People had been dancing through the night. Then Hamas fighters cut through the fence.

In the hours that followed, 1,200 people were killed - the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. At kibbutzim along the border, families were executed in their homes. Two hundred and fifty-one people were taken hostage into Gaza. Iran had not ordered the attack - Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian organization, does not take operational orders from Shia Iran. But Iran had spent years building Hamas's capacity to execute it. Three days after the attack, Supreme Leader Khamenei praised it as a demonstration of what 'resistance' could accomplish.

That speech turned out to be the high-water mark of the Axis of Resistance. Within two years, almost everything it had built would be in ruins.

The Pager Operation

Israel's response to October 7 was not merely a military campaign against Hamas. It was a systematic decapitation of Iran's entire proxy network. The September 2024 pager bombs were the first visible rupture. Hezbollah had stockpiled more than 150,000 rockets and missiles. It had survived the 2006 war with Israel and emerged claiming victory. Then, in a single afternoon, thousands of its fighters were killed or permanently injured by devices they believed were secure. Decision-making slowed. The organization that had been Iran's sword became hesitant, unable to coordinate.

The Death of Nasrallah

Hassan Nasrallah, who had led Hezbollah for thirty-two years, who had been the voice of the axis of resistance longer than many of his fighters had been alive was killed in September 2024. Israeli jets struck a bunker in Beirut's southern suburbs where he was meeting with senior commanders. The strike required intelligence about his exact location that could only have come from sources embedded deep inside Hezbollah's leadership structure. He had survived Israeli assassination attempts for three decades. He did not survive this one.

"The Axis of Resistance was not a strategy anymore. It was a memory. And memories don't protect you."

Iran Strikes Directly - and Fails

On April 13, 2024, Iran launched a direct attack on Israel for the first time in the two countries' history: over 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, fired from Iranian territory. Israel, with American, British, Jordanian, and Saudi assistance, intercepted approximately 99 percent of them. The attack was both a political watershed and a military humiliation Iran had exposed the limits of its conventional arsenal. It tried again in October 2024. Again, the interception rate held. The message both attacks sent was the opposite of what Iran intended: its missiles could be stopped.

Operation Rising Lion

By June 2025, Israel had determined that the time was right. Hezbollah was degraded. Hamas was losing. Iran's air defenses had been exposed. Mossad had been building networks inside Iran for years. Operation Rising Lion began in the pre-dawn hours of June 13, 2025. Before the jets came, Mossad commando teams activated across Iran roughly seventy operatives who had been positioned inside the country, equipped with weapons systems smuggled in over months. They struck air defense batteries simultaneously, clearing corridors for the Israeli Air Force.

Israeli strikes hit nuclear facilities, IRGC command centers, missile production sites, and the homes of military commanders. The twelve-day campaign killed multiple senior IRGC generals, degraded Iran's missile arsenal, and set its nuclear program back by years.

The Protests and the Massacre

Inside Iran, the war exposed the depth of popular opposition. In December 2025 and January 2026, protests erupted across the country - the largest since the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that followed Mahsa Amini's death in custody in 2022. The new protests were met with a ferocity that shocked observers: security forces used live ammunition and heavy machine guns. The UN documented crimes against humanity. The regime survived.

But the protests provided a public justification for escalation. On February 28, 2026, Trump posted a video announcing Operation Epic Fury had begun. Its primary target was the man who had ruled Iran for thirty-six years.

#October7 #Hamas #Hezbollah #Nasrallah #Iran #Israel #IranFiles #MiddleEast #WorldNews #GazaWar

Read More:

Part 1 "Iran and Israel Were Secret Allies for 30
Years. Here's What Ended It." - https://dhunt.in/13BPbe

Part 2 "How Iran's 1979 Revolution Changed the
Middle East Forever" - https://dhunt.in/13CW4d

Part 3 "Who Was Qassem Soleimani? The Man
America Killed And Why It Mattered" - https://dhunt.in/13CF1K

Part 4 "Iran's Nuclear Program: The Full Timeline
From Secret Bunkers to U.S. Airstrikes" - https://dhunt.in/13BVR9

Part 5 "How Israel Has Been Secretly Killing Iran's
Scientists for 15 Years" - https://dhunt.in/13CQR0

Part 7 "Khamenei Is Dead. Who Was He And What
Happens to Iran Now?" - https://dhunt.in/13BWmD

Part 8 "What Comes After Khamenei? Three
Futures for Iran - and the World" - https://dhunt.in/13CXl0