Since Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel last week, Benjamin Netanyahu has faced the highest-stakes decision of his career: how to respond to Tehran’s first direct strike on Israel without sparking an all-out war between the Middle East’s two most powerful militaries.
On Friday, the result of the deliberations between the Israeli prime minister and his war cabinet became clear. In the early hours, Israel launched a strike of its own on Iran, according to western and Israeli officials. Blasts echoed as Iran activated air defences near the cities of Isfahan in central Iran and Tabriz in the country’s north-west.
In the immediate aftermath, Netanyahu’s gamble appeared to have paid off. Despite warnings this week that even the “slightest” Israeli action in Iran would trigger a “severe” response, Iranian officials played down the strike and the possibility of retaliation.
Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel’s military intelligence service, said Israel had tried to “re-establish deterrence without escalation”, indicating that the equation was “Isfahan for Nevatim,” a reference to the southern Israeli air base targeted by Iran last weekend.
“It’s a difficult thing to calibrate, and will depend on if the Iranians analyse and understand what happened correctly,” he said. “[But] it will hopefully be easier now for both sides to climb down from their [high] trees.”
In keeping with their long-standing policy of ambiguity about operations against Iran, Israeli officials in both the government and the military declined to comment on the strike or on how it was conducted.
But one person familiar with the matter said it had hit a military target that had been used in the Iranian barrage against Israel last weekend, when the Islamic Republic launched more than 300 missiles and drones at the Jewish state.
There were also strikes in southern Syria early on Friday, the person added. Syria’s Sana state news agency reported that Israeli missiles had targeted air defence positions in its southern region.
A former senior US defence official said that the strike in Iran appeared to have been a long-range attack from Israeli fighter jets operating outside Iranian airspace. “It looks like they cleared the air corridor in Syria for a stand-off strike,” the official said
They added that Israeli aircraft were able to get close enough to hit Iranian territory from the air, but without needing to enter Iranian airspace or triggering enemy air defences.
“There are Russian and Syrian air defences there [in Syria] obviously, but if there’s a radar station there for Iran, that’s their early-warning system,” the official said.
Former officials and security analysts said that Israel had chosen a relatively narrow response — which caused no casualties and hit only military targets — because it allowed Israel to signal to Iran that it had crossed a red line, without doing damage that would have forced Tehran to respond.
“It was a reaction which . . . allows Israel to maintain its deniability, and quite a limited response, and therefore it doesn’t force Iran into further escalation,” said Raz Zimmt, a former Israeli intelligence analyst on Iran.
Netanyahu also had to take into account international considerations. After the US and other western allies rallied to Israel’s aid when it was under attack from Iran, they spent the following week exerting intense pressure on the prime minister to show restraint, warning of disastrous consequences if a muscular retaliation triggered all-out war.
At the same time, others said the attack had indicated that Israel had capabilities that could enable it to carry out far more damaging strikes if needed in future.
Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former senior intelligence official, said that while Israel had not targeted Iran’s nuclear programme, the location of its strikes was intended to demonstrate that it had the capability to do so.
“What would have been escalatory is exactly what Israel did not strike. Not far from where the strikes occurred are a uranium conversion facility and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre — part of one of Iran’s most prominent and important facilities housing the country’s ongoing efforts to develop a nuclear weapon,” he said.
In the week since Iran launched its barrage — in retaliation for an attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus which killed several senior Iranian commanders — Netanyahu has been under pressure from hardliners in his government to deliver what ultranationalist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called a “crushing” response.
But Jeremy Issacharoff, a former senior official in Israel’s foreign ministry, said that Netanyahu was unlikely to face pressure to take further action. “The majority of Israelis will consider this a very measured and cautious response, and a major demonstration of Israeli determination to maintain our deterrence and to ensure our national security,” he said.
In a sign that the US was also determined to downplay the latest strike, US secretary of state Antony Blinken repeatedly dodged questions about the attack in a press conference on Friday, and American officials were careful about what details they would discuss, even in private.
But despite the initial indications that Israel’s strike would not trigger an immediate Iranian response, diplomats and former security officials said the situation in the Middle East — which has been engulfed by hostilities since Israel’s war with Hamas erupted in October — remained highly volatile.
Not only was Israel still engaged in near-daily exchanges of fire with the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hizbollah across its northern border, and a war with Hamas in Gaza, but the direct exchange between Israel and Iran had broken new ground, one western diplomat said.
“This was off limits before . . . A new precedent has been set,” the diplomat said. “If there is another round between Israel and Iran it risks returning to this sort of level.”
Zimmt expressed similar concerns, arguing that the three-decade shadow war between Israel and Iran had entered a new stage in which the two countries had shown they were prepared to target each other directly, meaning that the risks of catastrophic miscalculation were far higher.
“The fact that we have moved to . . . confrontation not just by proxies, and not just in Syrian territory, certainly reflects a new a new phase,” he said. “This was the crossing of the line. And . . . once it happens once, we can definitely see it happening again.”