The Israeli military struck Iran early on Friday in retaliation for an aerial attack on Israel last weekend, according to two Israeli and three Iranian officials, but the strike appeared to be limited in scope and the reaction from both Israel and Iran was muted.
Iranian officials said that the strike had hit a military air base near the city of Isfahan, in central Iran, and that it had been carried out by small drones. They said the drones might have been launched from inside Iran, whose radar systems had not detected unidentified aircraft entering Iranian airspace.
If the drones were launched within the country, it would demonstrate once again Israel’s ability to mount clandestine operations in Iranian territory. Iranian officials said that a separate group of small drones was shot down in the region of Tabriz, roughly 500 miles north of Isfahan.
Israeli warplanes also fired missiles during the retaliatory strike, a Western official and two Iranian officials said. It was not immediately clear whether Iran’s defenses intercepted the missiles or where they landed.
The Israeli military declined to comment. A senior U.S. official said that Israel had notified the United States through multiple channels shortly before the attack. All the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Addressing reporters at a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of 7 nations in Italy, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States had “not been involved in any offensive operations” in Iran. But he declined to comment further and would not even confirm the Israeli strike, referring instead to “reported events.”
In public, Iranian officials played down the attack.
Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi, the commander in chief of Iran’s army, said that explosions heard early Friday in Isfahan “were from our air defense firing at a suspicious object” and that there had been “no damage.” An Iranian lawmaker, Seyed Nezamedin Mousavi, called the strike “ridiculous” and said it showed that Israel had “accepted defeat and is content with these ineffective actions.”
World leaders, who had been urging Israel and Iran to de-escalate tensions, once again implored both countries to avoid any taking any further action that could set off a wider war in the Middle East while Israel is fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both allies of Iran.
“Significant escalation is not in anyone’s interests,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, whose military participated in defending Israel against Iran’s missile-and-drone attack last weekend, told reporters on Friday. “What we want to see is calm heads prevail across the region.”
Early Saturday, there was an air attack on a base used by an Iranian-backed armed group, Harakat al Nujaba, in Iraq’s Babylon Province, according to an arm of Iraq’s security forces, the Popular Mobilization Forces. A hospital said at least three people were wounded in the explosion there.
There was no claim of responsibility for the strike on Saturday at the base used by Harakat al Nujaba, which is part of Iraq’s security apparatus. The U.S. military, which has carried out strikes on Iranian-backed armed groups in Iraq in the past, said in a statement that it had not participated in any strikes in Iraq.
Some analysts said that the small scale of Israel’s attack on Friday in Iran could give both countries a reason to refrain from further military strikes.
“It appears we are out of the danger zone and, because Israel’s strike was limited, it has allowed both countries to back down for now,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a British research institution.
The area around Isfahan has several Iranian military sites, including nuclear facilities that Israel has targeted in the past. But Iranian news agencies reported that none of the nuclear facilities had been hit and appeared keen to show that life was “back to normal” in the city known for its turquoise and purple tiled mosques, picturesque arched bridges and Grand Bazaar. Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, published a gallery of photos of people out and about in Isfahan — among them, women strolling with shopping bags and a child kicking a soccer ball.
President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran had forewarned that “the tiniest act of aggression” on his country’s soil would draw a response. But as of Friday evening in Iran, there had been no public calls for retribution by Iranian officials. Iran’s former foreign minister, Javad Zarif, described the strike on Isfahan as “reckless fireworks” and urged world leaders to “focus on ending Israeli transgressions, particularly its war on Gaza.”
SANA, a Syrian state news agency, reported that Israeli missiles also hit a Syrian air defense site in southern Syria at 2:55 a.m. local time on Friday, causing some damage but no casualties. It was not immediately clear whether the strike was part of the Israeli response to Iran’s weekend attack. The report gave no further details, and there was no immediate comment from Israel.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said the strike in Syria had targeted a radar system in the southern province of Dara’a. It said that the Syrian military had detected Israeli aircraft entering the country’s airspace but that its air defenses did not try to intercept the strikes. Iran-backed armed groups throughout Syria had been on high alert, anticipating a possible Israeli strike, the group said.
Speaking on the last day of the Group of 7 meeting on the Italian island of Capri, Mr. Blinken declined to say whether the United States had been notified in advance of the Israeli strike on Iran. Shortly before he spoke, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told reporters that the United States had been informed ahead of time.
“But there was no involvement on the part of the United States,” Mr. Tajani said. “It was simply information which was provided,” adding that he believed that the group’s collective efforts deserved credit for “the small scale of the event.”
Israel struck Iran in response to more than 300 missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel last Saturday night, nearly all of which were shot down. Iran said that attack was carried out in retaliation for an April 1 strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed seven Iranian military officers.
The back-and-forth strikes have pushed a decades-long shadow war between Israel and Iran — waged on land, at sea, in air and in cyberspace — more clearly into the open. In Israel, some commentators on news shows said the strike was somewhat successful even if it did not appear to have caused significant damage to military sites in Iran.
“Israel can do elegant military maneuvers that are not noisy or cause significant military damage but which deliver the message Israel wants,” Dana Weiss, a diplomatic-affairs analyst for Israel’s Channel 12, told viewers. “And that is what we have seen them do.”
The post Israel Strikes an Iranian Military Base, but Damage Appears Limited appeared first on New York Times.