2024 analysed: Hamas and Hezbollah's year
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, James Hansen and Alex Dibble. As the year draws to a close, we are bringing you a series of episodes analysing 2024 from a security perspective.

Yesterday we discussed what the last year has meant for Benjamin Netanyahu. Today we are going to look in detail at where Hamas and Hezbollah now find themselves. Both groups are seen as proxies of Iran and they've both been at war with Israel. Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, although a ceasefire in the latter conflict was agreed in November.

But it's also been a year in which both groups have been severely weakened, especially through the assassination of key leaders. In September, Hassan Nasrallah, who'd led Hezbollah since 1992, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut. And then, in October, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, was killed during a firefight with the IDF. Our guest today is The Times correspondent Richard Spencer, who's covered the Middle East for decades. Richard, how have you been?

Richard, let's start with Hamas, shall we? How badly has Hamas been decimated in 2024? And is Israel now closer to achieving its goals in Gaza? It's been much harder for Israel to take out Hamas, to destroy its leadership and really cripple it as an organisation than many people said at the start of the war.

Israel is extraordinarily advanced in its surveillance and intelligence capabilities. It made clear from the beginning of the war that it was going to be a no-holds-barred operation. I think many people expected it to clear Gaza not quickly, but within months. And yet here we are well over a year later now and the fighting's continued.

However, that said, Hamas has been shellacked very thoroughly. It's lost thousands of fighters. It has lost most of its senior leaders, including its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwaa.

and of course his overall political leader who was killed in that assassination in Tehran in July, Ismail Hania. So what Hamas would look like if it was allowed to reform in some way, if Israel withdrew now, there would undoubtedly be some attempt to reform Hamas by its remaining fighters.

Maybe, I don't know, half of its fighters, 40,000 fighters originally, you know, are still alive. Whether they'd be able to really get their acts together to rebuild and the strength they had before, I'm not so sure about right now.

We've heard for some time about the possibility that teenagers and young adults in Gaza would be radicalized by Israel's actions and bring a new wave of soldiers to Hamas. Is that possible as, I don't know, as soon as the new year? And if not, what does the short-term future hold for Hamas?

A lot of people criticise Israeli invasions and bombings of Gaza, of southern Lebanon and all their wars really by saying this just radicalises the kids there, that Hamas will grow again in a new form, you won't get rid of Hamas by bombing.

Other people say, well, actually, that's not true. You can bomb ISIS out of existence, like the Americans and their allies did in the wars of the last few years in Iraq and Syria. ISIS are severely weakened, not really a threat anymore. I think this kind of analysis is, you know, there are things that are true and not true about it on both sides. But I think it sort of really asks the wrong question. The

The question is not whether, you know, this particular form of radicalism will get more radical, whether, you know, by bombing Islamists, you will get hard-line Islamists. What we've seen throughout the last hundred years in the Middle East is that you can destroy one form of radical belief, whether it's extreme Arab nationalism of the Nazirite sort or communism or

Al-Qaeda or ISIS. But you'll just get another radical form. It might be a different ideology, an apparently different ideology, like, you know, Nazism, which was sort of Arab socialist or Islamism. But until at some point the Middle East is stabilised,

there will always be radical groups willing to overthrow the status quo. So for Israel, which wants to live in the Middle East, the question is how do you come to terms with your neighbours if you continually use this very violent form of reaction against their terrorism as you see it? Richard, let's turn to Hezbollah. We keep hearing that it's been decimated this year. In practice, what does that mean?

There's a big difference between Hamas and Hezbollah. And in some ways, what we thought about them has been reversed in the last year or so. The supposition was that Hamas was only one faction amongst several in the Palestinian side of the equation in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza and

the occupied territories generally, that Hamas was not as strong as Hezbollah, that Hamas had also a civilian function in government, but that could be taken over by the Palestinian Authority, that Hamas was not nearly as well armed as Hezbollah, which had 100,000 missiles in Lebanon, which is a sovereign state aimed at Israel, that Hezbollah would be a much tougher nut to crack

Now, in some ways, you know, you've seen a reversal of that. You know, Hezbollah has been completely decimated in Lebanon very, very quickly. In the space of two months, the Israelis killed its incredibly well-respected by many Lebanese leader, Hassan Nasrallah, a man who was in some ways the most powerful man in the Shia world after Hezbollah.

Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran, a very close lieutenant to the Iranian leadership, the man in Lebanon, leader of this incredibly powerful militia that had fought very hard in the Syrian civil war that had accumulated all these missiles. He, on all his military leadership, his deputy and a lot of his political leadership too were completely destroyed.

Now, they were also part of the government of Lebanon. You know, they are part of the governing coalition in Lebanon. Those Hezbollah MPs and ministers are still there. So, you know, in some ways they still exist. They will continue to exist. There will still be people representing the Shia cause.

in Israel, but it's really hard to see what status they will have now and how that will play out. And Richard, if we zoom out a little bit, what does the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah during 2024 mean for the wider Middle East, do you think?

The big question this all leaves us facing in the Middle East is how much have the extraordinary events of the last few months changed the underlying calculus of the various balances of power in the Middle East?

The Iranian axis, the axis of resistance, as it was called, the axis of resistance against both Israel and America and the West, has been savagely taken down. You know, the destruction of Gaza and Hamas is...

the decapitation of Hezbollah and its leadership in Lebanon, and now the fall of the regime, which is in Syria, which was the link between Iran and Lebanon. Iran itself is severely weakened. Israel took out its entire air defenses in those bombing raids in October after that tit-for-tat exchange with Israel.

Israel has also taken out senior Iranian generals and advisors. The Revolutionary Guard's overseas arm, the Quds Force, which was once feared across the Middle East, its future must be in question.

On the other hand, the regime is still there. Hezbollah are still there. Hamas is still there. They can rebuild. No one really thought that they were militarily able to take on America and Israel directly. What they stand for is continuing resistance to any political settlement of any of these issues, the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the establishment of a government in Lebanon, the continual

focus of the Palestinian and the resistance cause as a means of discrediting America, Israel and the West in general. Those drivers, those ideological drivers are still very powerful. And in the West, in our cities and our universities in Britain and America have only seemed to have strengthened. Richard, thank you. That is The Times correspondent Richard Spencer.

And tomorrow on The World in 10, we'll be reflecting on what 2024 has meant for the ground war in Ukraine, focusing in particular on the territory that's been gained and lost by either side. Joining us then will be the former British military intelligence officer, Colonel Philip Ingram. But for now, that's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

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