After weeks of soaring tensions following Israel’s deadly strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus and Tehran’s answering attack on Israeli territory, Friday’s limited action appeared to many experts as attempt by both sides to de-escalate the situation.
Iranian state media was muted in its response to the attack, saying its air defense systems had intercepted “three small drones” in Isfahan province. The area is home to sensitive facilities — an Iranian military base and key nuclear labs — but the attack appeared to be only a pinprick given Israel’s long-range military capabilities.
With Israel tight-lipped after the attack and Iran downplaying its significance, the two sides appear to be hoping the exchanges so far maybe be enough to satisfy domestic audiences without requiring further escalation.
“I would actually think that we will be surprised and that things may very well wind down,” said Charles Miller, a security expert at Australian National University. “It seems that actually both sides want to be seen to be doing something without actually undertaking the risks of doing anything that’s too provocative.”
Like the Iranian attack before it, the Israeli strike appears designed to stop short of escalating tensions. Analysts said Tehran’s attack last weekend, which featured hundreds of projectiles launched with a lot of advance warning, was probably designed to look spectacular while keeping death and destruction to a minimum.
Commenting at the time, Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil said Iran took time on its response to show a wide range of capabilities across the region — much the way Israel on Friday showed it could strike inside Iran.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s nuclear program, said Friday that none of the sites were damaged.
Iranian army chief Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi said that the explosions in Isfahan was due to antiaircraft defense systems shooting down a suspicious object in the sky and that no damage was caused, according to Iran’s official news agency IRNA.
Reports of the blasts began appearing on social media about 4 a.m. local time. Iranian military officials said air defense networks in the area were activated and that a system at a military base in Isfahan “was used for an interception,” according to state media.
Israel has signaled that it would respond militarily to Iran’s launch of more than 300 attack drones, ballistic and cruise missiles. But it has been under pressure from the Biden administration and other allies to show restraint to avoid provoking a wider regional conflict.
A person familiar with a briefing on the attack who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak about it said the strike was “carefully calibrated.”
Israel’s war cabinet has been reviewing a list of target options provided by the Israel Defense Forces. The body was seeking to craft an action plan that would deter Iran without causing significant casualties or damage so extensive that Tehran would be forced to answer with another round of attacks, according to an Israeli official familiar with the deliberations.
Israeli military and government officials declined to comment publicly. Details of the incident remained vague Friday morning and Israeli officials said privately that no official comment was likely in the coming hours, if at all. The military did not warn civilians to seek shelter Friday or to take extraordinary precautions as the country prepares for the Passover holiday.
Iran, too, was muted in its comments. Stations broadcast serene images of the central Iranian city beneath headlines reading “the situation is normal.”
Isfahan, a province in central Iran, is the site of the largest nuclear research complex in Iran, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative; it is also the site of a military base and the Isfahan airport, Iranian media reported. State news agency IRNA said nuclear facilities in the province were undamaged.
Iran suspended flights from a number of airports shortly after reports of explosions, according to Iranian state media. The news reports did not explain the cancellations, but airspace in the region was similarly closed last weekend when Iran launched drone and missile attacks on Israel.
By 6 a.m. local time, the skies above western Iran were largely empty, flight tracker website Flight Radar 24 showed. Some flights appeared to sharply divert while over Iran, including FlyDubai flights from Istanbul and Zagreb to Dubai.
Syria’s state news agency reported early Friday that Israel launched an attack overnight with missiles targeting air defense sites in the country’s southern region. It did not provide specific details about the location and said the attack caused some damage.
Hawkish Israelis had been calling for a harsh military answer to Iran’s Saturday attack on Israeli soil, even though Israeli, U.S. and Jordanian forces intercepted more than 99 percent of the weapons that launched successfully. A seven-year-old Israeli girl from a Bedouin family in the south was the only casualty.
It was unclear Friday whether the apparently limited action over Iran would satisfy those demands.
Israeli officials followed a gag order in the hours after the attack on Iran, but Tally Gotliv, a far-right firebrand from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted an apparent reference to the strike on social media: “Good morning, people of Israel. This is a morning in which the head is held high with pride. Israel is a strong and powerful country. May we regain the power of deterrence.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who had called on Israel to go “crazy” on Iran in response, posted a one-word comment on X that translates as “weak.”
Iran said its attack Saturday was in response to Israel’s (officially unacknowledged) strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus two weeks earlier that killed seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Harris reported from Washington, George from Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, Vinall from Seoul. Kelsey Ables and Andrew Jeong in Seoul and Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
