On Saturday, just after dark in Tehran, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards picked up a phone and gave the order to launch “Operation True Promise” – an unprecedented air attack by the Islamic republic against the Jewish State.
Before Major General Hossein Salami read out the names of senior Iranian military officials whose guards sought revenge for the killings in a suspected April 1 Israeli airstrike in Damascus, he chanted a verse from the Quran.
“Fight them!” he said. “Allah will punish them on your behalf, and He will humble them and give you victory over them. »
Within minutes, the attack began: a swarm of drones took off for a flight of nearly 2,000 km and hours towards Israel, soon followed by missiles. It was the first direct confrontation between the Middle East’s two most powerful militaries, two great rivals embroiled in a decades-long shadow war marked by Israeli assassinations and the Iranian Resistance Axis, which brought its proxy militias and its Iranian soldiers to the end. Israel’s border.
With Iran’s onslaught, soon thwarted by Israel’s sophisticated air defenses, this conflict came out of the shadows. In Tehran, some rushed to gas pumps and grocery stores, and others to Palestine Square, draped in Iranian flags. In Isfahan, people cheered as missiles flew over the grave of Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the general killed in Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus by an airstrike that Israel has not publicly claimed responsibility for.
In Washington, US President Joe Biden had already cut short his vacation on Saturday and returned to the White House, fearing that this was the first volley of an all-out war between Israel and Iran.
In Israel, where the attack was long expected, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plane, the Zion Wing, took off to safety from the Nevatim air base as the missiles approached. Around the same time, dozens of fighter jets and defensive systems were deployed to repel the attack – not just Israeli, but also British, Jordanian and American.
At 8 p.m. local time, neighbors saw Netanyahu’s motorcade set off from the Jerusalem home – reportedly equipped with a missile shelter – of a billionaire friend where the Israeli prime minister and his wife had past the Sabbath.
What followed was a spectacle on social media, perhaps exactly as Iran wanted. In Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, a grisly parade of drones lit up the night sky, their deadly payloads cheered by some, including in Beirut, where ravers at a nightclub took a brief dance break to watch a projectile trail above their heads.
What Tehran was counting on, said Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, was a show of power for all to see.
“In the eyes of the religious establishment, this mission was a success because they were able to strike Israel directly from Iranian soil. [and] demonstrate that [despite] with its obsolete Shah-era fighter planes and air inferiority, it now controlled the skies.
As the drones began their hours-long journey, Israelis huddled at home, staying close to air raid shelters, and after six months of war in Gaza, a stoic humor took hold. “First direct flights from Iran to Israel since 1979,” one joked. Israeli, referring to the year of the Iranian revolution.
But the dark humor masked an existential fear around which Netanyahu has shaped his own political career over the past decade: that all-out war with Iran is ultimately inevitable.
Even today, after Israel emerged almost unscathed from the Iranian assault – a child was injured by shrapnel, a military base was lightly damaged, and few missiles made it into space Israeli air force – its response will determine whether this remains a single fatal shot. of tit-for-tat attacks, or the precursor to the war he has long warned against.
Hours after Salami issued the order to Tehran and Israeli air defenses intercepted 99 percent of the assault, Iran declared its mission accomplished: “the operation is over.”
At that time, Netanyahu was on the phone with Biden, and was reportedly told that Israel’s successful defense was victory enough and that the United States would not join in any counter-retaliation.
“The president told the prime minister that Israel really came out on top in this exchange,” a senior US official said. “Israel eliminated the IRGC. . . leadership in the Levant [and when] Iran tried to react, Israel clearly demonstrated its military superiority.”
Israel has faced rocket barrages from Hezbollah and Hamas for years, repelling them with its famous Iron Dome. The sight of its interceptors tracking threats above Tel Aviv’s horizon is now a familiar sight.
But it was the first time the Jewish state had been attacked by another country since 1991, when Saddam Hussein fired dozens of Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa while Iraq was at war with its most powerful ally. close to Israel, the United States.
At the time, George W. Bush persuaded Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir not to retaliate. This time around, Netanyahu may be less receptive to this argument, given the scale of the Iranian attack; Iran launched more ballistic missiles at Israel in an hour this weekend than Iraq did during weeks of war.
As Biden watched from the White House Situation Room, at least 100 ballistic missiles streaked through the sky, minutes from Israeli territory.
But in the balance, Iran may have given Biden’s argument a little boost. After telegraphing the assault for two weeks and primarily using slow drones that Israeli air defenses could easily track and eliminate, Tehran reduced the risk of mass casualties.
These drones, some of which – the Shahed-136 – are similar to those that Russia launched in Ukraine, have proven easy to dismantle. Even Ukraine’s limited air defenses succeeded. At the same time, an Israeli official said, the drone swarm was designed to probe Israel’s responses and track the locations and trajectories of its defensive assets.
“They learned a lot about us, and we learned a little about them,” the official said. “It was an education.”
Iranian missiles were less easily deflected but, given the advance warning, Israel had placed its most sophisticated, multibillion-dollar missile defenses on high alert. The Arrow system destroyed most of the cruise and ballistic missiles, while Israel’s allies destroyed the rest.
“The Iranians took into consideration the fact that Israel has a very, very powerful multi-tiered anti-missile system,” said Sima Shine, a former official of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency who focuses on Iran. “And they probably took into consideration that there wouldn’t be too many casualties.”
Shine said the assault was similar to that launched by Iran after the 2020 assassination of revered Qassem Soleimani by the IRGC, on the orders of then-US President Donald Trump. Then as now, Iran telegraphed the assault on U.S. troops in Iraq, giving them advance notice to take defensive measures that resulted in no casualties in a televised attack.
“From Iran’s point of view, it was a show: ‘We have the capability.’ We all have different missiles and drones. We can do it. We prefer not to turn this into war,’” » Shine said. “The fact that we can sit down now and talk about waiting, seeing, thinking and not retaliating is because there were no casualties..”
Indeed, almost immediately after the attack ended, Israel returned to a steady, if martial, pace. Citizens were informed that they no longer needed to shelter in place and that by Monday evening, all restrictions on public gatherings would be lifted across the country.
But the country was still at war, against Hamas, even against Iran. And in the north, as they have done almost daily for the past six months, Israeli warplanes pounded Hezbollah targets in retaliation for rocket attacks earlier that night.
“We intercepted. We are arrested [the attack]. Together we will win,” Netanyahu said on X, signaling that while this barrage may be over, Israel’s war is not.