Iran’s strikes on Israel open a dangerous new chapter for old enemies
BERLIN
Iran has retaliated directly against Israel for the killings of several of its senior generals in Damascus, Syria, with an onslaught of more than 300 drones and missiles aimed at restoring its credibility and deterrence, officials and analysts say.
That represents a moment of great risk, with key questions still to be answered, they say. Has
Iran’s attack been enough to satisfy its calls for revenge? Or, given the relatively paltry results — almost all of the drones and missiles were intercepted by Israel and the United States — will it feel obligated to strike again? And will Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, see the strong performance by his country’s air defenses as a sufficient response? Or will he choose to escalate further with an attack on Iran itself?
Now that Iran has attacked Israel as it promised to do, it will want to avoid a broader war, the officials and analysts say, noting that the Iranians targeted only military sites in an apparent effort to avoid civilian casualties and advertised their attack well in advance.
“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,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group. “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,” one that could drag in the United States, he said.
“The Iranians have for now played their card,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “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.”
On Sunday, Iranian leaders said the military operation against Israel was over but warned that they could launch a bigger one, depending on Israel’s response.
Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s top military officer, said the “operation yielded its complete result” and “there is no intention to continue it.” But, he added, if Israel attacked Iran on its own soil or elsewhere, “our next operation will be much bigger than this.”
For years, Iran took blow after blow from Israel: assassinations of its nuclear scientists and military commanders, explosions at its nuclear and military bases, cyberattacks, intelligence infiltrations, an embarrassing theft of nuclear documents and recent attacks on its critical infrastructure.
But since the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7 prompted Israel to go to war in the Gaza Strip, Israel has intensified its attacks on Iranian interests and commanders in Syria. In strikes from December onward, Israel has assassinated at least 18 Iranian commanders and military personnel from the Quds Force, the elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that operates outside Iran’s borders, Iranian media said.
Iran’s government has been criticized by hardliners backers for its caution on the war in Gaza.
With the attacks this weekend, Vakil said: “I think 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.”
Tehran felt it had to respond, even if its attack prompted firm American backing and widespread Western diplomatic support for Israel, taking some of the heat off Israel over its war in Gaza, at least temporarily, and again isolating Iran.
Now, Vakil said, the two sides were in a standoff in which both were prepared for escalation despite knowing it would cause them huge damage.
At the same time, the old equation has changed, with Israel and Iran hitting each other directly, on each other’s territory, and not through Iranian proxies abroad.
The Israeli strike on Iran’s Embassy compound in Damascus, followed by a direct Iranian strike on Israel, is a dangerous new chapter in the long, sometimes hidden war between Israel and Iran, which has said it wants Israel to be wiped off the map. Sometimes known as “the shadow war,” the conflict has been carried out mainly between Israel and Iran’s allies and proxies – in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.
Both sides claim they are acting in national selfdefense — Israel against groups committed to its destruction, with Iran as their prime ally and controller, and Iran against any potential Israeli war against it, often in the name of the Palestinians.
Iran increasingly refers to its rapidly expanding nuclear program, which has enriched uranium to near weapons-grade, as a deterrent against Israel, while at the same time denying that it has any intention of building a nuclear weapon. But, increasingly, Iran is considered by experts as a nuclear-threshold state, able to create weapons-grade nuclear material within weeks and a crude nuclear weapon within a year or so.
Iran is also going through a slow and complicated transition as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and commander in chief, is said to be ailing and faced a 2022 domestic uprising, led by women, that demanded an end to clerical rule.
Khamenei himself ordered the strikes on Israel from inside Iran to send a message that Iran was shifting from “strategic patience” to a more active deterrence, according to four Iranian officials. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“Iran’s operation has a crystal-clear message to Israel and its allies that the rules of the game have changed, and from now on, if Israel strikes any Iranian targets or kills any Iranians, we are willing to strike in a big way and from our own soil,” Nasser Imani, a prominent analyst based in Tehran who is close to the government, said by telephone. “The days of covert operations and patience are over.”