JERUSALEM — Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Iran on Saturday, fulfilling its vow to retaliate for an earlier Iranian attack and raising fears that the intertwined conflicts in the Middle East could escalate into an all-out war between the region’s two most powerful militaries.
The Israeli military said in a statement at 2:30 a.m. that it was “conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran,” adding that it was acting in response to more than a year of attacks on Israel by Iran and its allies across the Middle East.
Israel did not immediately say where or how the strikes were being carried out. Residents of Tehran, the Iranian capital, reported hearing multiple explosions in and around the city.
Maryam Naraghi, an Iranian journalist, said she heard large explosions in the eastern part of Tehran, where she lives. “It was the sound of bombs and explosions,” she said. “It was very close to where I am.” The area includes military bases and the secretive military site Parchin.
Another Iranian journalist, Reza Rashidpour, said five massive explosions were heard in Tehran within about 10 seconds. He said Iranian air force jets had taken off in the western part of the country.
The attack early Saturday was a response to several waves of ballistic missiles that Iran launched at Israel on Oct. 1, which forced millions of Israelis to take cover in bomb shelters but did minimal damage. “Iran made a big mistake tonight — and it will pay for it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said then.
Iran said it had fired the missiles at Israel in response to the killings by Israel of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who was with him at the time; and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, whose assassination while in Tehran was particularly embarrassing to the regime there.
The recent exchanges between Israel and Iran have bucked both countries’ long-standing practice of avoiding direct military clashes. For years, Israel and Iran have fought each other in a shadow war involving covert operations and armed groups backed by Iran, including Hamas and Hezbollah. But after the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel by Hamas, the conflict between Israel and Iran came out into the open this year.
Before Saturday’s attack, the Israeli government had told the Biden administration that it would avoid striking Iran’s nuclear enrichment and oil production sites, two officials said earlier this month. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that Israel had agreed to focus its attack on military targets in Iran.
The White House believed that avoiding nuclear or oil infrastructure sites would reduce the likelihood of the United States being dragged into a bigger Middle East confrontation with the presidential election less than two weeks away.
Two classified U.S. intelligence documents that were leaked last week described satellite images of Israeli military preparations for a strike on Iran and offered insight into U.S. concerns about those plans.
President Joe Biden replied in the affirmative last week when asked whether he knew when Israel would strike, and what kind of targets it had chosen. He gave no details, but his response implied that the United States and Israel may have reached an agreement on the matter. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a lengthy meeting with Netanyahu on Tuesday.
Israel and Iran traded attacks earlier this year. After an Israeli strike on April 1 on an Iranian Embassy compound in Syria’s capital, Damascus, that killed three top Iranian commanders, Iran launched a missile barrage that was its first-ever direct attack on Israel.
Israel largely thwarted the Iranian missile barrage using its air defenses, assisted by the United States and other allies, and then responded with an attack of its own. That airstrike damaged an S-300 anti-aircraft system near Natanz, a city in central Iran critical to the country’s nuclear weapons program. Western and Iranian officials said Israel had deployed aerial drones and at least one missile fired from a warplane in that attack.
That strike showed that Israel could bypass Iran’s defensive systems and paralyze them.
Then, in late July, Israeli jets killed a top commander of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed at least 12 people. One day later, Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran.
The Iranian government and Hezbollah vowed to retaliate, but, to the surprise of many, Iran took no immediate action.
It launched a missile barrage at Israel on Oct. 1, which Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said was in retaliation for the assassinations of Haniyeh; Nasrallah, late last month; and the Iranian commander.
Israel’s strikes Saturday came after a day of bloodshed and destruction that underlined how enmeshed Israel has become in fighting Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which receive funding and weapons from Iran.
In Lebanon, the Israeli military said it had carried out 200 airstrikes stretching from the Syrian border with Lebanon to Beirut.
In the Gaza Strip, the toll among Palestinians continued to climb with the Gaza Health Ministry reporting that Israeli forces had killed 38 people and injured dozens more in strikes in the southern city of Khan Younis, where residents said there were no warnings before the attacks. Witnesses said some of the dead were children, which appeared to be supported by videos and photos shared on social media, distributed by news agencies and verified by The New York Times.
The Israeli military said only that in an unspecified part of southern Gaza, it had “eliminated a number of terrorists from the air and ground and dismantled numerous terrorist infrastructure sites.”
Scores more people were reported killed this week in the northern reaches of the enclave, where the Israeli military is returning to fight a regrouped Hamas presence in some of the same areas where it had routed the group after invading the territory late last year.
The fighting in the north has been described by residents as intense and relentless, and this week, it forced the main emergency service in Gaza, which had been rushing to the site of airstrikes and pulling people from rubble, to cease all rescue operations in the north.
The director of the World Health Organization said Friday that it had lost contact with staff at Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza after the health ministry said Israeli troops had raided the facility. The ministry said that Israeli forces had stormed the hospital and were “detaining hundreds of patients, medical staff and some displaced people.”
On Friday, Blinken completed his 11th wartime visit to the region, saying that U.S. and Israeli negotiators would be returning to Qatar soon in an effort to revive hostage and cease-fire talks with Hamas.
Still, any hopes of a quick breakthrough were short-lived.
Blinken found no evidence that the killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by the Israeli military this month had left either Hamas or Netanyahu ready to strike an immediate cease-fire deal in Gaza that would free the hostages held by Hamas.
Instead, Blinken flew out of a Middle East teetering on the brink of greater chaos and in a more precarious state than even in the aftermath of Hamas’ attacks last October, or during his last visit in September. His focus now seemed to be on planning the management of a post-conflict Gaza that remains hard to envision.
“This is a moment for every country to decide what role it’s prepared to play and what contributions it could make in moving Gaza from war to peace,” Blinken told reporters in the Qatari capital, Doha. A necessary condition of ending the war in Gaza, he said, is “to make sure that we have the appropriate plans in place.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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