Israel has vowed to respond with violent force to Iran’s ballistic missile attack.
The unanswered question that loomed over the Middle East on Wednesday is what that response will look like: Will it serve as another escalation on a spiraling trajectory to all-out war? Could Israel seek to target Iran's oil facilities and even its nuclear sites? Or is there still room for the diplomacy being urged by the United States?
One thing is clear, an Israeli official told NBC News on Wednesday — the country will retaliate swiftly.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s military and intelligence leaders were meeting at the defense ministry to discuss what this might look like. The official said the timeline on when exactly to strike was complicated by Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year, which begins Wednesday evening and is followed soon after by other Jewish holidays.
But Israel is determined to hit back quickly, they said.
In this cycle of “escalation after escalation,” as U.N. chief António Guterres put it, the Iranians have already promised a more severe response to any Israeli retaliation. (Israel declared Guterres “persona non grata“ for not condemning Iran.)
Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s relatively moderate president, told his Cabinet on Wednesday that if the Israelis “make a mistake” then “they will receive a far more crushing response.”
This is the exact scenario that Western governments and analysts feared: that Israel’s post-Oct. 7 conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah — two militant groups backed by Iran — would morph into a direct confrontation with Tehran itself.
Netanyahu has made it clear he wants to change “the balance of power” in the Middle East, as he said last weekend. So far, that has meant assaulting Gaza and weakening Hamas, before obliterating Hezbollah’s command structure, including killing its powerful leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Both these fronts have come at a high cost to Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, with more than 41,000 people killed in Gaza and more than 1,000 people, including 100 children, killed in Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon, according to local officials.
The last time Iran fired missiles at Israel six months ago, Washington persuaded Israel to hold back from a major response. This time, Netanyahu signaled a more hard-line response.
“Iran made a big mistake tonight — and it will pay for it,” he said Tuesday after the attack. “The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies.”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Iran it would “pay a heavy price,” while Israel’s United Nations Ambassador Danny Danon said Iran would “bear the painful consequences.”
Some in Israel and beyond are encouraging the country to use this opportunity to launch an ambitious and unprecedented strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Such a strike would “mark a new high in the tit-for-tat pattern of escalation, and will likely unfurl a chain reaction of unforeseeable events that will endanger U.S. and Western assets, interests and personnel in the region,” Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, told NBC News.
Whether to go this far has been a “longstanding debate” within Israel’s intelligence and defense decision-makers, she added. “Israeli retaliation at this stage will be significant, but it may not be the maximalist hit that some on the far-right in Israel are demanding, for now.”
Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment when asked last week whether it was considering this course of action.
If not, another option might be Israel striking Iran’s oil refineries.
The Islamic Republic is the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, responsible for 4% of the global total. This industry is the country’s “arterial economic lifeline” and the “soft belly of Iran,” Ozcelik added, because “without revenue from oil exports, the economy will take a heavy blow.”
Iran's next move could be to target Saudi oil facilities, as it was accused of doing by the U.S. and others in 2019, according to Ozcelik and industry analysts. It could also hit back by closing the key Strait of Hormuz maritime bottleneck.
“This dangerous cascading effect would trigger a spike in oil prices and severe disruptions in the energy supply chain with a global knock-on effect,” Ozcelik said.
The nuclear issue has gained increasing salience in recent years.
Iran has made significant advancements in its ability to build nuclear weapons since then-President Donald Trump withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal in 2018. It is now what’s known as a “threshold state,” meaning it has all the components to build a nuclear weapon, according to the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan, nonproliferation group based in Washington, D.C.
One of the reasons Israel has not targeted these facilities yet is that Iran has used Hezbollah as a deterrence, Matthew Savill, military sciences director at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank, wrote in an analysis this weekend.
Now that Hezbollah threat has been apparently diminished, prominent voices are calling for Israel to strike.
“We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime,” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on X. “The octopus’s tentacles are temporarily paralyzed — now comes the head. We must remove this terrible threat to our children’s future.”
It’s unclear the extent to which the U.S. and its allies might be drawn into such an escalating conflict. The administration of President Joe Biden says it has been working round the clock to prevent a wider war, only to be frustrated and blindsided by a Netanyahu coalition that appears to be listening less and less.
This week Washington has sent thousands more troops to the region, and its warships in the Mediterranean helped Israel shoot down some of the Iranian missiles fired Tuesday.
Arms experts widely believe that Israel has around 90 nuclear weapons of its own, although the U.S. ally has never acknowledged it.
That inevitably raises the stakes for any clash with Iran.
Scholars war-gamed one potential scenario of these two foes trading hostilities last December, after the Hamas-led terror attack on Oct. 7 left some 1,200 people dead and 250 taken hostage, according to Israel.
The war game, run by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, another Washington think tank, ended with both countries firing nuclear weapons at each other.
