“Escalate to De-escalate”: What Led Iran to Attack Israel

Tehran tests the limits of retaliation as Israel lays siege to southern Lebanon

On Tuesday evening, Iran launched a wave of ballistic missile attacks striking sites throughout Israel, in retaliation for its recent assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards officer Abbas Nilforoushan. Initial estimates claim that Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, with missiles reportedly targeting military airbases and other sites throughout the country.

“In response to the assassination of Martyr Haniyeh, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Sardar Nilforoshan, we targeted important targets,” read a statement shared on Telegram channels linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “If the Zionist regime responds to our attack, our next attacks will be more devastating.” In a statement about the attack, the IRGC said that it had “targeted three military bases: Nevatim, which houses F-35 aircraft, Netzarim, which houses F-15 jets used in the assassination of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and Tel Nof base near Tel Aviv with Fateh ballistic missiles.”

Video footage on social media also showed damage from missile impacts in Israeli cities, including multiple attacks that hit Tel Aviv. One individual, a construction worker from Gaza who had been stuck in the West Bank since October 7, was reportedly killed by a missile, likely intercepted by the Iron Dome, that fell on the city of Jericho. Despite videos appearing to show major strikes on military targets across Israel, including airfields and facilities associated with Israeli intelligence, there were no initial reports of military casualties. Israel has a state military censor to suppress information deemed important to national security.

Rockets fired from Iran over the skies of Jerusalem / Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

“We’re in a very, very potentially dangerous position. I think Iran knows that. I think the Iranian leadership knows that. I think it feels confident enough that it won’t lose a war—it may not win a war but Israel’s not sending troops to Iran,” said Hooman Majd, a political analyst and author who served as an advisor to former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. “It’s going to be missiles back and forth, perhaps a bombing run by Israeli planes, but it’s not going to be much past that. Iran can’t do a bombing run on Israel, but it can send missiles and it has good missiles and it has drones.”

Israel’s military offensive in Lebanon has already killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, and displaced roughly one million people, while also inflicting devastating losses on the leadership of Hezbollah, Iran’s chief political and military ally in the region. For Iran, the dilemma was how to retaliate, Majd said: strong enough to send a response, but not so strong as to provoke Israel to come back with a substantially harder attack.

“Iran’s been very clear that they don’t want the great war. It’s the last thing they want,” said Majd, who recently met with the new Iranian president and other officials during the UN General Assembly in New York. “The mere fact that the supreme leader did a 180 from supporting the most hardline elements in Iran to supporting, fully supporting, a moderate who wants to get Iran out of the situation it’s in. No, I don’t think Iran has any appetite for a broader war.” Though Iran had promised a response after the killing of Nasrallah, it had previously declined to hit Israel directly after the assassination of numerous other allies and Iranian military commanders and advisers. 

Iranian officials have said that, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Haniyeh at an IRGC guesthouse in Tehran in July, U.S. officials urged them against retaliating. The U.S. told them that such a move would jeopardize a supposedly impending ceasefire deal in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then went on to systematically sabotage any deal. And Israel launched its pager attacks in Lebanon and began bombing areas throughout the country, assassinating much of the Hezbollah senior leadership. 

In a statement on Twitter, Iran’s recently elected reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian said, “Netanyahu should know that Iran is not a warmonger, but it stands firmly against any threat,” adding, “This is only a part of our power. Do not enter into a conflict with Iran.”

In April, following the killings of several high-ranking IRGC officers in Syria, Iran launched a large number of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel. But in that attack it carefully signaled its intentions to Israel’s regional allies over a period of days. This allowed them to intercept most of the projectiles, leaving the attack itself to serve more as a demonstration of Iran’s capabilities than a direct assault.

This was not the case in the attack this Tuesday, which saw countless ballistic missiles directly striking Israeli territory. Footage shared online showed salvos of projectiles striking Israeli territory, overwhelming the country’s vaunted Iron Dome and Arrow missile batteries. Geolocated footage posted online also appeared to show a huge missile barrage striking Nevatim Air Base in the Negev Desert, which houses many of Israel’s advanced F-35 fighter jets. Another strike geolocated by open-source intelligence analysts struck near the headquarters of the Mossad in northern Tel Aviv.

Notably, Iran gave warning of today’s attack, but with far less time than it did in April. According to reports from Reuters, Iran did inform the U.S. through diplomatic channels earlier in the day about the impending attack. Millions of Israeli citizens had already retreated to bomb shelters by the time the missiles struck.

Part of the message Majd said Iran sent was: Next time there may be no advance warning. “If we don’t telegraph it, if we do this at 3:00 in the morning and nobody knows that we’re doing this, if we can manage to keep it secret, we could do a lot of damage,” he said, speculating on Iran’s thinking. “The fact that they did this was to really show not just Israel, but also show the regional states, the Arab states, ‘We have firepower, and it’s not going to be easy to stop us.’”

Netanyahu gave a brief speech after the strikes. He characterized the Iranian attack as a failure, which was largely thwarted by Israeli defenses, and he thanked the U.S. for its support. “Iran made a big mistake tonight—and it will pay for it. The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies,” he said. Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris characterized the attacks as a failure and credited the U.S. with militarily assisting Israel. “This is testament to Israeli military capability and the U.S. military,” said Biden. “I'm clear-eyed Iran is a destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East," Harris said

A string of Israeli tactical successes with its assassination rampage in Lebanon had seemingly emboldened Netanyahu over the past month. Rather than condemn Israel’s massive bombing of a crowded Beirut suburb in an effort to kill Nasrallah, Biden and Harris endorsed the assassination operation, saying it served as a “measure of justice.” During his post-Nasrallah victory tour this week, Netanyahu delivered a video address, purportedly aimed at the people of Iran whom he called “Persians.” He seemed to promise imminent regime change in Iran. “When Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think, everything will be different,” Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media. The Israeli prime minister also hinted at the likelihood of future Israeli strikes directly targeting the Iranian government, warning that, “there is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach.” 

The mixture of triumphalism and threats continued when Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former point man for Middle East affairs, issued a lengthy post on Twitter on September 29 openly demanding U.S. support for an Israeli attack against Iran. “Iran is now fully exposed,” he wrote, adding: “Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.”

Amid the drumbeat of threats and following the seeming decimation of its allies in Lebanon, Iran may have calculated that its best bet was to hit first before it was targeted at home, rather than continuing a policy of strategic patience.

“The narrative being created by Jared Kushner’s statement as well as Netanyahu’s regime change video was that Iran is now on its back, and this is the time to go and take them out,”  said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “This telegraphed a clear message that Israel was planning to attack Iran, one way or another, relatively soon.”

Reporting recently has indicated that senior figures in the Biden administration, including Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk and presidential adviser Amos Hochstein, have given the green light to Israel’s military offensive against Iranian allies in the region, reportedly treating it as an opportunity to transform the region in their favor. This endorsement of maximalist Israeli goals by the Biden administration—evidently undaunted by the staggering humanitarian toll in Gaza and Lebanon—also seemed to play a role in Iran’s decision to target Israel directly at this time.

“The Iranians also now have ample evidence to conclude that Israel is not doing this on their own, and that, rather than restraining them, the Biden administration is completely on board with Israel’s policy for the region,” Parsi added. “War is already at Iran’s doorstep.”

The Biden administration has issued statements suggesting Israel will respond to the Iranian attack harshly, with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying that the assault “appears to have been defeated and ineffective.” The statements seemed to downplay the gravity of the unprecedented attack as Israel considers how it will retaliate.

Potential targets include Iran’s oil and gas fields, along with sites affiliated with its nuclear program and the leadership of the current Iranian government. Iran has periodically threatened to target oil and gas plants in neighboring countries if its own critical infrastructure was struck, a step that would likely plunge the global economy into crisis. Likewise, Iran and Iran-backed groups in the region have threatened in the past to target Israeli port, energy, and water desalination facilities in the event of a major war.

Facing a potential decapitation strike, the Iranians appeared to have struck first in order to send a message that in any such conflict Israel’s own critical infrastructure and military assets would also not be spared.

“After a string of assassinations and other Israeli escalations in recent weeks, Iran is trying to create a new deterrence equilibrium. They are saying that we can still hit you, and we can hit you hard,” said Sina Toossi, a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy. “Iran is actually trying to ‘escalate to de-escalate’ here. They had pursued a policy of strategic patience, but many people inside Iran had already been saying that if they had responded forcefully to the killing of Haniyeh, there would not have been the strike against Nasrallah.”

Earlier this week, it was announced that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been moved to a secure location for his own safety after recent assassinations, and likely in preparation for Tuesday’s strikes. Khamenei is expected to deliver a sermon at congregational prayers in Tehran this Friday, a significant and relatively rare event that typically takes place during moments of political crisis or transition. Should Khamenei appear in person, it would be a defiant challenge to Israel’s industrial scale assassination program.

His address would also be intended as a morale boost to his supporters, particularly in Lebanon where Hezbollah has been reeling from a string of killings that have eliminated most of its longtime leadership. Chief among these is Nasrallah, an iconic political and religious figure whose influence extended far beyond Palestine and Lebanon. Khamenei has taken a risk in ordering the strikes against Israel, but has seemingly done so to regain some of the leverage that Iran has lost in the face of repeated attacks that passed without reaction. 

“I think they had to show a bigger reaction than they did in April, because clearly that deterred nothing for Israel or the Netanyahu government,” said Majd. “And so this time, they felt that the deterrent had to be something that was real.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article identified the construction worker from Gaza killed in Jericho as a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, based on erroneous early reports. The reference has been corrected.