SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE ANALYSIS — Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel this weekend were both a potentially game-changing, historic first — and an underwhelming response. Historic, because Iran itself had never attacked Israel directly, choosing instead to use its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas to play that role. The last country to fire missiles at Israel was Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
But the strikes were also underwhelming, given that for two weeks, observers in the region and around the world had feared a massive Iranian response to the April 1 Israeli air strike that killed three Iranian generals and four others at Iran’s embassy in Damascus. "The Zionist regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week. “We will make it regret this crime and others it has committed." The U.S. had warned that Iran's retaliation might ignite a wider regional war, exactly what the Biden Administration and others have been trying to avoid since the October 7 Hamas massacre.
That broader war may still come, but Saturday’s attacks were far less than Tehran had telegraphed was coming.
The numbers looked impressive, and frightening: Iran sent roughly 100 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles and 170 drone weapons towards Israel, forcing the closure of airspace and a near-total shutdown of normal activity in Israel itself.
But the impact was minimal. An Israeli airbase in the Negev Desert sustained minor damage and a young girl was critically wounded. Israeli air defense, with help from the U.S. and U.K., knocked virtually every incoming threat out of the sky. Israel’s neighbor Jordan helped as well, shooting down missiles that entered its airspace. (The Economist noted that Iran’s attacks had the unintended effect of uniting the West and at least one Arab nation in defense of Israel). Here the impressive number was 99 – the percent of incoming aerial threats that were intercepted.
On Sunday morning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on X: “We intercepted. We blocked. Together we will win.”
What comes next
On the day after, there was one overriding question: Did the Sunday attacks end this direct Israeli-Iran engagement — or were they the first stage of a far more dangerous phase? Put differently, will Israel “take the win” of its successful defense, as President Joe Biden urged Netanyahu to do in a phone conversation late Saturday? Or will Israel feel the need to strike back?
The answer rests with Netanyahu and his war cabinet, which met Sunday to consider a response. If the cabinet views Iran’s strikes as an unacceptable assault that cannot stand, then an Israeli counter will come, and send the two nations and the region into uncharted territory. Alternatively, the Israelis may see Saturday as a predictable response, one they knew would come when they struck the compound in Damascus, and an episode that has been dealt with successfully and warrants no escalation.
Biden’s message was a clear argument for the latter. According to several reports, the president told Netanyahu the U.S. would not support any Israeli counterattack against Iran, politically or operationally.
"You got a win. Take the win," Biden told Netanyahu, according to a White House official.
What will Israel do? A senior official, speaking anonymously, told Israel’s Channel 12 late Saturday that an “unprecedented response” would follow; on Sunday Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the confrontation with Iran was “not over yet.” The New York Times reported that some war cabinet members had urged an immediate retaliatory strike, but Netanyahu vetoed that after his conversation with Biden.
Earlier in the week, in anticipation of an Iranian strike, Netanyahu said, “We have determined a simple rule: Whoever harms us, we will harm them.” While Iran’s attacks Saturday carried the potential for great harm, in the end, that was avoided.
Israeli responses could take many forms – direct strikes on Iranian territory, or attacks against any number of Iranian facilities in other countries in the region. Iran supports militants in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and on Sunday the Israeli military said it had struck targets in Lebanon belonging to the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah – though these appeared to be part of a regular crossfire along the Israel-Lebanon border rather than a response to Saturday’s barrage.
The view from Tehran
For its part, Iran declared the attacks “a full success,” as Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, the commander in chief of Iran’s armed forces, put it. Other senior officials noted that it had been a measured attack.
Hossein Salami, the top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told the Tasmin news agency that Saturday’s strikes “could have been very extensive, but we limited the scope of the operation” to facilities that Israel had used in the April 1 strike.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations used its account on X to say its attacks had been a direct and proportional response to the April 1 strike, and that “the matter can be deemed concluded.” The post went on to warn that if Israel struck back, “Iran’s response will be considerably more severe.”
In the six months since the October 7 Hamas massacre, Iran has juggled its interest in avoiding direct conflict with Israel and the U.S. with internal pressure to respond to repeated killings of senior military figures. Even before the April 1 attack – which stood apart because Israel struck an Iranian diplomatic facility – Israel had killed at least 18 Iranian commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps since October 7.
“Iran’s government appears to have concluded that the Damascus strike was a strategic inflection point, where failure to retaliate would carry more downsides than benefits,” Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, told the New York Times. “But in doing so, the shadow war it has been waging with Israel for years now threatens to turn into a very real and very damaging conflict."
“The Iranians have for now played their card,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, told the Times. “They made a choice to call Israel’s bluff, and they felt they needed to do so, because they see the last six months as a persistent effort to set them back across the region.” She added that “Tehran saw a need to draw this red line and make it clear to Israel that Iran does have red lines and would not continue to tolerate the slow degradation of its position.”
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