Israel carried out its threat and attacked targets in Iran early this Friday in response to Tehran’s offensive five days earlier. Although not all details are known, the scope has been limited. The Iranian regime claims to have destroyed three drones in the province of Isfahan, the heart of the Iranian nuclear program, after activating its defense systems. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), dependent on the UN, has confirmed that no nuclear installations have suffered damage. A senior Iranian official quoted by the Reuters agency has indicated that Tehran – which had warned that it would respond to the slightest blow against its territory – does not plan to respond immediately because it is not clear who is behind the attack, which it downplays. The president, Ebrahim Raisi, has not even mentioned it in a speech to the nation. Israel, as usual, remains silent. The first information points to a moderate retaliation after days of international calls for containment.
The Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, has clarified that his country “has not been involved,” in line with his messages in the previous days. Israel notified Washington, its great ally, hours before of the retaliation operation. A senior Iranian commander has suggested that the attack was launched within its borders. “We have not received an external attack and the discussion tends more towards an infiltration [operación desde dentro]”, he told the Reuters agency. The official Iranian media is downplaying the Israeli attack, a response to the also calculated offensive that Tehran launched on the night of last Saturday to Sunday, with more than 300 drones and missiles, and which caused no deaths or hardly any material damage.
The Iranian Fars agency points out that “several unidentified objects” were shot down by “the air defenses of the 8th Shekari military base”, near that base, the Isfahan airport and the city of Qahjavarestan, in the same province. The national airspace was temporarily closed and has already been restored, according to the Iranian Airports and Air Navigation Company, cited by the state agency.
There is no data on victims or material damage, nor have large explosions been felt, according to Iranian media. The spokesman for the National Space Center of Iran, Hossein Dalirian, has also assured in a message on X (formerly Twitter), that his country has shot down quadcopter drones, small unmanned devices with four propellers.to which explosive charges can be added and which Israel has used in the past to attack Iran, such as in 2021 and last year, also against Isfahan. Some neighbors have recorded explosions that authorities attribute to the interception.
That area, in the center of the country and about 400 kilometers south of the capital, hosts military installations, Defense system factories and, above all, nuclear system installations such as the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, from where Tehran announced in 2007 that had joined the club of countries capable of producing nuclear fuel on an industrial scale. This place has previously been the target of attacks from Israel. In the provincial capital of the same name, there is also the Center for Nuclear Technology of the University of Isfahan, the largest nuclear research complex in Iran, which employs approximately 3,000 scientists. The US and Israel suspect that its facilities host a secret research program to produce atomic weapons, something that Tehran denies. Iran assures that its atomic program is exclusively for civilian purposes.
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Israeli silence
Israel rarely acknowledges its operations abroad, at least not immediately. It remains to be seen if any of its leaders suggest, as is usual, Israeli authorship, although without express recognition. Only the Minister of National Security, the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir, has spoken. He has done so with a message in X that reflects his disappointment that the attack was not more powerful. His ministry controls the police, but Ben Gvir is not part of the war cabinet that makes military decisions.
The offensive has not been limited to Iran. The official Syrian news agency, Sana, reports citing military sources of an early morning attack on the country’s air defense systems that caused only material damage. Tehran supports Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the civil war in Syria and its allied militias have become stronger.
Military response
Israel had announced in different forums throughout this week that the unprecedented offensive by the Iranian regime last weekend in its territory would not go without a military response, which generated fear of an open regional war. The escalation has its origins in Israel’s bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus, the capital of Syria, on April 1. He killed 16 people, seven of them members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. One of the fatalities was Mohamed Reza Zahedi, leader of the Al Quds force in Lebanon, a regional branch of this Iranian body.
Israel has been calibrating the type and intensity of its response for days. Amid the threats and the war dialectic of both countries, throughout the week international pressure has grown for containment to prevail. The IAEA had expressed fears that Israel would direct the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the United States on Thursday announced new sanctions against Tehran and that country’s drone industry and missile program, in a coordinated punishment with the United Kingdom that the Netanyahu government requested. The European Union has also announced that it is considering imposing similar measures. Following Iran’s attack last week, the threat to invade Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that is home to more than half of the 2.3 million Gazans, which was announced almost two months ago by the first minister and had been delaying due to international pressures.
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