Lebanon, Israel is threatening the same tactics used on displaced Palestinians in past decades—not allowing a return to their homelands once removed.
Reuters reported on March 16 that Israel warned that displaced Lebanese driven from their homes by its military campaign would not be able to return until the safety of Israelis living near the border was ensured, as Israeli troops pushed into new parts of southern Lebanon.
In a briefing, Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told reporters that soldiers were now conducting ground operations in “new locations,” Reuters reported.
Israel’s military, which has occupied five positions in southern Lebanon since a November 2024 so-called ceasefire with Hezbollah, sent additional forces into the country in early March after Hezbollah fired a salvo of rockets in support of Iran.
The conduct of Israel fits a pattern that has become its modus operandi of terror and illegal land grabbing.
“Israeli policies of settlement expansion, annexation, property transfer, and demographic manipulation have intensified over decades,” said a March 30 paper issued by Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization. “The culminating in a multifaceted campaign that, today, threatens the very existence of the Palestinian land, life, and identity,” said Al-Haq.
In the last two years of Israel’s continuing genocidal assault on Gaza, 72,265 Palestinians have been killed and 171,959 Palestinians injured, including 689 Palestinians killed and 1,860 injured since the so-called ceasefire in October 2025, according to Al-Haq.
Gaza’s physical and social infrastructure has been obliterated. Satellite images show that over 80 percent of Gaza has become uninhabitable. The scale and pattern of devastation indicate the systematic targeting of residential and civilian infrastructure, consistent with long-term objectives of territorial control and demographic reshaping.
While Gaza lies in ruins, the West Bank—including East Jerusalem—has become the focus of Israel’s accelerating annexation efforts. Since late 2024, more than 36,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced—on a scale described as unprecedented—amid illegal settlement expansion, demolitions and settler violence. Israeli authorities have also advanced or approved roughly 27,200 settlement units and established at least 84 new outposts.
“These measures are not routine administrative adjustments,” said Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, in a Special Procedures statement on Feb. 18.
“They are deliberate, incremental steps toward permanent annexation, advanced piece by piece, in broad daylight, and with total impunity,” she said. “They will only deepen and entrench an occupation that the world’s highest court has determined to be unlawful, further eroding the rights of Palestinians,” Ms. Albanese explained.
In its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice confirmed that Israel’s settlement policy is irredeemably illegal and clarified the obligation of all States not to recognize as lawful the illegal situation arising from Israel’s conduct, nor to render aid or assistance in maintaining it. Observers argue this is where the U.S. is complicit in breaking international law.
Settlement expansion constitutes a transfer of the occupier’s civilian population into occupied territory, prohibited under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention and criminalized under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Legalizing these transfers worsens the violation and carries criminal responsibility.
“The architects of the measures, including the Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich and the Minister of Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir, have openly and repeatedly stated that the objective is to accelerate settlement development for ‘Jewish self-determination’ only,” the Special Rapporteur said. “This is not neutral governance. It is a criminal policy pursuing ethnic cleansing that must be halted immediately,” she contends.
However, Israel’s eye for expansion also includes the remaking of the Middle East. While Israel marches forward in multi-front conflicts, answers to why the temperature of war is rising rather than subsiding are unfolding.
Before the current crisis reached this level of upset were years of warning by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam and His National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Minister Farrakhan warned that the ultimate aim of the uprising is the sinister plan of genocide and illegal seizure of Palestinian lands, and why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to back away from war, slaughter, displacement, and destruction, despite global condemnation.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu has a vision of Eretz Israel. Several states over there, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, they intend to annex that to what is called ‘Greater Israel,’” said Minister Louis Farrakhan, in his message entitled “What Does Allah, The Great Mahdi And The Great Messiah Have To Say About The War In The Middle East?” delivered on Feb. 25, 2024 at the Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day convention.
“Do you know about that? That man already has over 400 nuclear bombs sitting in the desert in Dimona, Israel,” Minister Farrakhan continued. “That’s a lot of weapons. And they, now, feel that they are the power in the Middle East, and they are,” he said.
However, Iran has posed a central obstacle to Israel’s expansionist ambitions. One of the primary demands from the U.S. and Israel is that Iran cease supporting groups like Hezbollah in its “axis of resistance,” which have been responding to Israeli aggression in the region.
Iran has been one of the foremost pro-Palestinian nations—arguably more so than several Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia. Iran has backed its position with material and military support, framing its support as solidarity and defense of Palestinians against past and ongoing Israeli actions.
On a recent episode of the Joy Reid Show, author, commentator and culture critic Touré spoke on the resistance groups. “Hezbollah is the only thing protecting Lebanon. Lebanon does not have an army, they don’t have a functioning government. So, without Hezbollah, Lebanon would cease to exist and that’s part of the big point here.
I read through what America’s demands to Iran are, some of which are clearly written by Israel and what Iran’s five demands back to Israel and America are. And one of the things that America and Israel want is ‘stop funding Hamas and Hezbollah.’
And one of the things that Iran wants is an end to the wars that Hamas and Hezbollah are fighting. So, they (Hamas and Hezbollah) want you [Israel to] stop fighting Palestine, stop fighting Lebanon, right? Because, Hamas and Hezbollah are responses to Israeli aggression in the region.
All the Americans that talk about ‘we are pro-Palestine,’ Iran is the most pro-Palestine nation in the world,” he said on the March 30 broadcast. He argued that from his purview, Iran wants the U.S. and Israel to leave Palestine and Lebanon alone.
“They (Israel) have expansionist dreams. They want to expand. We’ve talked about Greater Israel … but they’re already trying to take over the bottom third of Lebanon. … They’ve told a million people ‘you cannot return home,’ so that’s a new Gaza,” Touré continued.
Iran has made clear it will not sever ties with the resistance groups confronting Israel and the United States as long as Israeli military actions and aggressive policies persist in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. Tehran has also rejected any notion of scaling back its response to the ongoing war on its soil, which began February 28, when the United States and Israel launched large-scale strikes on Iran.
Analysts argue that Palestine remains the unresolved issue in the Middle East. They contend this is a primary source of regional anger toward Israel—rooted in its continued occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, with the backing and support of the U.S.
The military power of Israel is reinforced by U.S. domestic law that allows the Jewish state to have the military advantage in the region. The Qualitative Military Edge (QME) law, formalized in 2008, legally commits the U.S. to ensuring that Israel maintains a decisive technological and operational military advantage in the Middle East.
In practice, this requirement shapes U.S. arms sales and defense cooperation across the region to preserve Israel’s superior military capabilities over potential adversaries.
Although massive U.S. security pacts exist with Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. law grants Israel the edge.
Besides the unbalanced arrangement, Washington maintains a military footprint of aircraft carriers docked in the Eastern Mediterranean, replete with fighter planes and thousands of navy troops to also back Israel.
America argues such force is for regional deterrence, but critics argue the posture supports Israel’s brazen destruction in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, and now Iran.
Such a show of military might is used not as a deterrence but as a tool of intimidation. This is the kind of arrogance the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad condemned decades ago.
“America wants everyone to believe she is right in her wicked dealings with the people of earth. With her might of arms commanding the high seas and the land around the globe, she wishes everyone to think she is right in building up arms and forts in foreign countries and on their shores a bristling, deadly navy with guns trained on foreign peoples’ towns and cities, as a dare without any cause.
This only shows her pride and daring aggressive acts against people who would like to be at peace,” the Honorable Elijah Muhammad wrote in Chapter 33 of His monumental book, “The Fall of America.”
Final Call staff contributed to this report.