BAGHDAD, Aug 7: The Iran-backed "axis of resistance" against Israel has threatened retaliation after losing two major figures last week in attacks either blamed on or claimed by Israel.
Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in a strike the group blamed on Israel, hours after top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr perished in an Israeli strike on south Beirut.
As the region braces for the militants' reprisals, the United States has said it is working "around the clock" to avert all-out war.
Here are the main members of the "axis of resistance" which has supported Hamas since the Palestinian group launched the October 7 attack on Israel.
Iran: Iran has made the Palestinian cause a centrepiece of its foreign policy since the Islamic revolution of 1979. It backs armed groups across the region who have attacked Israel since the Gaza war erupted.
In April, Iran made its first ever direct attack on Israeli soil, firing a barrage of drones and missiles after a deadly strike on its Damascus consular annexe blamed on Israel.
Days later, explosions rocked Iran's central Isfahan province, with US officials saying that Israel carried out a retaliatory strike.
Israel has declined to comment on Haniyeh's killing, but Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened a "harsh punishment".
Hezbollah: Lebanon's Hezbollah, the most powerful "axis of resistance" group, has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israel since the start of the Gaza war.
The killing last week of Shukr, who Israel says was responsible for a strike on the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights that killed 12 children, has raised fears of a fierce response.
Hezbollah, or "Party of God" in Arabic, was founded during the 1975-1990 Lebanon civil war after Israel's 1982 ground assault on Beirut.
Created at the initiative of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the group fought Israeli troops who occupied south Lebanon until 2000.
It is the only faction to have retained its weapons after the end of the civil war, and is considered to have a bigger arsenal than the army.
Hezbollah has expanded the size and quality of its arsenal since it last fought an all-out war with Israel in 2006.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly said his group's advanced weaponry can strike deep into Israel.
Hamas: Hamas, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement, was created shortly after the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) erupted in 1987, and has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007.
Over the decades, it has lost a succession of political and military leaders to targeted killings by Israel, pushing its leadership abroad, to Syria, Lebanon, Qatar and Turkey.
In recent years, the group improved its relations with Iran and gradually became a key "axis of resistance" member.
The latest Gaza war was sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 39,677 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the territory's health ministry.
Israel has vowed to crush Hamas, and last week announced it had killed the group's military chief Mohammed Deif in a July 13 air strike in Gaza. Hamas has yet to confirm this.
Iraq 'resistance' groups: Several Iraqi Shiite Muslim groups are also aligned with Iran and hostile to the United States, which still maintains troops in Iraq as part of its campaign against the Sunni Muslim extremists of the Islamic State group.
In the first few months of the Gaza war, these armed groups, which have formed a loose alliance known as the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, targeted US forces in the country in support of the Palestinians, before suspending their attacks in late January.
The alliance, whose main groups have been integrated into Iraq's armed forces, has also claimed drone and rocket attacks on Israel.
Yemen's Huthis: Since November, Yemen's Huthi rebels have waged a campaign of attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden that they say are linked to Israel, triggering retaliatory strikes by the United States and its allies.
The rebels have also claimed attacks on Israel, some of them joint operations with Iraqi groups.
On July 20, Israel struck the rebel-controlled Red Sea port of Hodeida, a day after a Huthi drone attack killed a civilian in Tel Aviv.
The rebels seized the capital Sanaa and most of the north in 2014, prompting Saudi Arabia to spearhead a military intervention the following year to prop up the beleaguered government. —AFP
