Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah: The Axis of Resistance in 2026

Iran proxy network in Middle East conflict 2026

The US-Israeli campaign against Iran was predicated on a strategic hypothesis: that eliminating or severely degrading Iran's nuclear capability and military command structure would cripple the wider network of proxy actors that Tehran has painstakingly constructed and funded over four decades. The empirical evidence from the first month of the campaign is, at best, equivocal.

Iran's proxy ecosystem — the so-called 'Axis of Resistance' comprising Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and various Shia militia groups in Iraq and Syria — has not collapsed. The Houthis continue to launch drone and missile attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and against Gulf state targets, demonstrating a capability that is genuinely indigenously developed and maintained and that does not depend on the continuous flow of Iranian weapons and command direction that the campaign sought to sever.

Hezbollah, despite having lost senior leadership figures in previous Israeli operations, has retained meaningful military capability in southern Lebanon and has activated it in ways that directly contributed to the one million Lebanese displaced since February 28. What the campaign has unambiguously achieved is the degradation of Iran's nuclear programme itself and the physical destruction of military assets that would have been instruments of Iranian escalation.

What it has not achieved — and may not achieve through military means alone — is the dissolution of the ideological, financial, and social bonds that hold the Axis of Resistance together. The deeper lesson may be that networks are more resilient than hierarchies: when you remove a central node, the network reconfigures around the loss rather than collapsing.