Iran’s “Ring of Fire” Around Israel Has Changed, and Tehran Faces a Crucial Dilemma

For decades, Israelis were used to thinking that Iran’s proxies were meant to act in its place, without Tehran paying the price. But the latest round showed that reality is different, they are no longer just “defenders,” but assets that require active protection from Mother Iran. Tehran’s dilemma, the weakening on the Palestinian front, and the proxy that only wanted to tick a box in war: “did not really deliver the goods.”

By Yogev Carmel, N12 Magazine, published: 11.06.26, 20:05

The echoes of the explosions and interceptions are still ringing in the ears, and the brief round of fighting against Iran this week made clear that something profound has changed in the Middle East. As Iran acts directly against Israel to protect weakened Hezbollah, the balance of power appears to have shifted. “Iran had an interest in acting to show, ‘we keep our promises,’” Dr. Abd Kanaane explains the Iranian response, which led to a round of fighting lasting nearly a day. “Their message is, ‘Unlike others, we intervene, and when necessary we support our allies.’”

The dust from this very short round of fighting has not yet settled, but the strategic discussion in Israel is already underway, against a new reality. For decades, we were accustomed to the idea that Iran was building a “ring of fire” around Israel, a network of proxies meant to bleed Israel without Tehran paying the direct price. But this week, after the targeted strike in the Dahieh, a different picture emerged: Iran was the one that came to defend its proxy.

Kanaane, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, argues: “The previous paradigm was not accurate to begin with. It just suits Israel, and the Western world, to deal with Iran and its allies in the region, the easiest thing is to say that ‘it’s just a proxy, and if we hit the head, then all the arms will fall one after the other.’”

With the renewal of the launches after two months, he says, “the Iranians are saying to the Lebanese and sending a message to the entire Islamic world: ‘We, unlike others, keep our promises, and we do not abandon our allies in different places. We are not like the United States, which abandoned its allies, for example in Egypt with Hosni Mubarak, or was unable to protect the Gulf states.’” He also does not rule out the possibility that Iran will continue responding on behalf of its other proxies, for example the Houthis in Yemen or even Hamas in Gaza: “If something doesn’t work out or blows up somehow, then maybe it will intervene in the Strip too, but it needs backing or support from other countries in the region, mainly Turkey and Egypt, and perhaps Saudi Arabia.”

While it is still unclear whether an agreement will be reached or the exchange of blows will continue, Kanaane estimates that the connection between Tehran and the proxies, בראשן the Lebanese terror organization, will tighten: “These alliances, to a large extent, have דווקא proven themselves, contrary to what some experts say. They showed that this investment over many years was profitable, both for Iran and for the proxies, its allies. I don’t know whether this tightening will lead to the Iranians becoming much more dominant in the local arenas of the other forces, meaning in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq or Gaza. But continued cooperation? Clearly that will continue.”

The struggle that became a global proxy arms race

To understand how Iran ended up rushing to defend after a strike in an entirely different country, while it itself is in an international crisis over the Strait of Hormuz, one has to go back to the roots of the doctrine and the deepest rivalry in the Middle East.

“The proxies are a doctrine that Qasem Soleimani gave the name ‘Hulteh al-Nar,’ ‘the ring of fire,’” explains Dr. Shaul Yanaï of the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa and a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking. “People get confused and think the target is Israel. But the truth is that it is aimed against Saudi Arabia, we are only a byproduct.”

According to Yanaï, it all begins with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. “When Khomeini defined the export of the revolution as a supreme goal in 1979, he put Saudi Arabia at the center of his attention. It is the perfect and complementary opposite of Iran, it is a militant, Islamic, Sunni, fundamentalist theocracy, the mirror image of Iran. The Shiites have a blood feud with them going back to the 18th century, when the Saudi Wahhabis decided they were reshaping Islam and intended to uproot Shiite Islam, which they consider heresy, from Islam.”

This struggle, which began in theology, turned into a global proxy arms race. “Both sides invested imaginary sums in an attempt to make their religious doctrine the leading one in the Muslim world,” Yanaï says. “Since then the two have been fighting for dominance and hegemony in the Middle East, politically, religiously and economically. That is the basis for the creation of all the proxies. But they failed, because to their surprise this theology was not accepted by Arab Shiites. Because Khomeini’s revolution was also political, not just religious, it changed the basic assumptions of Shiism from top to bottom. Therefore the Arab Shiites did not accept it and still do not accept Khomeini’s doctrine today. Only after they failed in theological export did they turn to establishing terrorist organizations, the proxies, in every country that has a Shiite minority.”

Yanaï: “Hezbollah was on the ropes, and Israel saved it.”

For years, he explains, Israel was seen in Tehran as a secondary arena, but at the same time Iranian concern about the emerging Saudi-Israeli alliance grew stronger. “The fairly open alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel meant that Saudi Arabia was focusing on the eastern and southern front, while Israel was focusing on the northern front, Syria and Lebanon, to stop or contain the Iranian proxies, Hezbollah and Syria. Israel was very active in the last decade. And Iran, in retaliation, strengthened even more its ties with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis, arming and funding them massively and at an accelerated pace, even more than before the outbreak of the cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In other words, the pieces were placed on the board before October 7.”

So what changed on October 7? “Let’s go to October 2. There is an intriguing document from Yahya Sinwar that also addresses Khamenei and Nasrallah and says to them: ‘Look, the Israeli-Saudi normalization that is supposed to be signed on January 1, 2024 changes the entire equation of the Middle East. Because an Israeli-Saudi alliance will push to the margin everything we built in the Middle East,’ in addition to pushing the Palestinian issue entirely out of the game. This is the peak of Sinwar’s attempt to persuade the two of them, Hezbollah and Iran, to launch a joint attack against Israel before normalization with Saudi Arabia matures. He understands that once the agreement is signed, he is finished. Therefore, in his view, they must carry out a joint preemptive strike, which if successful, and he is right about this, will mean that ‘we changed the equation.’ Even if it fails, it will entangle Israel in war and prevent normalization with Saudi Arabia and with many other Muslim and Arab countries that Saudi Arabia would bring as a dowry to that agreement.”

“Sinwar went into October 7 against Iran’s will, and Iran paid heavy prices for it.”

But the Iranian response was not what Sinwar had hoped for. “Iran and Hezbollah refused Sinwar’s pleas, they told him: ‘This is not the time, this is not the place,’” Yanaï notes. “Exactly then Saudi Arabia and Iran had reached some sort of détente between them, a pause in this cold war, and Hezbollah was very busy on the internal Lebanese front, especially after many years of war in Syria, a war in which Saudi Arabia sent tens of thousands of volunteers and invested tens of billions to topple Assad’s regime. So Hezbollah was tired, and Iran was economically and internally exhausted, so they refused.”

“Sinwar went into October 7 against Iran’s will, and Iran paid heavy prices for it,” he stresses. “Hezbollah was prepared to carry out a limited attack on October 8, but Israel’s weak response encouraged it to continue. The evacuation of Israeli civilians encouraged it even more to continue, until the pager explosions operation came.”

The latest events, especially the June 7 and 8 fighting round, raise difficult questions about Hezbollah’s current role. If once the organization was seen as Iran’s “insurance policy” against an Israeli attack, it seems that at least this time the situation was reversed. “Hezbollah was on the ropes, and Israel saved it,” Dr. Yanaï says. “Hezbollah was dealing with a huge loss of fighters and resources, and with tremendous internal Lebanese pressures. Above all, it has 100,000 to 300,000 Shiite refugees that it has to support on a daily basis. The Israeli attack was a mistake, because Hezbollah now says: ‘Here, I told you I protect Lebanon.’ It has returned to guerrilla warfare, which it knows how to do, in territory it knows deeply in southern Lebanon. Yes, for every Israeli it manages to hit, it loses 20 of its own, and more infrastructure, but it is returning to its original base, meaning fairly successful guerrilla warfare against an Israeli ‘occupier’ in its territory, and this is the lifeline that Israel, in its strategic stupidity, gave it.”

“The weight of the Revolutionary Guard in Hezbollah’s management is more dramatic than in the past”

However, there are those who see the direct Iranian intervention as evidence of weakness. If Iran is forced to “go down onto the field” itself, it means its players can no longer control the field. Dr. Raz Zimmt, director of the Iran and Shiite Axis program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), points to a process of “direct management”: “At the loyalist and most committed end of the spectrum to Iran has always been, and still is, Hezbollah. Since the campaign between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer-autumn of 2024, against Hezbollah the Iranian involvement has in fact increased very, very much. Following the killing of Nasrallah and the leading echelon of Hezbollah’s decision-making process, Iran assumed not only the traditional role of assistance and support to Hezbollah, including ongoing weapons transfers, but what I think is more important is that a large part of the day-to-day management of Hezbollah’s rebuilding has passed to the Revolutionary Guard.”

“Hundreds of Revolutionary Guard officers were sent to Lebanon over the past year and a half and helped manage the organization on a daily basis. I would not exaggerate and say the organization is managed entirely by them, but certainly the weight of the Revolutionary Guard in managing Hezbollah’s affairs and its reconstruction is much more dramatic than it was in the past.”

Dr. Yanaï reinforces this: “We know that Hezbollah’s significant missile units have been managed directly by Revolutionary Guard officers since 2006, since the Second Lebanon War, when Hezbollah went to war without Iranian approval and caused Iran enormous damage. Hezbollah today, especially with Naim Qassem, who has been weakened compared with Nasrallah, is under almost total Iranian control. I am not talking about guerrilla operations in such a village or such a route, I am talking about strategic decisions taken by Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers sitting in Lebanon.”

The retreat on the Palestinian front

While in Lebanon Iran is tightening its grip, in the rest of the “ring of fire” the picture looks very different. “After Soleimani’s killing, in January 2020, we saw a kind of decentralization of the proxy network,” Dr. Zimmt explains. “That does not mean, of course, that Iranian influence necessarily declined, but Iran, and mainly the Quds Force, lost to some extent their ability to manage this network in a centralized way.” Even so, he clarifies, “there was never a situation in which Iran gave an order and the proxy executed it.”

On the Palestinian front, the retreat is clear. “Today it is completely clear that the very limited capabilities of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Iran’s difficulty in acting both in the Strip and in the West Bank greatly affect Iran’s ability to continue its support. That does not mean there are no ties also between what remains of Hamas-abroad and the Iranians, but overall we must say that to a large extent the Iranians have lost a significant part of the influence they had on the Palestinian front.”

In Iraq too, the country considered a strategic key for Tehran, the Iranian plan is running into difficulties. “Since Iran lost Syria, the most important place it has left in the Arab world is Iraq, but there it is encountering many problems,” Yanaï says. “Muqtada al-Sadr, the prominent Shiite leader in Iraq, dismantled his militia and today he is one of the fiercest opponents of Iran in Iraq. And the Iraqi government threatened al-Hashd al-Shaabi and Iran that if they participated in the war against Israel, and they have tens of thousands of missiles, there would be concern about another civil war in Iraq. A threat that worked well. Therefore we did not find much presence, even though it is Iran’s biggest proxy today.”

Dr. Zimmt adds that international pressure is also taking its toll in Baghdad: “The increasing pressure, mainly from the United States and to some extent also from the Iraqi government, to carry out a long-term process of disarming the pro-Iranian Shiite militias, this is a process far from over and it is not certain it will succeed, but we do see that at least some of the militias that are less identified with the clearly pro-Iranian line have already announced that they are prepared to disarm and integrate into the Iraqi armed forces.” According to him, “the more frequent visits of Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani to Baghdad in recent weeks certainly indicate that the Iranians are very troubled by this process, but that does not mean they intend to give up, not at all.”

The proxy that “did not deliver the goods”

Perhaps the biggest surprise comes דווקא from Yemen. The Houthis, considered the wildest and most dangerous proxy, stayed out of the game this week except for one launch, apparently just to mark the box. “The Houthis played a relatively minor role throughout the war, despite a very clear Iranian desire for them to join the campaign,” Zimmt says. “In the end, they did not really deliver the goods, and this is another indication that the Saudis bought them with money and caused them to refrain from joining the campaign. What was exposed here again, and not for the first time, is that the Houthis were always a particularly undisciplined actor, with their own agenda.”

In the end, this week’s Iranian move may point to a deep debate taking place within the corridors of power in Tehran. “Iran today is in a dilemma, a huge internal debate that also appears in its media,” Yanaï concludes. “The dilemma is whether the proxy concept justified itself, or ‘Iran first’, first Iran should invest in itself, abandon the proxies, but move quickly toward developing nuclear weapons, because that is what will deter its enemies, as in the case of North Korea. Inside the Revolutionary Guard the approach that supports the proxies is dominant. But if you notice, so far I have not seen either the president of Iran or the parliament speaker Qalibaf boasting about this attack.”

“This may indicate a split in Iran, and the weakness of Hezbollah, which cannot cope alone, but it also indicates Israel’s inability to make decisions on its own and organize the Sunni-American-Israeli axis for countermeasures,” Yanaï explains. “So a situation was created in which the front that was supposed to emerge, the Israeli-Sunni-American one, is not active, and Iran used that to exert pressure at a very precise point. The proxies are becoming less relevant and less independent for Iran than before.”

Is Israel facing a united front or a network of increasingly weakening self-interested allies? The answer is probably somewhere in between. What is certain is that this week, in June 2026, the masks came off: the proxies are no longer just “defenders” but assets that require active and costly protection from Mother Iran. The question is how long Tehran will be able to keep paying that price.

Contact the reporter: yoghevk@n12.tv