The fallout of Saturday’s assault by land, sea, and air on Israel by Hamas, the terrorist Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza Strip which is home to approximately two million stateless Palestinians, has brought West Asia to the edge of the precipice.

That the Hamas mass infiltration conducted under the cover of thousands of missiles launched into Israeli territory came fifty years to the day of another surprise attack (by Egypt and Syria) which began the Yom Kippur war, is a grisly reminder of what is likely. As a shocked Israel looks for a ‘smoking gun’ to link Iran to the Hamas assault, Tel Aviv has started hitting back. But Israeli air strikes on Gaza which are reported to have hit at least 50 Hamas targets and killed hundreds is only the beginning; the “total siege” of Gaza ordered by the Benjamin Netanyahu administration on Monday will have huge consequences for the region.

The vortex that has been the Middle East for the US-led West over the past 75 years has opened up again and it will pull Washington and its allies back in. Already, US naval ships have been deployed in the region and military support to Israel promised publicly by President Joe Biden. Israeli troops are still striving to drive Hamas fighters out of the bordering areas with Gaza and working on plans to rescue as many hostages as they can from Hamas captivity.

The war will only begin after that. Developments in Israel/West Asia will command much of the world’s ~ especially America’s ~ attention in the days, weeks, and months to come and for all the wrong reasons. Hezbollah in the North has already launched a few sporadic attacks on Israel “in solidarity” with Hamas. It seems inevitable that Iran will get drawn into the conflict and that will almost certainly lead to paroxysms of violence in the region. The heinous treatment of Israeli hostages abducted by Hamas, and the fact that they are being used as human shields in Gaza to dissuade Israel from launching an all-out assault on the terrorist organisation, makes an already volatile situation fraught with even more danger.

In the process, the US strategic pivot away from West Asia and the AF-Pak region to the Indo-Pacific given China’s relentless rise now seems to have been effectively scuppered. It is a reminder to all superpowers, present and future, that one cannot spend decades telling countries what to do, and even how to do it, under pain of punitive military-economic measures, and then walk away from the scene of the crime, as it were.

For India, the coming war in West Asia has all the portents of a major geostrategic setback. With a coercive China intent on squeezing India’s ‘space to grow’ in the Indian Ocean Region and the larger Indo-Pacific, trade, supply, and connectivity corridors to Europe through West Asia and Africa could be a gamechanger for India’s economy and augment its comprehensive national power. But for that, an Israeli rapprochement with its Muslim-majority neighbours in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, is a necessary condition. That is unlikely in the near future. New Delhi will have to exhibit great dexterity to support Israel strongly while protecting the national interest vis-à-vis relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular.