The reported Israeli strike on an Iranian air installation near the city of Isfahan in central Iran appears to have been the most significant of a series of attacks carried out by Israel in the course of last night. While the full picture is still emerging, there are indications that an additional strike of some kind took place south of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. A third strike took place on a position of the Syrian army in Sweida, a majority Druze province close to the Syria-Israel border, according to a number of Syrian opposition sources.
The strike on Sweida is business as usual in terms of Israel’s ongoing campaign against Iranian entrenchment in Syria. The Isfahan strike, however, and to a lesser extent the apparent strike on Baghdad constitute a significant escalation. Attacks on Iranian regime facilities on Iranian soil have been attributed to Israel in the past. Operations against drone production facilities in the Isfahan area took place in May 2021 and January 2023. An additional strike on a drone factory in the Kermanshah area was carried out in February 2022.
Israel wanted to remind Iran that it possesses an asset on the ground which the Iranians cannot match or counter...
But while most observers concluded that Israel was responsible for those operations, there was no obvious sequencing of the type that characterized last night’s attack. This strike came as a clear response to the massive, but almost entirely thwarted Iranian drone and missile assault on multiple sites in Israel of 13 April.
The Iranian authorities seem keen now to draw a line under the process of escalation. Official Iranian media sought to downplay the significance of the attack, saying that a number of ‘quadcopters’ launched from within Iran had been shot down in the Isfahan area. The limited dimensions of the attack seem to make such a de-escalation from the very tense atmosphere of the last week likely.
So what may be learned from the Israeli response to the 13 April attacks? And what will happen next?
Israel appears to have wished to remind the Iranian regime that it possesses an asset on the ground which the Iranians cannot match or counter: namely a network, clearly involving local partners, which is able to organise successful attacks on Iranian soil. The S-300 batteries, a sophisticated air defence system provided by Russia to Iran, is deployed in the Isfahan area. Israel evidently wanted to demonstrate that while Iran was unable to penetrate Israel’s air defences, it can activate the means to get past those of Iran at will.
The question, however, is whether this modest and not entirely novel display of Israeli capacities should be seen as an adequate response to the 13 April attacks. There is no doubt that its limited nature is, in part, the product of the Israeli government’s awareness of US determination to avoid escalation to open war in the Middle East at the present time. But this is not the heart of the matter.
There is no doubt that its limited nature is, in part, the product of the Israeli government’s awareness of US determination to avoid escalation to open war in the Middle East at the present time. But this is not the heart of the matter.
It is important to remember the series of events that led to the current crisis. On 1 April, Israel signalled a clear intention to change its modus operandi regarding Iran’s campaign against it. The killing of IRGC/Quds Force General Mohammed Reza Zahedi indicated an Israeli decision that the previous accepted rule according to which Israel would focus its responses on Iran’s proxies, rather than their Iranian patron, no longer applied.
This reflected a conviction held widely in Israel’s defence establishment that Iran is the real sovereign in the land area between the Iraq-Iran border and Syria and Lebanon’s borders with Israel. They view the ‘states’ of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon as today largely fictions, with Iran either in effective control of the government (Iraq, Lebanon) or possessing freedom of operation (Syria).
From within this large area of control (and elsewhere), Iran is pursuing a strategy intended to lead to the slow bleeding to death of the Jewish state, via the activation of Islamist proxy armies. The killing of Zahedi was an announcement that Israel would now not only strike at the clients, but also directly at the patrons, including the most senior among them, where they think they are most safe.
Iran’s drone and missile attack of 13 April was an attempt to shock Israel into abandoning this new approach. Iran finds the previous arrangement comfortable and wishes to get back to it. The message of the 13 April action was ‘look how far we’re prepared to escalate if Israel starts targeting our senior personnel’. These attacks were not a Pearl Harbor-style declaration of open warfare. Rather they were, as former Centcom Commander General Kenneth McKenzie called them, an attempt to ‘escalate in order to de-escalate.’
The real test will come in the weeks and months ahead. Will we see actions comparable in scale and nature to that of the killing of Mohammed Reza Zahedi?
The real test will come in the weeks and months ahead. Will we see actions comparable in scale and nature to that of the killing of Mohammed Reza Zahedi? If so, it will indicate that Israel has rejected Teheran’s 13 April message and, having quietly demonstrated its abilities to penetrate Iran’s air defences, intends to continue its strategy of including Iranian facilities and Iranian senior personnel in its circle of retribution. If no such actions occur, then Iran may conclude that its 13 April escalation was a success, producing the desired result.
There is, of course, a much larger question surrounding all this: namely, why are western countries acquiescing to a process whereby Iran appears to be slowly swallowing up the Middle East? With its proxies and clients, Teheran is now in control of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. It is able to disrupt shipping on a daily basis on a key global maritime trade route (the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden), and it has, via Hamas and Islamic Jihad, largely achieved ownership of the Palestinian cause. But in the round of escalation that began on 1 April with the killing of Zahedi, the final word remains to be said.
