- By Lyse Doucet
- Chief International Correspondent
The final round of the region’s most dangerous rivalry appears to be over for now.
Israel has still not officially acknowledged that the attack in Iran in the early hours of Friday morning was its fault.
Meanwhile, Iran’s military and political leaders have downplayed, dismissed and even ridiculed the fact that anything significant might have happened.
Accounts about the type of weaponry deployed Friday and the extent of the damage caused remain conflicting and incomplete.
U.S. officials call it a missile strike, but Iranian officials say the attacks, in the central Isfahan province and northwest of Tabriz, were provoked by the explosion of small drones.
“The downed micro-air vehicles did not cause any damage or casualties,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian insisted to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
But these simple quadcopters are Israel’s calling card – it has deployed them repeatedly during its years of covert operations in Iran.
This time their main target was the central province of Isfahan, famous for its magnificent Islamic heritage.
However, in recent times the province is more famous for the Natanz nuclear facility, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center and a major air base, which was used during the Iranian attack on Israel on April 14.
It is also an industrial heartland housing the factories that produce the drones and ballistic missiles that were fired by the hundreds toward Israel last Sunday.
Thus, a limited operation appears to have delivered a powerful warning: Israel has the intelligence and means to strike at will at Iran’s beating heart.
It is such an urgent message that Israel ensured it was sent before rather than after the start of Passover, as Israeli observers had widely predicted.
U.S. officials also said Israel had targeted sites such as Iran’s air defense radar system, which protects Natanz. There is still no confirmed account of its success.
This attack could therefore also be just an opening salvo. But it was, for the moment, an unintentional gift for the 85th birthday of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Israel’s official silence has given Iran’s ultimate decision-maker vital political space. Tehran did not need to invoke its new rule that whenever its archenemy strikes, Iran will hit back hard, with the risk of triggering a perilous spiral of escalation.
Iran also welcomes what it sees as its new power projection.
Radical President Ebrahim Raïssi did not even mention these most recent events in his speeches on Friday.
For the Islamic Republic, it is above all about what it calls Operation True Promise – its unprecedented attack on Israel in the middle of the night last Sunday. He praised what he called his country’s “iron will.”
Iran has for years prided itself on its “strategic patience,” its policy of playing a long-term game rather than retaliating immediately and directly to any provocation.
Today, he invokes “strategic deterrence”. This new doctrine was sparked by the April 1 attack on its diplomatic compound in Damascus, which destroyed its consular annex and killed seven Revolutionary Guards, including its top commander in the region.
Iran’s supreme leader was under increasing pressure to draw a line as Israel increased its targets in the last six months of the terrible war in Gaza.
No longer content with striking Tehran’s assets, including weapons caches, buildings, bases and supply routes on battlefields like Syria and Lebanon, Israel was also assassinating high-ranking officials.
Decades-long hostility, which had previously manifested itself in shadow wars and covert operations, erupted into open confrontation.
Whatever the specifics of this latest blow-for-blow, there is a more fundamental priority for both sides: deterrence – a more solid certainty that strikes on one’s own soil will not happen again. If they do, there will be a cost to pay, and it will hurt.
For now, a sigh of relief is audible across the region and in capitals around the world.
Israel’s latest decision, under the concerned insistence of its allies to limit its retaliation, will have eased this tension, for now. Everyone wants to end a total and catastrophic war. But no one will doubt that a lull may not last.
The region is still on fire.
The war in Gaza continues, causing an impressive number of Palestinian casualties.
Under pressure from its most loyal allies, Israel has facilitated the delivery of greater amounts of desperately needed aid, but the devastated territory remains on the brink of famine.
The Israeli hostages have still not returned home and ceasefire talks have stalled. Israel continues to warn of coming fighting in Hamas’ last bastion of Rafah – which aid chiefs and world leaders say would be another unspeakable humanitarian disaster.
Iran’s network of proxies in the region, what it calls an “axis of resistance” stretching from Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, through Iran-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria, to the Houthis in Yemen, is ready and continues to attack daily.
Over the past few weeks, everything and nothing has changed simultaneously in the region’s darkest and most dangerous days.