The three urgent questions that arise from Iran’s assault on Israel

It is difficult to tell at this stage whether the attack represents a conclusion to hostilities which began with the raid on a consular building in Damascus, or the opening salvos of a wider war, writes Mary Dejevsky

The attack was unprecedented not just in its scale, but in being, for the most part, launched directly from Iran (AFP via Getty)

It will be no exaggeration to say that much of the world held its breath when Israel announced, late on Saturday evening local time, that Iran’s long-expected reprisal raids were under way, with hundreds of drones and missiles headed its way.

The attack was unprecedented not just in its scale, but in being, for the most part, launched directly from Iran. As such, it represented a new and immensely threatening stage, as a potential state-to-state conflict, rather than one conducted through proxies. No one – not Iran, not Israel, not the surrounding states, not the European countries and especially not the United States – was under any illusions about the possible consequences.

Modern reconnaissance and communications capacities meant that the awareness was widely shared, giving time – on the positive side – for those in the likely target zones to seek shelter, but also for many, many more people in the region and beyond to chart, and dread, the approach of war in real time.

In the end, for those watching through the night or waking up to the news, the feared cataclysm was avoided. Israel’s defences, bolstered by US, French and UK air support, succeeded in disabling almost all the firepower unleashed by Iran. According to Israel, there was limited damage to an air base in the Negev desert, and one child was injured. At the barest minimum, this can be described as a major success for the defence of Israel, and should, it must be hoped, avert, or at least delay, the much-feared regional conflagration.

Here, though, much of the certainty ends, and the questions begin – many of them doubtless being addressed at the emergency government and alliance meetings being held around the world today.

First, does Iran’s attack mark the end of something or the beginning of something? While many reports described it as constituting a serious “escalation” of the war in Gaza, my view is that this is not quite true. The most significant escalation was the raid – not claimed, but assumed to have been committed by, Israel on an Iranian consular building in Damascus on 1 April, in which 13 people, including two senior Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, were killed.

The significance of this was obscured in much of the Western media by the killing of seven aid workers in Gaza on the same day. But an attack on diplomatic buildings is tantamount to an attack on sovereign territory. It was not something Iran’s leaders could leave without a response.

Iran has now made clear, through its mission to the United Nations, that it regards its raids this weekend as having “concluded” the matter – in other words, Tehran sees its attack as an end, not a beginning. In the same vein, it warned Israel of “a considerably more severe” response, should the “Israeli regime make another mistake”. So the first question has to be whether Israel will see it the same way.

A second question concerns Iran’s intentions. Was it intending to launch lethal strikes on Israel, or were its raids carefully calibrated to strike less populated areas and inflict limited damage? Were they, in other words, more symbolic than real – designed to dispel any impression of weakness (including among its own citizens) and deter future attacks by Israel, but not to up the ante? Or did Iran intend to do real damage, but fail?

Everything Iran’s leaders have said since the Hamas attacks of 7 October has suggested that they wanted to avoid becoming involved in, or indeed escalating the conflict. The same goes for its proxy, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. However there have been conflicting accounts of Iran’s actual intentions.

On the one hand, there have been belated Israeli reports that Iran funded and had advanced knowledge of the 7 October Hamas attacks (which I personally doubt). There have also been persistent reports (to which I give more credence) of recent contacts between Iranian and US officials (something almost without precedent since the 1979 Iranian revolution) with a view to agreeing some limits on Iran’s response to the Damascus attack and restraining any counter-response from Israel. On balance, it seems reasonable to believe that Iran fully expected most of its drones and missiles not to reach their targets.

A third question is whether this is how Israel – primed no doubt by the United States – will see Iran’s attack, or whether it will treat it as an invitation to launch further attacks on Iranian interests, or even on Iran itself. There is a view that Israel attacked Iran’s Damascus consulate deliberately, in order to trap Iran into a response that could serve as a pretext for further – and far more destructive – Israeli action. That remains an open question. What cannot be contested, though, is that Israel regards Iran as a far greater threat to its survival than Hamas – for all its current difficulties with rooting it out of Gaza.

What happened this weekend raises several further questions beyond the bilateral relationship between Israel and Iran. One is whether and how far Iran’s raids could reshape the Gaza war and the international climate. Israel’s conduct of the war swiftly lost it large swathes of foreign (moral) support, including at the popular level even in the US and the UK, to the point where both had to adjust their public stance – on a ceasefire, for instance.

But they continued to supply weapons, and allied firepower against Iran’s drones and missiles appears to have been decisive. Has the pro-Israel alliance been reconstituted? Did it ever really go away? An emergency session of the UN Security Council called at Israel’s request could provide clues.

Second, and not unrelated: Iran tried to raise the question of the violation of its diplomatic territory in Damascus at the UN, to no avail. There seems also to have been no public support for Iran from, for example, either the US or the UK. But diplomatic immunity is a basic principle of international rules, and a failure to condemn such a breach when it happens to some countries, but not others, not only undermines the principle, but smacks of double standards (as with the US supply of cluster bombs to Ukraine or the staunch defence of self-determination for Ukrainians, but not for Palestinians).

This brings us to the role of the RAF in the air defence of Israel. The justification for this appears to be a 10-year-old mission called Operation Shader, established to combat Isis and other jihadi groups in the region. Has there, and should there have been, any parliamentary scrutiny of the use of the UK’s (hard-pressed) armed forces in this new capacity? Is there a risk that it could endanger the safety of UK citizens at home or abroad? Should there be rather more transparency in such matters?

And finally, a footnote on Ukraine. I wonder how President Zelensky and his team, and Ukrainians generally, reacted to the immediate, high-profile and hands-on engagement of the US and the UK over the Middle East on Saturday night – as some of their own cities were being pounded by Russian airpower.

If nothing else, it should have demonstrated that, for all the fine words from Boris Johnson in his time and others, where the US and the UK are concerned, Ukraine’s defence needs to take second place to those of Israel. And while the US and the UK may be prepared to risk taking on a debilitated Iran, the same does not apply to a direct confrontation with Russia.