NEW YORK—Confirming that only a few square miles currently remain, a report released Tuesday by the United Nations warned that the Middle East is rapidly running out of available land for violence to spill over to. “As more and more of the region’s land area is consumed by armed struggles such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war against ISIS, ongoing rebellions in Yemen and Egypt, and widespread strife between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the available square footage in which these clashes can further spread is becoming increasingly scarce,” said U.N. analyst Philippe Brun, adding that brutal government regimes, religious extremist groups, and sectarian death squads are now spending a considerable amount of their time simply searching for the few remaining placid acres of land in the region in which to expand their violent reach. “If the Middle East’s hostile factions can’t slow down the pace at which their battles are overrunning new territory, we may soon reach a point where the struggle over where to hold future armed conflicts becomes a full-scale war in and of itself.” Brun added that, though the Middle East will soon run out of area in which violence can spread, there would always be plenty of space left for it to intensify.

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