The US and other countries raise the alert level for travel to Israel due to the risk of an attack from Iran

The United States and some of its Western allies are showing signs of concern and considering it plausible that Iran will respond with a direct attack against Israel in retaliation for the Israeli bombing that killed senior officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in that country’s consulate in Damascus. April 1. This supposedly imminent attack by Iran against Israel is a “real and credible” threat, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said this Friday, without offering more details about when it could take place. President Joe Biden later appeared before the press to affirm that his country expects an attack by Iran on Israel “sooner rather than later.” He then sent the following message to Iran: “Don’t do it,” and underlined Washington’s commitment to defending Israel. Hours earlier, the US Embassy in Israel had issued a security alert to its citizens prohibiting “employees of the US Administration and their families from personal travel outside the metropolitan areas of Tel Aviv (…), Jerusalem and Beersheva until further notice.” India, Canada, the United Kingdom, Poland and Australia have also urged their nationals not to travel to the region, as has France. Spain advised against traveling to Israel since the start of the war, but has not now updated those travel recommendations.

Meanwhile, the Israeli War Cabinet was scheduled to meet this Friday afternoon to analyze the Iranian threat. The spokesman for the Israeli army, Daniel Hagari, also appeared at a press conference in the afternoon to warn that “the coming days” require his country to be “prepared and on alert.” He then stressed that Israel has plans “for different scenarios of an Iranian attack.” Hagari stressed that, despite this, military security instructions for the country’s citizens have not changed.

In this context of tension, the Israeli army has also confirmed having intercepted part of the 40 rockets that the pro-Iranian Shiite militia Hezbollah launched this Friday from Lebanon. The projectiles, which reached Israel and hit its territory, caused no victims.

The newspaper The Wall Street Journal He had assured in the morning that Israel is preparing for this attack from Iran, in the south or north of the country, in the next 48 hours. However, that outlet then quotes a source “informed by Iranian leaders” that, although attack plans are being discussed, no final decision has been made in Tehran.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, A US official assured on Thursday that his country’s intelligence reports precisely indicate that this attack may be on Israeli territory, and not against targets abroad, a scenario that some experts consider more likely. General Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of the Central Command of the United States Army – the highest-ranking US military officer for the Middle East – met this Friday in Israel with the country’s chief of staff, Herzl Halevi, and with the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. Kurilla has traveled to the Jewish state several times in the more than six months of Israel’s war in Gaza.

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According to him The Times of IsraelWashington has also ordered one of its aircraft carriers in the region, the USS Dwight Eisenhower, which approaches Israel through the Red Sea, in a “show of deterrence by the Biden administration,” the newspaper highlights. This aircraft carrier can intercept missiles launched from Iran.

The Foreign Minister of Iran, Hosein Amirabdolahian, had assured his British, Australian and German counterparts this Thursday night that his country does not intend to “escalate tensions in the region”, but that the lack of international response to the attack against The consulate and residence of the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (Syria) on April 1, enables his country to “punish” Israel. “Legitimate defense becomes a necessity,” the minister assured his counterparts, as Amirabdolahian wrote on his account on X (formerly Twitter).

“Very unlikely”

Meanwhile, in Iran, citizens show no signs of being concerned about the possibility of an open war with Israel, journalist and analyst Fereshteh Sadeghi says from Tehran by email. “Iranians are intelligent people and do not feel that an attack is imminent, at least for now,” he points out. Sadeghi highlights how Iran has so far maintained a policy of “strategic patience and restraint.”

Iranologist Raffaele Mauriello, a professor at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran, agrees and points out how Iran has traditionally responded to Israel’s attacks “on the same level or even on a somewhat smaller scale.”

“The Israeli attack was against an Iranian consulate (in Damascus), which can technically be considered Iranian territory, as the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) said on his networks. And so it is, but it is not exactly the same as directly attacking Iranian soil. If Iran attacks Israel directly, it would be raising the bar a little and that is not what it normally does,” says the professor. Mauriello believes that “a great novelty” is that Tehran is beginning to use its ballistic missiles in the region, but points out that the possibility that “it could launch these missiles against Israel” seems “very unlikely” to him.

Among the various scenarios proposed by this specialist, the one of an Iranian attack against the Golan Heights stands out, a Syrian territory that, for the most part, has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Fereshteh Sadeghi points out, for his part, that “the (Iranian) authorities are carefully evaluating the situation. Iran went through a devastating war in the 1980s (…). Both those authorities and the people know how horrible war could be. Therefore, they try to avoid it and, at the same time, they consider that Israel must be put in its place. “I assume that the Iranians have already warned the United States and Western countries that support Israel that a retaliation, if it occurs, would be a tactical attack to punish Israel,” he emphasizes.

Meanwhile, an Israeli delegation remains in Cairo to negotiate with Hamas a possible ceasefire that would allow a new exchange of some of the 133 Israeli hostages still in Gaza and of whom Washington believes a large number could be dead.

These ongoing negotiations have not stopped Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian territory. At least 89 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, including 25 people from a single family, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-ruled Strip. These victims have raised the death toll in the war to 33,634, according to that source. In the West Bank, settlers and Israeli soldiers attacked the village of Al Mughayer, near Ramallah, this Friday, killing one Palestinian and wounding six others, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

In Gaza, around thirty people have died from starvation, and of them, at least 27 were children, according to the United Nations. The UN estimates that more than half of the 2.2 million Gazans suffer from an extreme lack of food, while in the north, as early as mid-March, an international report warned of imminent famine. This Friday, the Israeli authorities announced that the first trucks with humanitarian aid for the northern half of the territory had entered that region of the Strip the day before through a new border post enabled by Israel. Last week, the Israeli Government committed to the United States to open the Erez border crossing, also in the north, three days after the Israeli attack against the convoy of the NGO World Central Kitchen. That pass remains closed.