What a difference a day makes. 

The Saturday websites of Israeli news outlets were understandably dominated by the Hamas terror attack, but leftover spaces remained filled with reports of events that took place before war broke out. 

The Times of Israel, for example, featured a story on the historic warming of Israeli-Saudi relations, under the optimistic headline that “Riyadh said willing to boost oil output to help clinch normalization deal with Israel.” 

Even as the horrific details and photos of the attack expanded to cover most of the homepage, the Saudi story remained visible well into the afternoon.

As such, it was a dated reminder of the world as it was a day earlier, which suddenly seemed a very long time ago. 

War changes everything.

And this war has the potential to be one of the most consequential events in the modern Mideast. 

The similarities of the Hamas attack to the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel, led by Egypt and Syria, are significant, including that both were surprise assaults launched during major Jewish holidays. 

That was 50 years ago, almost to the day, an anniversary worth repeating the next time a dreamy American leftist tells you the Palestinians are ready for peace. 

The pattern will also be a challenge for the antisemites around the world to find a way to blame this latest war on Israel, but I’m sure they’ll manage.

They always do. 

Caught off guard 

Even before the shooting stops, it’s already clear the domestic implications for Israel are enormous.

Its vaunted intelligence state, which features world-class technology and human spies and informers throughout the Muslim world, was caught completely off guard, both by the attack and the massive buildup of arms and equipment in Gaza. 

How in the world did that happen? 

The assault also comes while Israeli society is deeply polarized over the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an encouraging move designed to unite the nation in one of its darkest hours, Netanyahu was in talks Saturday with political opponents to form a unity government, a move that would wisely put politics aside during a fight for survival. 

Meanwhile, the massive military response Netanyahu ordered is sure to exact an extra heavy price in densely populated Gaza.

The Hamas leaders who planned the attack and those murderous thugs who killed civilians and soldiers alike deserve no mercy. 

As the prime minister said in a televised address, “We will defeat them . . . and take revenge for this black day.” 

(Memo to The New York Times: You call the Hamas attackers “militants,” but do militants fire unguided rockets into urban areas? Do militants slaughter civilian men, women and children in their homes? They are terrorists. That’s what the United States and the European Union calls Hamas. Why won’t you?) 

Different from before 

Despite the similarities to past wars and flare-ups, this is not a copycat war.

The Mideast is a very different place than it was 50 years ago. 

For one thing, the remarkable and expanding Israeli relationships with key Arab nations have reshaped the regional security map.

The Abraham Accords fashioned by the Trump administration broke decades of diplomatic taboos and replaced hostility and threats with shared security arrangements, trade and tourism. 

Kosher restaurants in Dubai symbolized an emerging new era. 

The crowning achievement of this movement was the growing and open rapport between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Although the two powerful nations have long had secret military contacts, the crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, clearly wants to complete the normalization process and likely would have done so in a second Trump term. 

His willingness to move forward now partly explains the timing of the Hamas attack, and reveals a second major change in the region: Iran’s military might and its roster of lethal proxies. 

The mullahs regard both Israel and the Saudis as enemies, and they simply could not abide the idea that its enemies would join forces. 

That backdrop explains Iran’s praise of the Hamas attack, saying in a statement that “What took place today is in line with the continuation of victories for the anti-Zionist resistance in different fields, including Syria, Lebanon and occupied lands.” 

One of the mullah’s errand-boy terror groups, Hezbollah, also issued a statement supporting Hamas and said the attack was a warning “to those seeking normalization with Israel.” 

Blaming Israel 

What is surprising, and disappointing, is that a Saudi statement also seemed to blame Israel only.

Although it called for an immediate end to the fighting, the statement went on to say that Saudi Arabia had made repeated warnings, presumably to Israel, about “the ongoing occupation and the deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights, as well as the repeated deliberate provocations against their sanctities.” 

Even allowing for the need for Muslim solidarity, the statement critically ignores the Hamas rejectionism of Israel’s right to exist. 

For Israel, this is not a border dispute. It’s an existential one. 

Still, the actions by Hamas and the warnings from Iran and Hezbollah reflect a reality described to me several years ago by an Israeli diplomat.

Although Iran has no direct border with Israel, he said, it has created them on three sides of the Jewish state. 

Through its proxies, which it funds, arms and trains, Iran has in its corner the government of Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. 

That means Iran is now capable of opening a multifront campaign that would cause enormous numbers of Israeli casualties and be a severe test of its resilience. 

Whether it plans to activate that capability now is a great unknown, but that scenario cannot be ruled out. 

Nor can the possibility of Iran entering the war directly be ignored, though that is less likely because it prefers to use proxies to do its dirty work. 

Multiple fronts 

The result is a very complicated landscape for Israel.

It doesn’t want to expand the number of fronts at a time when it must deal with the fact that Israeli civilians and soldiers have been taken captive and reportedly moved to Gaza. 

How does it exact revenge while also trying to rescue the hostages?

Some social media posts, while unverified, purportedly show Israelis being held in Gaza tunnels in civilian areas, where Hamas usually hides its munitions. 

If anything is certain, it is that the Hamas attack reflects Iran’s malign intentions and underscores the fallacy of the Biden White House’s attempt to woo it back into the international community.

The recent decision to lift trading sanctions and release $6 billion in frozen funds did not bring reciprocal moves of peace. 

The US insisted loudly that the deal, which featured the exchange of prisoners, put severe restrictions on how Iran could use the $6 billion. 

“The money is only earmarked for humanitarian purposes,” said National Security Spokesman John Kirby. 

That’s certainly not how the Iranians saw the deal. 

“The decision on how to utilize these unfrozen resources and financial assets lies with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the foreign ministry said. 

That is exactly what happened when the Obama White House returned pallets of cash in exchange for Iran signing the nuclear deal in 2015.

Although the US insisted the money was earmarked for peaceful purposes, it soon admitted the inevitability that a portion would fund terrorism. 

“I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said matter-of-factly.

“You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.” 

Between Obama and Biden, Donald Trump took a completely different approach.

He did not play the game of appeasement, as evidenced by the fact that he droned Qasem Soleimani, the mullahs’ terror mastermind. 

In that sense, Trump spoke the only language Iran understands.