Will Israel strike Iran – and if so, how and when?

Since the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at the end of September, Israel has expanded its air strike campaign in Lebanon and launched a ground invasion. It has also struck Yemen and Syria in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah has launched a series of rocket attacks towards Israel, which for the most part have been intercepted. At the same time, the war in Gaza is continuing as Israel devastates the north of the enclave.
The other major escalation was Iran directly striking Israel with ballistic missiles for the second time since April. Israel has now vowed to strike back. But when and how?
Until now, Iran has relied on its proxy groups in the Middle East. At first, it was unthinkable that any major world power would want to get involved in a war of that scale. Neither the US nor Iran seemed to want to venture to that point of no return. However, tensions have escalated.
In this episode of Beyond the Headlines, host Nada AlTaher looks at the potential consequences of these recent escalations. We hear from Paul Salem, vice president for International Engagement at the Middle East Institute, and Dr Sanam Vakil, Middle East and North Africa programme director at Chatham House. They analyse how Israel could respond and the geopolitical risks the warring sides may or may not consider.
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Below is the full transcript of this episode:
Nada AlTaher:  In a widely circulated image last week, we saw Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York at the UN General Assembly session. He was sitting in a room holding a phone to his ear, surrounded by his delegation.
This is reportedly the moment he approved an air strike on Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It also may have been the pivotal moment that Israel’s war with Hezbollah changed.
Since then, Israel has expanded its air campaign in Lebanon and conducted a ground invasion into the south of the country. Hezbollah has launched a series of rocket attacks towards Israel, which Israel often says are intercepted. At the same time, it has struck Yemen and Syria, while the atrocities in Gaza are worsening and Israel devastates the isolated northern region of enclaves, with plans to turn it into a military zone and force 300,000 Palestinians to leave.
But the other major escalation was Iran attacking Israel directly with ballistic missiles for the second time since April. Now Israel has vowed to strike back. But when and how?
The international community warned time and time again against allowing the war in Gaza to escalate. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks have mostly been an inconvenience to Israel. The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping have been detrimental for the group and the Yemeni people, after Israel struck the vital Hodeidah port, which brings in aid for millions. But even the situation there was still within the bounds of a contained battlefront.
Until now, Iran has relied on its proxy groups in the Middle East to do its bidding. And at first it was unthinkable that any major world power would want to get dragged into a war. Neither the US nor Iran seemed to want to venture to that point of no return. Israel, on the other hand, appears to have forced all sides to the brink of war.
Ironically, Iran had just begun to show signs that it was willing to engage in diplomacy with the West. Hezbollah was about to soften to the idea of a Lebanese ceasefire, potentially abandoning its vow to stand with Hamas in Gaza. And the US has been eager to get a deal done, ideally before its presidential election in November. But has that ship sailed now?
This is Beyond the Headlines and I’m your host, Nadal AlTaher. In this episode, we look at all the recent escalations in the Middle East and their potential consequences. How and when will Israel respond to the Iranian attack? And how could all this change the nature of Israel’s war, as well as the geopolitical landscape of the region?
To map out how the war spilled over and where it’s going next, we need to look at the extent of the damage to Iran’s main ally in the region, Hezbollah. The group has suffered its biggest blow yet, which may be a defining factor of how big a potential war may be. To talk about this, I’m joined by Paul Salem, vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem, said twice in a speech that the group backs a ceasefire, without linking it to Gaza. Does this indicate to us, especially after the pager attacks, that Hezbollah’s military capabilities have been weakened?
PS: Hezbollah has been dealt a very staggering blow, no doubt. At the same time, it still exists. It can still fight, it still has more than half of its missile capacity. It’s still lobbing missiles at Haifa and other locations in Israel and it can continue to fight. It has fighters in the south, in some of the villages where Israel is staging operations.
Israel suffered losses in some of those ground operations. But Hezbollah has lost its top leader, its historic leader, and has lost its deputy leader and much of its leadership. About 2,000 fighters have been taken off the battlefield, either because they were killed or injured in the pager attack.
And what remains of Hezbollah’s communication system is paralysed, because it doesn’t know what to use any more to communicate. So that makes life very difficult.
Hezbollah’s raison d’etre for the past 20 years, at least, has been that it is there to protect the south and the villages of the south from the Israeli army. That has already failed. The inhabitants of the south have already had to leave. The inhabitants of the southern suburbs have had to leave. And hence, both militarily and politically, and leadership-wise, and communication-wise, it is in a very, very difficult spot. It knows it has lost this battle, at least.
For Iran and what’s left of Hezbollah, their goal is now to survive to rebuild over time. They need years. Iran is between two positions. It doesn’t want to lose what’s left of Hezbollah. It wants to preserve it. At the same time, it has said all the fronts of the resistance will support Hamas and will never stop. It got stuck in that position, as did Nasrallah, and it hasn’t yet found a clear way to climb down from that ideological position.
But Netanyahu wants to finish Hezbollah. And so I think, from his point of view, this war will go on for weeks and months, whereas Hezbollah and Iran would probably like it to stop. So that’s where we are.
NA: Which brings me to my next question. Israel described its air strike campaign and ground invasion of Lebanon as a “limited operation”. The last time it used these words was for an attack on Rafah in Gaza that was devastating. And we’ve also seen similar patterns of events in Lebanon that we saw in Gaza, like the bombing of densely populated residential neighbourhoods.
The death toll since October 8 last year is more than 2,000 people in Lebanon, with 1.2 million displaced. So what’s Israel’s endgame here? Is it expecting to eradicate Hezbollah in Lebanon just like it is working on eradicating Hamas in Gaza? And does that mean that Israel plans to occupy parts of Lebanon to make sure that Hezbollah doesn’t rise back up again?
PS: Definitely Israel’s campaign, particularly in the past three weeks or three and a half weeks, has been utterly devastating. If the site has four or five residential buildings over it, no problem, it goes after it anyway, killing men, women and children in the process.
But I think it is different than, at least so far, in what was happening in Gaza. First of all, the Israeli reaction to the October 7 attack from the President of Israel down, it immediately dehumanised all Palestinians. It called them animals. And this obviously comes after years of oppression and fighting with the Palestinians.
And secondly, from the very beginning the Israeli war plan was to completely take all of Gaza and obliterate Hamas completely. It could say that because Gaza is completely surrounded. Israel is well aware that is not possible in Lebanon. Lebanon cannot be surrounded and Hezbollah has infinite strategic depth, so its goals are different in Lebanon.
Israel approaches it differently. And for many in the Israeli military and so on, their past experience of occupation in south Lebanon ended up being a headache and they had to withdraw and so on. So far, they’re saying they will stage operations to degrade Hezbollah and so on. But I do think that occupation is probably part of the plan as well.
We’re talking about Lebanon, where Iran is the main decision maker, but the war is about to arrive in Iran.
Israel is going to attack Iran. And when that happens, Lebanon will become a sideshow. Israel took out Hezbollah because Hezbollah was the main obstacle to Israel attacking Iran. And now it feels that now is the time, let’s go hit Iran. So in a week, we’re going to be talking about something very different. The game is about to get much bigger than Israel and Lebanon.
NA: The US has said, in so many words, that it told Israel it does not support a retaliatory attack on nuclear infrastructure or oil facilities in Iran. So it seems there is some sort of thought process behind what Israel is going to attack. Is there a universe where Israel attacks Iran in a way that doesn’t prompt an Iranian response?
PS: There’s different motivations in Tehran and Israel. If it was just up to Iran, Israel could hit and say, yes, it could do that.
But the reality is Israel, and in particular Netanyahu, but also a lot of the military and right wing in Israel, feel now is the time to have the decisive war with Iran. That’s their position and their conviction. And I think, from their point of view, OK, their first strike might be somewhat limited so as not to anger the Americans too much. But their motive is to go to the second strike and the third strike and eventually to go after Iran’s nuclear programme, or for Iran to be so shaken that it gives major concessions.
Israel is in that frame of mind. It is not escalating to de-escalate. It is escalating to escalate. As we’ve seen in the past year, it’s really not the President of the United States who’s determining US policy. It’s Netanyahu. It’s Netanyahu qho got 50 standing ovations in Congress, not President Joe Biden. And at every step of the way, Biden has often said one thing and Netanyahu has done completely another thing, on everything, on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran. Netanyahu, who was born in America and knows America well, knows Biden can’t do anything about it politically.
NA: The consequences of a Middle East war could be costly for Iran, which is already struggling under the weight of western sanctions. Even more, if the country is attacked directly. But how Iran responds to a potential Israeli strike could make or break a regional war.
For more on Iran, we speak to Dr Sanam Vakil, Mena programme director at Chatham House. She explains how the cycle of escalation has been building to this tense moment.
SV: I think it’s important to see this escalatory cycle that has been building since April, when we saw the first direct strike between Israel and Iran, from the vantage point and perspectives of the parties involved, not from where we sit geographically. Obviously, it’s important to lay out that, for Israel, a direct strike from Iran is a huge provocation and a huge escalation, even if there hasn’t been damage or any serious loss of life.
And for Iran, effectively since the attack on its consular facilities, it has been set back in Syria. Obviously it was hugely embarrassed on July 31, when Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran. That showed Israel’s intelligence dominance, as well as clear gaps in Iran’s security and intelligence.
Iran did not respond and chose to practise what is referred to as its strategic patience. And then really, I think the big turning point for Tehran was the killing of Hassan Nasrallah.
Inside Iran, clearly the Islamic Republic is not monolithic or homogenous. There was a debate about how to respond and those seeking to retaliate and draw some clear red lines won the argument. The October 1 strike was a surprise to many and an effort by Iran to defend its position in the region, to show the Axis of Resistance that Iran still has skin in the game, because Iran hasn’t been militarily engaged.
But finally, of course, it was a weak and feeble effort at trying to restore deterrence. So here we are again in this critical moment, where Israel is certainly going to respond.
NA: But what would the scale of Israel’s response be? And what is the likelihood that it might attack Iranian oilfields or nuclear facilities?
SV: There has been a lot of speculation and clear anxiety that Israel’s response could lead to a wider regional war. But I still don’t think either Israel or Iran are ready for a broader, direct military confrontation. There have been concerns that Israel could seize this moment, feeling very triumphant with its war campaign also having extended to Lebanon, so it could try to weaken Iran as well.
But Iran, we have to remember, is a big country with diverse demography, topography and geography. Weakening Iran will be much harder for Israel to achieve on its own. And there are clear divisions that have emerged between Washington and Israel in the past few weeks. We can sort of criticise the Biden administration for maybe not enforcing more muscular efforts to restrain Israel, but they have made it clear that a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme is not something they would support.
I would be surprised if Israel took that route by itself. First of all, Iran’s nuclear programme ha become very advanced since the US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and there is real thinking that a strike on Iran’s programme could provoke Iran to advance its programme further, if not weaponise it.
But secondly, and more practically, Iran’s nuclear programme is not sitting out in the open any more. I think the Iranian system has, of course, moved much of that programme underground. So I think it would be hard to achieve success conducting an operation of that scale.
There’s a debate about hitting Iranian infrastructure and economic sites, particularly oil infrastructure. Here too, I’m a bit dubious. I think the easiest and obvious options on the table are for Israel to strike several Iranian military targets. And it can do that quite effectively.
Iran also doesn’t have air defences, so everything’s out in the open, Israel can hit launchpads, fueling sites, intelligence centres, hopefully without inflicting any loss of life on the civilian population. That would be quite effective, but would also give Iran room to climb down.
NA: There will be a thin line that determines whether this will be another series of escalations or a fully fledged war. The scope of Israel’s attacks will be one factor, but the other, but the other will be how Iran responds to it, if at all.
Sanam says, though, that there might not be an appetite on either side to enter into a vicious cycle. Iran had already been facing crippling sanctions and we recently saw Iran’s new President, Masoud Pezeshkian, calling for a “new era of co-operation with the West” at his first UN General Assembly. It signalled a potentially promising shift for Iranian foreign policy, but with recent escalations and an imminent Israeli strike, are hopes for diplomacy now dead?
SV: Absolutely not. I think that we too often try to see developments in these zero-sum circumstances. Iran is certainly trying to achieve several contradictory aims simultaneously in the region and in its relations more broadly. Iran and its somewhat moderate President recognise that there is a deep economic crisis in the country and one of the avenues to addressing that is through diplomatic negotiations with the West. That is very much on the table, regardless of what happens in the region, because Iran’s advancing nuclear programme is a regional threat and an international threat that will have long-term consequences.
Talks cannot really go forward without the support of the incoming US president. This is a high priority for European countries, as well as the UK. Since the Iran nuclear agreement didn’t fully address the array of issues about Iran, perhaps this time the international community is going to try to achieve compromises on Iran’s support for Russia and Tehran’s ballistic missile programme, as well as change the nature of Iran’s activities and destabilising behaviour across the Middle East.
It’s an aim. It’s an objective. It’s not necessarily going to be an outcome. And certainly, if an agreement is going to be achieved, it will require compromise on all sides.
NA: That’s it for Beyond the Headlines this week. Follow our minute-by-minute reporting on the situation at TheNationalNews.com.
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This episode of Beyond the Headlines was produced by Ban Barkawi and audio engineered by Arthur Eddyson. Doaa Farid is our editor and Yasmeen Altaji is our assistant producer. And I’m your host, Nada AlTaher.