Dov Lieber
Israel retaliated overnight against Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on its territory, people familiar with the matter said—with what appeared to be a limited strike aimed at avoiding an escalatory cycle that could push the countries closer toward war.
The attack was a targeted strike in the area around Isfahan in central Iran, one of the people said. Iranian media and social media reported explosions near the city, where Iran has nuclear facilities and an air base, and the activation of air-defense systems in provinces across the country after suspicious flying objects were detected.
The narrow Israeli attack and Iran’s soft rhetoric in response appeared to be an attempt by both sides to calm tensions after more than a week of concerns that Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza would metastasize into a bigger regional conflict, though fears remain of a miscalculation.
Israel has been under pressure from the U.S. and Europe to moderate its response and faced the challenge of delivering a blow that would punish Iran for the attack without provoking a response.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken declined to say whether the U.S. had received advance warning of Israel’s strike. “I’m not going to speak to that, except to say that the United States has not been involved in any offensive operations,” Blinken said at a press conference at the end of a Group of Seven conference in Capri, Italy. His Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani, said earlier Friday that Israel informed the U.S. of its plan “at the last minute.”
Blinken also declined to characterize the Israeli strike on Iran, and whether he considered it limited or an escalation. “All I can say is that for our part and for the entire G-7, our focus has been on de-escalation and avoiding a larger conflict,” he said.
Much remained unclear about the extent or the impact of the Israeli action. State-run news agency IRNA said Friday morning that its reporters hadn’t seen any large-scale damage or explosions anywhere in the country and that no incidents were reported at Iran’s nuclear facilities. Flight restrictions imposed overnight by Iran were lifted in the morning.
Iranian state television repeatedly played down the episode in its broadcasts, saying three small flying objects had been downed by air-defense systems and suggesting they had been launched from within the country. Iran’s army chief, Abdolrahim Mousavi, told state-run media the explosions heard in Isfahan were a result of the downing of a suspicious object that caused no damage.
In Israel, the military said late Thursday night that there were no changes to the home-front command instructions that tell the public when to seek shelter, and it made no changes to those instructions on Friday, indicating Israeli officials weren’t expecting a major Iranian retaliation.
State media in Syria, meanwhile, said Friday that Israel also attacked air-defense sites in the country. Iran in recent days had evacuated personnel from sites in Syria, where its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has a large presence. Israel told Arab allies this week that it might limit its retaliatory attacks to Iran-linked facilities in Syria, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the Syria strikes, mirroring a broader reticence among Israeli officials on Friday to talk about the strikes in either Iran or Syria.
Iraqi militias said they had found the remains of an Israeli missile near Baghdad, posting images online. Open-source researchers said the debris looked similar to Israeli-made air-to-surface missiles that are fired from fighter jets and made up of a rocket-propulsion system and warhead. The system could have landed in Iraq while its warhead traveled on to Isfahan, weapons experts said. Israel’s missiles can also hold an inert warhead, according to a brochure of an Israeli weapons manufacturer. That wouldn’t explode on a target, but it would demonstrate an ability to hit it.
Isfahan is home to an Iranian air base that houses S-300 antiaircraft batteries, a sophisticated air-defense system made by Russia, according to open-source researchers who track satellite imagery.
Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Washington-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Israel’s attack likely targeted the base as a symmetrical response to Iran’s attack on an Israeli air base on Saturday. Israel’s strike, he said, was likely the first time it struck a military target in Iran protected by the S-300. The fact that Isfahan is also home to important Iranian nuclear facilities, Dubowitz said, also made it a symbolic choice for Israel.
“It sends a message we can penetrate your air defenses and hit your crown jewels,” Dubowitz said.
The Israeli action was a response to an unprecedented direct attack by Iran that involved more than 300 drones and missiles aimed at Israeli territory. That attack itself was retribution for a strike attributed to Israel that killed top Iranian officers in Damascus, Syria.
Most of the drones and missiles fired by Iran were shot down, and the rest did little damage and caused no deaths, giving Israel room to respond with less intensity.
Iran has ramped up warnings in recent days that it would respond aggressively to any Israeli strike. It also signaled Thursday that it could accelerate work on nuclear weapons if its nuclear facilities were targeted.
On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ministers from his Likud party that he was determined to respond to Iran, but that the action would be “sensible and not something irresponsible,” according to a person familiar with the matter. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also spoke Thursday to discuss Iran’s actions in the region, according to the Pentagon.
Russia has communicated to Israel that Iran doesn’t want the skirmishes that have recently erupted between them to escalate, and Moscow doesn’t want an increase in the tensions either, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told state media outlets Friday.
In an interview with the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda and the radio stations Sputnik and Moscow Speaks, Lavrov revealed that there had been telephone contacts between the leadership in Moscow and Tehran, and between Russian representatives and the Israeli government.
“We very clearly…conveyed to the Israelis that Iran does not want escalation,” Lavrov said.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, was one of the few Israeli officials to react publicly to the strike in Iran. He wrote a one-word post on X: “Weak.”
Israel has otherwise remained officially silent about the strike.
The direct exchange of blows between Israel and Iran risked taking the conflict that began with militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel to a dangerous new level, one that threatens to embroil the U.S. and Gulf states in a regional conflagration that they have worked hard to prevent.
Iran had long pursued its conflict with Israel through a network of Middle East proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen as it sought to avoid a full-scale conventional conflict. It changed that equation with the direct strikes against Israel, gambling that it could reset the informal rules that have provided some predictability to the strikes and counterstrikes over the years.
Israeli officials have said the direct strikes demanded a response. The overnight retaliation isn’t Israel’s first attack within Iran’s territory.
In January 2023, an Israeli drone strike inside Iran hit an advanced weapons-production facility, according to people familiar with the operation. The strike was carried out by Israel’s Mossad and targeted a Ministry of Defense site in Isfahan, hitting a building in four different areas with precision strikes, the people said.
Israel never acknowledged that operation. The people familiar with the matter compared it to an Israeli quadcopter drone strike in 2022 on Iranian drone-production sites in the western city of Kermanshah.
Israel is juggling a fast-growing number of military challenges. It is already fighting on three fronts: in Gaza against Hamas and on its northern border with Hezbollah—both of which are funded and armed by Iran—as well as trying to quell unrest in the West Bank. On Friday, the Israeli military said it launched an airstrike on a building in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah fighters were operating, the latest tit-for-tat exchange of fire between the two sides.
Israel is under pressure to restore deterrence with Iran and its proxies but also must hold together the tenuous strategic partnership that helped it block Iran’s attack last Saturday.
“A ‘de-escalatory strike,’” Yonatan Touva, a senior analyst at Mitvim, a think tank in Tel Aviv, wrote on X of Israel’s attack on Iranian territory. “Barring any unexpected developments, Israel’s strike inside Iran earlier today may well merit the coinage of this new term.”
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