Relief follows limited Israeli strike, but tensions remain
An uneasy calm has settled over Iran as residents take stock of Israel’s strike in the central province of Isfahan.
The attack, which was narrow in scope, appeared to be aimed at de-escalating tensions, analysts and officials said, after a massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel last week.
But Iranians in Isfahan, which hosts sensitive military and nuclear facilities, said the strike was a reminder of how close the country had come to an all-out war, after years in which Israel and Iran fought mainly in the shadows.
“This year, the talk of war feels much more real,” said a 33-year-old engineer and resident of the city of Isfahan, the provincial capital, near where the strikes took place. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals by Iranian security forces.
Iranian officials and state media downplayed the attack as insignificant, saying the explosions reported in Isfahan, more than 320km south of Tehran, were from Iran’s air defences intercepting drones. Israel has made no official public comment on the strike, and the primary target remained unclear.
The narrative was in sharp contrast to the fiery warnings Iran made earlier this month after an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus killed senior members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). That attack prompted Iran to strike back at Israel last weekend, when it launched hundreds of drones and missiles, most of which were shot down by either Israel or the United States.
“No damage has been reported in the incident,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported yesterday.
In Isfahan, a city famed for its ornate Islamic architecture, residents said life continued normally but the streets were quieter than usual. The city is the third-largest in Iran, with nearly 2 million residents and the spacious Meidan Emam square, a Unesco World Heritage site.
Israel and Iran had entered “a new equilibrium, not so different from the old one”, said Arash Azizi, a senior lecturer in political science and history at Clemson University in South Carolina. “The immediate threat of escalation has been lifted.”
Ahead of the strike, Iranian officials warned against an attack on the country’s nuclear facilities.
After days of bracing for an Israeli response, some Iranians felt relief at the news of a limited attack.
They began circulating dark humour jokes online, mocking state media’s coverage of the strike. The only Iranian casualties were the result of laughter, one user posted on Instagram. Another suggested that if there was significant damage from the attack, the government would just deny that Isfahan even existed.
For others who have grown frustrated with Iran’s clerical rulers, a war would be welcome, they said, as long as it meant the government would fall.
“Being killed by the morality police is a much more real threat than being hit by a strike from Israel,” said a 40-year-old resident of Tehran, referring to the special patrol unit that, often violently, enforces Iran’s strict Islamic dress codes.
US President Joe Biden and his aides viewed Israel’s strike as a relatively measured response to the barrage of missiles and drones Tehran launched towards Israel last weekend, and they are increasingly hopeful that the confrontation between the two states will not immediately spark a regional escalation, according to several people familiar with the White House’s thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The Biden administration had publicly urged Israel not to respond to the more than 300 missiles and drones Iran launched towards Israeli territory last weekend. Israel’s strike was in a sense a rejection of Biden’s request, but senior officials have concluded that Israel’s decision to aim at a remote part of Iran that did not appear to harm anyone – followed by a muted reaction by Iranian state media – makes it less likely that the tit-for-tat strikes will escalate into a broader war.
An Israeli official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the strike was intended mostly to signal to Iran that Israel had the ability to hit targets inside the country.
The White House declined to comment on the strike.
The developments came as a welcome change after six months in which it often seemed to White House officials that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took every opportunity to publicly rebuff any demand Biden made, despite unwavering US military and diplomatic support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has isolated the country on the world stage.
Still, deep disagreements remain between the US and Israel that have yet to be resolved.
Most immediately, US and Israeli officials are preparing to hold another high-level meeting about an impending Israeli operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where some 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there under Israeli orders.
US officials have made it clear that they oppose a major military operation in Rafah without a “credible” plan to protect the Palestinian civilians there. Israeli officials have said they still plan to go into the city to dismantle the remaining Hamas battalions there.
And even if a wider conflict does not immediately erupt, Middle East experts and analysts cautioned that the decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel had now crossed an unprecedented threshold.
The two countries have shown that they are willing to strike inside each other’s territories, however carefully – a move both long avoided for fear of sparking a war that could become catastrophic.
“We have not seen the conventional regional war that everyone fears, but at a moment’s notice, anything could go wrong,” said Brian Katulis, vice-president of policy at the Middle East Institute. “It’s not a sustainable situation when you look at the whole theatre.”
While Israel and Iran had been in a “shadow conflict” for decades, Katulis said, their hostility had now become “an open, low-grade direct military confrontation, and with that comes all sorts of risks”.
The Israel-Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza, and US officials have long feared that it would escalate into a major regional conflagration that would further destabilise the Middle East.