Iran Warns It Will Retaliate for Israel’s Attack
Comments by a top military official raise the risk of further escalation between the two foes
Iran is signaling it will respond to last weekend’s Israeli strikes on its soil, a move that would extend the cycle of violence between the two enemies and risk dragging the Middle East into a wider war.
Iran initially played down the Oct. 26 strike, which Israel aimed to calibrate to close out a series of direct attacks this year by the two sides. But the nature of the attack, which damaged Tehran’s most advanced air defenses and killed four soldiers, is now prompting more definitive talk of an Iranian retaliation.
“We will give an unimaginable response to the enemy,” Gen. Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Thursday after days of bellicose statements by senior Iranian officials.
Israel’s strikes on Iranian military and missile-production sites followed U.S. pressure to avoid hitting the country’s nuclear and oil facilities, which could be targets in further rounds of escalation. Oil prices were up 1.5% in trading Friday after the threatening Iranian statements, with concerns growing over a Middle East war that would interrupt supply.
Western officials say they believe Iranian decision makers are now debating how and whether Iran should respond, including whether an attack should come directly or from proxies outside Iran to offer a layer of deniability. Israeli officials also believe Iran is seriously considering a response and have warned they are willing to mount a far more aggressive attack in return.
Should Iran fail to respond it would lose face both among allies fighting Israel and among its supporters at home, according to Mohanad Hage Ali, a deputy director at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, a research institute in Beirut. That is creating increasingly tough rhetoric among Iranian officials over a response.
“The number of casualties—four soldiers—and the destruction caused by the strike probably was too big for them to swallow,” he said. The regime would rather respond than stop, but “given their vulnerabilities, that’s a massive risk,” he added.
Israel’s Oct. 26 attack exposed the vulnerability of Iran’s air defenses, and the Israeli military now claims to be able to fly freely in Iranian airspace.
In a sign that Iran might temper its response, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has refrained from promising harsh retaliation, as he has done after other attacks in the past.
Escalatory strikes from either side would put further demands on Israel’s military as it fights a multifront conflict against Iran’s Middle East allies and would risk a far more damaging war.
Israel invaded the Gaza Strip last year after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and destroyed much of the Palestinian group’s military, but it is still fighting pockets of resistance there amid long-moribund cease-fire talks.
In recent weeks, Israel has intensified an air and ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon that has killed much of the militia’s leadership and degraded its ability to attack. The Israeli military and other security forces are beginning to push for a diplomatic solution to that conflict, but any deal will be complicated given Israel’s security demands and Hezbollah’s still-powerful position in Lebanon.
In April, Tehran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel in response to an attack that killed several Iranian military officials gathered at a diplomatic building in Damascus. Israel’s response was a limited, targeted strike, which ended the back-and-forth. But Israel then provoked Iran again by killing Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a military guesthouse in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with an airstrike in Beirut.
On Oct. 26, dozens of Israeli warplanes struck Iranian military assets in three provinces and knocked out three Russian-supplied S-300 air-defense systems, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. The assault impaired Iran’s ability to defend against a future attack.
Iran could retaliate and still calibrate its response by using one of its allies in the Middle East. Alongside attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel also has been targeted by drones and missiles from Yemen’s Houthis and by militias in Iraq over the past year.
These militant groups are part of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance against Israel. Before Hamas sparked the war in Gaza, they helped Iran fight a shadow war with Israel. Iran’s attack on Israeli territory in April brought the two sides into direct confrontation for the first time. But Iran has told Arab nations that it doesn’t want a wider war and might now respond to Israel’s attack through one of its proxies.
An attack through a proxy “protects Iran from a direct Israeli strike,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a think tank in London. It also sends a message “that despite Israeli efforts, that the Axis lives on,” she said.
Iranian officials also gave fresh warnings that the country might review its two-decade-old official stance that it won’t develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. Such warnings from senior officials have become increasingly public in recent months.
Kamal Kharrazi, a top Khamenei adviser, on Friday claimed Tehran has the technical capabilities to build the bomb and that the nuclear stance could change if Iran faced an “existential threat.”
The U.S. has vowed to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon.
Israel in recent months has shown its military and intelligence edge against Iran and its allies in the Middle East. Iran might now be calculating that Israel will soon turn its attention more forcefully to Tehran, and that it is best served launching an attack as a deterrent, Hage Ali said.
Israel largely blunted Iran’s attack last month, as most of the missiles fired were intercepted or failed to do much damage. But a number did get through Israel’s defenses, indicating that Iran could cause significant damage, particularly if it paired an attack of its own with action by its proxies.
Israel wanted to send a message with its attacks that it sought to close out the cycle of direct skirmishes with Iran, said Avner Golov, a former senior director at Israel’s National Security Council who is now with MIND Israel, a national security advisory group.
But the attack had a more subtle message, too, he said. “If you are planning to retaliate, if you are planning to create attrition warfare, then we will not tolerate and we will escalate,” he added.