Israeli leaders were debating Tuesday how best to respond to Iran’s unprecedented airstrike this weekend, officials said, weighing a set of options calibrated to achieve different strategic outcomes: deterring a similar attack to future, appease their American allies and avoid all-out war.
The Iranian attack on Israel, a massive barrage including hundreds of ballistic missiles and explosive drones, has changed the unwritten rules of the rivals’ long shadow war. In this conflict, major airstrikes launched directly from one country’s territory against another country have been avoided.
Given this change in precedent, the calculus by which Israel decides its next action has also changed, said the Israeli officials who requested anonymity to discuss Iran.
“We cannot stand idly by in the face of this type of aggression,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israeli army, said on Tuesday. Iran, he added, will not escape “sheltered from this aggression”.
As Israel’s war cabinet met to consider a military response, other countries applied diplomatic pressure on both Israel and Iran in hopes of deescalating the conflict.
Almost all of the missiles and drones fired in the Iranian attack on Sunday morning were intercepted by Israel and its allies, including the United States and Britain.
The attack, Iran said, was a response to an Israeli airstrike earlier this month, in which several armed forces commanders were killed in an attack in Syria. That Attack on Iranian embassy building in Damascus was so different from previous targeted killings of individuals during the shadow war that it gave Iran an opportunity to recalibrate its own red lines.
The strike also destroyed a building part of the Iranian embassy complex, normally considered prohibited tackle. Israeli officials said the building was diplomatic in name only and was used as an Iranian military and intelligence base, making it a legitimate target.
Iran, which indicated it viewed the attack as an Israeli break with shadow war norms, felt compelled to retaliate vigorously, analysts say, in order to establish deterrence and maintain credibility. with his proxies and his die-hard supporters.
Israel does not want Iran to conclude that it can now attack Israeli territory in response to an Israeli strike against Iranian interests in a third country, some officials said, summarizing the internal Israeli debate. But, they added, Israel does not want to, nor can it afford, a major conflict with Iran while continuing to wage war in Gaza and skirmish with Iranian proxies along its borders.
Members of Israel’s small but fragmented war cabinet are considering options significant enough to send a clear message to Iran that such attacks will not go unanswered, but not so much as to trigger a major escalation.
Officials outlined the following options, along with their downsides, from which Israeli leaders choose a response:
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Conducting an aggressive strike on an Iranian target, such as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base, in a country other than Iran such as Syria. (The downside is that it lacks the symmetry of responding to a direct attack on Israel with a direct attack on Iran.)
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Strike a mostly symbolic target in Iran. (Such a move would likely require consultation with the United States and risk angering Americans who have advised against such a strike.)
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Carry out a cyberattack against Iranian infrastructure. (This could prematurely expose Israel’s cyber capabilities and would not constitute an in-kind response to a major airstrike.)
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Accelerate small attacks in Iran, including targeted assassinations, carried out by Mossad. (Israel does not claim responsibility for such attacks, so they do not correspond to the public nature of the Iranian strike.)
Other Israeli options include doing nothing or taking a more diplomatic approach, including a U.N. Security Council boycott of Iran, other officials said.
At least two cabinet members argued at the time of the Iranian attack that Israel must respond immediately, two Israeli officials said, arguing that a quick response in self-defense would give such a counterattack obvious legitimacy.
Yet after three days of meetings, the cabinet has yet to decide on a response. On Tuesday, the five-member cabinet met with security officials for two hours of consultations, according to an official, and they are expected to meet again on Wednesday.
War cabinet discussions shrouded in secrecy and torn apart by old rivalries and distrust. Its members share stories of fierce competition as well as personal and political betrayal, which can sometimes influence the details that leak.
According to two officials, the main proponents of immediate retaliation over the weekend were Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former military leaders and now centrist political allies who broke through parliamentary barriers to join the government in the interest of unity national after October 1, 2017. 7 Attack carried out by Hamas against Israel.
But for reasons that remain unclear, no strikes took place on Sunday following the Iranian attack.
U.S. officials publicly and privately tried to persuade Israel that it did not need to retaliate for the Iranian strike. Mr. Netanyahu, they argued, can “achieve victory” with a successful defense against the Iranian attack, which caused minimal damage and injured only one person, a young Bedouin girl.
But U.S. officials also said they understood that it might be impossible to persuade Israel not to retaliate. U.S. officials said they understood that Israeli officials believed they needed to respond to a direct Iranian strike against Israel in a way visible to the world. A covert Israeli attack on Iran, U.S. officials said, would likely not be enough to satisfy Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition partners or the current Israeli government.
If that counterattack were to unleash a new round of Iranian missiles and drones, U.S. officials said, U.S. warplanes and ships would once again come to their ally’s defense against their main adversary in the Middle East. .
The United States also supports diplomatic efforts to pressure and punish Iran, including imposing tougher sanctions against the country in the coming days, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Tuesday during a press conference in Washington.
Ms. Yellen declined to specify what form sanctions might take, but suggested that the Biden administration was considering ways to further restrict Iranian oil exports. The United States is also studying ways to cut off Iran’s access to the military components it uses to make weapons such as the drones it launched toward Israel over the weekend, according to a Treasury official. who declined to be named in order to discuss private deliberations.
“Treasury will not hesitate to work with our allies to use our sanctions authority to continue to disrupt the Iranian regime’s malign and destabilizing activities,” Yellen said ahead of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the Bank. worldwide.
As Israel faces pressure from its allies to avoid a wider conflict with Iran, several countries, including Russia, China and Japan, have also urged Iran to avoid further escalation .
And the European Union is considering extending economic sanctions against Iran’s weapons program to punish that country for last weekend’s attack on Israel and try to prevent any escalation of violence in the Middle East, a the EU’s top diplomat said on Tuesday.
“I am not trying to exaggerate when I say that in the Middle East we are on the edge of a very deep precipice,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles said after a meeting Hastily organized European diplomats to discuss the crisis.
The report was provided by Eric Schmitt, Alan Rappport, Cassandra Vinograd, Aaron Boxerman Christopher F. Schuetze And Lara Jakes.
