Three years after Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the war it triggered, Israelis are heading toward an election without having closed what the Council on Foreign Relations calls an "unfinished reckoning" over how the attack happened. The anniversary arrived alongside a foiled attack on a flydubai flight, which revived the same "sense of abandonment" many Israelis felt in October 2023, according to the Atlantic Council.

The Atlantic Council describes Israel three years on as a country "facing inward": the live argument is no longer only about the war in Gaza, but about whether the state's leadership and institutions can be trusted to stop the next October 7.

Zoom out and the story is regional, not only Israeli. The war has shifted the Middle East's balance of power, according to the Kurdish outlet ANHA, while the analysis firm Geopolitical Futures goes further, arguing the conflict marks "the end of the Middle East as we know it."

Hypothesis: Israel's domestic reckoning and the region's reordering are the same story told at two different scales — a state whose deterrence model failed once is being tested again by plots like the flydubai attempt, while its neighbors recalibrate alliances around a Middle East that is no longer organized the old way. Supporting this: both dynamics trace to the same date and the same war, as laid out separately by the CFR and ANHA. Against this: three commentary outlets frame the stakes in three different ways, with no shared account yet of what the "new" Middle East looks like or who writes its rules.

What to watch: the timing and outcome of Israel's next election, whether further plots on the model of the flydubai attempt surface, and whether regional powers treat the closing of the old Middle East order as opportunity or threat.