The supreme leader of Iran Khamenei He clarified: “The malicious Zionist regime will be punished.” The Revolutionary Guards also issued an official statement: “We attacked specific targets in Israel using missiles and UAVs.” The Iranian Defense Minister added that “any country that opens its airspace or territory to Israel in order to attack Iran will receive our decisive response.”
In the shadow of the Iranian announcement, the White House made it clear that “the United States will stand by Israel.” At the same time as the attack, the President of the United States Joe Biden Assessing the situation together with senior American security officials. “Our commitment to Israel’s security against threats from Iran and its affiliates is solid,” the president wrote on social media. American officials said that the Iranian attack is “the realization of the worst-case scenario” and could ignite a regional war.
In a column she published this weekend in “Maariv” Dr. Anat Hochberg-Marom The assessment that in a broad strategic view, alongside increasing the likelihood of a significant security escalation, it is already apparent that this assassination in Damascus is a critical move that significantly challenges the balance of deterrence and the “rules of the game” that have existed until now between Israel and Iran. He turned the shadow war, which was conducted mainly between the security systems and their intelligence organizations and Iran’s emissaries, into an open and complex campaign, with multiple players, dimensions and arenas. A campaign that is entering a new and extremely dangerous phase.
She also wrote that any direct Iranian retaliatory action, indirect through its proxies, or combined, increases the likelihood of the expansion of iron swords into an all-out regional war. Not for nothing, against this background and in general, the USA hastened to declare that it was not involved in the attack on Damascus. Despite its massive support for Israel, its ties with many of the GNA countries and its presence in the Persian Gulf, and despite the mutual enmity, strategic gaps and ideological differences between them – the governments of Washington and Tehran share an interest shared.