It’s a regional issue that’s been going on for thousands of years, with many sub-events.

Essentially, Israel has been stealing land from Palestine since it was first created as a nation. Separate from that, relations between Israel and Gaza, which is a Palestinian territory inside Israel, have been tense, and blew up when Hamas, which effectively governed Gaza, broke through the barricade keeping them hemmed in and killed/kidnapped a bunch of people in Israel proper.

Israel responded by flattening most of Gaza, and attacking people in many other parts of Palestine and taking more land.

Hamas is mostly backed/funded by the Iranian government.

Israel also attacked Syria and sent some settlers over the Syrian border, and attacked Lebanon, targeting Hezbolah-controlled border states; Hezbolah is also Iranian government-backed.

Israel then attacked Iran, and convinced the US to join them.

It’s worth noting that the current Israeli government is hard-right expansionist nationalist, and has been waiting for an excuse to do these things for a while now.

Iran has backed Hezbollah and Hamas by providing weapons and funds, and after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, fired some ballistic missiles at Israel.

So in that sense, yes, they’re linked.

However, that’s also not the only factor involved — that is, this isn’t just “Israel and Palestine fight, ergo Iran conflict”. Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons, which is an issue for the US. There’s been historic conflict between Iran and the US on a number of different issues, from the Shah to Iran involving itself in the US conflict in Iraq, providing weapons to the Houthis, etc.

EDIT:

Here: Wikipedia: Iran-United States relations

Isreal and the US attacked iran together.

In short, yes. It’s a fairly complex issue, but not so complex that it can’t be understood. The broader context is imperial control of the middle east and decolonization, while the narrower context is the post-Octeber 7th conflict and genocide in Gaza. Iran is one of the few countries in the region that doesn’t have a collaborationist puppet government, and is the only middle eastern regional power left that opposes US/Israeli interests. Therefore, Iran is the only check left against Israel gobbling up Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and so on.

A lot of this is literally ancient history, so I’ll try to keep it brief. 2000 years ago, Judea was a Roman province, and after a couple unsuccessful revolts, the Romans expelled most of the Jews, leading to the Jewish diaspora. Rome converted to Christianity, then later Islam arose and the Muslims, coming out of Arabia, conquered the Roman portion of the middle east. The region was ruled by various Muslim empires, briefly Christian crusaders, and then the Ottoman empire. It’s important to note that Islam had official legal toleration of Jews and Christians (though this varied from time to time, with periods of repression), so there were always Christian and Jewish minorities in the middle east after the Muslim conquest.

In the 19th century, modern zionism, with many European Jews advocating the creation of a Jewish state. This was a secular and self-consciously colonial project based on 18th century theories of ethnic nationalism rather than being overtly religious. They thought they could solve what they saw as the “problems” with the Jewish diaspora - the “rootless, weak, overly-intellecutal” Jew would be replaced with a new “muscle Jew” who is strong, confident, athletic, and rooted to the land. If this sounds a bit like Nazi rhetoric, it’s because it came from the same milieu of European antisemitism that Nazism came from.

The Zionists weren’t set on the holy land - as I mentioned, it was a secular project. They would have gone for Uganda, Cyprus, or a number of other places. A major impetus for selecting Palestine was the Balfour declaration of 1917, in which the British declared that a Jewish state would be created in Palestine (at the time still part of the Ottoman Empire). With the conclusion of WW1, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned between France and Britain, with Palestine being administeded under the British Mandate. Through the interwar period, zionists immigrated to Palestine, often buying land from absentee landlords and evicting the tenants. This caused conflict, naturally, and the Jewish colonists were often used as auxiliaries by the nominally neutral British in order to keep the Arabs down. This was a classic British imperial strategy in which they would use a minority against a majority, ensuring the minority was dependent on them.

Another major impetus to the zionist project was of course WW2 and the Holocaust, though it doesn’t play as major a role as the Israelis would say. In fact, the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were that very “weak, rootless, overly-intellectual” diaspora Jew that the Zionists wanted to replace. It did lead to another wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, but the zionists there had contempt for the holocaust victims, calling them “soap” - the zionists figured that they would have fought back rather than being “weak victims.”

The conflict reached a boiling point in 1948 and became an open civil war between Jews and Arabs, and later an international conflict. The Israelis ended up winning, and during and after what they call their independence war, they killed or displaced about half of Palestine’s majority Arab population in the Nakba. The reasoning for this killing and displacement at a basic level was that Israel was to be a Jewish majority state, and having too many Arabs (who were the majority, remember) would compromise the Jewish nature of the state. They didn’t have to get rid of all of them, and indeed it was useful to keep an Arab minority as a fig leaf to make it appear as if Israel was just a normal democracy rather than an ethnic-supremacist project.

The following decades saw more wars, with Israel annexing parts of Syria, and briefly Egypt. The surrounding Arab states rightly saw Israel as an invader and a colonial outpost - remember that this was the period of decolonization, where the European empires lost their overseas territories, but here was a Soth African or Rhodesian-style European colonial project in their midst. However, Israeli battlefield successes combined with increasing American support saw the neutering of most of the Arab regimes. Post-colonial nationalism gave way to neo-colonial puppetry by the United States. At the same time, Israel continued to take more land in occupied Palestine, with extremist settlers driving Palest

Yes, they’re related. Iran was threatening to attack and even invade Israel soon after the genocide began. They’ve been supplying Hamas and Hezbollah for years. Israel thinks it has Hamas on the run and decided to start going after a bigger threat while they still had Trump in their back pocket.