Live Updates: Muted Reactions to Israeli Strikes on Iran Hint at De-Escalation (2024)

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Here are the latest developments.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the strike. A senior U.S. official said that Israel had notified the United States through multiple channels shortly before the attack. All the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The explosions came less than a week after Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel — nearly all of which were shot down — in response to an April 1 strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed seven Iranian officials. That attack brought the decades-long shadow war between Israel and Iran — waged on land, at sea, in air and in cyberspace — more clearly into the open.

Here’s what else to know:

• Iranian officials told The New York Times that the attack had been carried out by small drones, possibly launched from inside Iran, and that radar systems had not detected unidentified aircraft entering Iranian airspace. They said that a separate group of small drones was shot down in the region of Tabriz, roughly 500 miles north of Isfahan. The use of drones would follow a well-established pattern in Israeli attacks on Iranian military targets.

• In public, Iranian officials sought to downplay the strike. Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi, the commander in chief of Iran’s army, said explosions heard early Friday in Isfahan “were from our air defense firing at a suspicious object,” and that there had been “no damage.” Iranian news agencies appeared keen to show that things were “back to normal” in the city.

• President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran had warned that “the tiniest act of aggression” on his country’s soil would draw a response. But in the hours after Israel’s strike, there have been no public calls for retribution by Iranian officials. One lawmaker, Seyed Nezamedin Mousavi, called the strike “ridiculous,” saying it showed Israel “is content with these ineffective actions.”

• Isfahan is one of Iran’s most famous and historic cities. The area also hosts a number of Iranian military sites. Iranian media reported that nuclear facilities in Isfahan had not been hit.

• Israeli leaders came close to ordering widespread strikes in Iran on the night Iran attacked, officials said, but the war cabinet postponed a decision. Mr. Biden and other world leaders urged Israel for days not to retaliate in a way that would inflame a wider Middle East war while it fights Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both allies of Iran.

Israel reportedly strikes an air defense site in Syria.

The strike happened around the same time that Israel carried out a strike on a military air base near the city of Isfahan, in central Iran.

That strike came less than a week after Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel — nearly all of which were shot down — in retaliation for an April 1 attack on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria that killed seven Iranian military officers.

Friday’s strike in Syria targeted a radar system in the southern province of Daraa, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.

The Syrian military detected Israeli aircraft entering Syrian airspace, but its air defenses did not attempt to intercept the strikes, the Observatory said.

Iranian-backed armed groups throughout Syria have been on high alert since Iran’s strikes on Israel last weekend, the Observatory said. The groups obscured their positions and gave some of their leaders a week of leave.

Iran is closely allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, and with the Syrian government, and both Hezbollah and Iran’s Quds Force operate in Syria. For years, Iranian proxies like Hezbollah have launched strikes at northern Israel.

Israel has repeatedly targeted Iran and its allies with strikes in Syria, including in Damascus, the capital, and Aleppo.

Attacks across Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon have escalated since the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas on Israel.

Since the first of the year, Israel has carried out nearly three dozen attacks in Syria, destroying buildings, military headquarters and weapons and ammunitions warehouses, the Observatory said. The strikes have killed 129 fighters and 12 civilians, the group said.

Residents of Isfahan describe their fears of an escalated war.

Mehrdad, 43, an engineer from Isfahan, said the latest retaliation left him and his pregnant wife feeling stressed and unwell. He asked that his last name not be used for fear of retribution.

“The future of this country concerns me,” he said. “I believe nothing good is expected.”

Though he said that the city had returned “back to its normal” and reactions from officials were muted — which he believed was to help make people feel at ease — many residents remain scared after a stressful night of explosions.

For the first six months of the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran’s involvement in fighting had been limited to its proxies, including the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthi militia. But after Iran’s first direct strike on Israel last weekend, Mehrdad said, “things are coming to the surface.”

He hoped that diplomatic mediation would put an end to the threat of war, and he worried that the county’s infrastructure would be “ruined” by further Israeli attacks.

“Our economic situation is awful. We have 50 percent annual inflation,” he said. “Now guess what would happen if the war materialized. What would happen to our living conditions in this country?”

Mahsa, 34, an accountant from Isfahan who also asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution, described a tense atmosphere of fear and instability. The economy is often the main topic of conversation when people gather, she said, and many are worried about the consequences of a wider war.

“When Iran attacked, we were all worried and we really didn’t know what to expect,” she said, describing the cycle of retaliation between Israel and Iran as a “show game.”

“Of course, after this Israeli attack, the direction of the game will be determined,” she added. “Either a full-scale war, or the end of this line, or just threats.”

The distress is crushing. Mahsa said her mental health had deteriorated, describing an instance last week when she broke down sobbing in the middle of the street for seemingly no reason while on a run. Dreams seem “more impossible to achieve, day by day,” she said.

“We don’t have much mental energy left,” she added.

Here is a look at the recent history of Iran-Israel hostilities.

Here is a recent history of the conflict:

August 2019: An Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian-trained militants in Syria, a drone set off a blast near a Hezbollah office in Lebanon and an airstrike in Qaim, Iraq, killed a commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. Israel accused Iran at the time of trying to establish an overland arms-supply line through Iraq and northern Syria to Lebanon, and analysts said the strikes were aimed at stopping Iran and signaling to its proxies that Israel would not tolerate a fleet of smart missiles on its borders.

January 2020: Israel greeted with satisfaction the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the foreign-facing arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, in an American drone strike in Baghdad.

Iran hit back by attacking two bases in Iraq that housed American troops with a barrage of missiles, wounding about 100 U.S. military personnel.

2021-22: In July 2021, an oil tanker managed by an Israeli-owned shipping company was attacked off the coast of Oman, killing two crew members, according to the company and three Israeli officials. Two of the officials said that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Iranian drones.

Iran did not explicitly claim or deny responsibility, but a state-owned television channel described the episode as a response to an Israeli strike in Syria.

In November 2021, Israel killed Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and followed up with the assassination of a Revolutionary Guards commander, Col. Sayad Khodayee, in May 2022.

December 2023: After Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault, Iranian-backed militias stepped up their own attacks. And late last year, Iran accused Israel of killing a high-level military figure, Brig. Gen. Sayyed Razi Mousavi, in a missile strike in Syria.

A senior adviser to the Revolutionary Guards, General Mousavi was described as having been a close associate of General Suleimani and was said to have helped oversee the shipment of arms to Hezbollah. Israel, adopting its customary stance, declined to comment directly on whether it was behind General Mousavi’s death.

January 2024: An explosion in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, killed Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas leader, along with two commanders from that group’s armed wing, the first assassination of a top Hamas official outside the West Bank and Gaza in recent years. Officials from Hamas, Lebanon and the United States ascribed the blast to Israel, which did not publicly confirm involvement.

Hezbollah, which receives major support from Iran, stepped up its assaults on Israel after Mr. al-Arouri’s death. Israel’s military hit back at Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing several of the group’s commanders.

March: An Israeli drone strike hit a car in southern Lebanon, killing at least one person. Israel’s military said it had killed the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile unit. Hezbollah acknowledged the death of a man, Ali Abdulhassan Naim, but did not provide further details.

The same day, airstrikes killed soldiers near Aleppo, northern Syria, in what appeared to be one of the heaviest Israeli attacks in the country in years. The strikes killed 36 Syrian soldiers, seven Hezbollah fighters and a Syrian from a pro-Iran militia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that tracks Syria’s civil war.

Israel’s military did not claim responsibility. But the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, wrote on social media, “We will pursue Hezbollah every place it operates and we will expand the pressure and the pace of the attacks.”

April: A strike on an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus on April 1 killed three top Iranian commanders and four officers. Iran blamed Israel and vowed to hit back forcefully.

Two weeks later, Tehran launched a barrage of more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel, an unexpectedly large-scale attack, although nearly all the weapons were shot down by Israel and allies. Israel said for days it would respond, before a strike on Friday hit a military air base near the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

Israel has commonly used exploding drones in attacks on Iran.

The drones might have been launched from inside Iran, whose radar systems had not detected unidentified aircraft entering Iranian airspace, Iranian officials said. If the drones were launched within the country, it demonstrates once again Israel’s ability to mount clandestine operations in Iranian territory.

Israel’s military has not commented on Friday’s strike. Though it rarely claims responsibility publicly for attacks against Iranian targets, several attacks in recent years have used drones:

• August 2019: Israel sent an exploding drone into the heart of a Hezbollah-dominated neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon, to destroy what Israeli officials described as machinery used in the production of precision missiles.

• June 2021: A quadcopter exploded outside Tehran at one of Iran’s main manufacturing centers for centrifuges, which purify uranium and are used at the country’s two major uranium enrichment facilities. Western officials have closely watched activity at those facilities for signs that Iran could be moving toward producing a nuclear weapon. Iran claimed that there had been no damage to the site outside Tehran, but satellite images showed evidence of significant damage.

• February 2022: Six quadcopters exploded at Kermanshah, Iran’s main manufacturing and storage plant for military drones.

• May 2022: A strike targeted the highly sensitive Parchin military site outside Tehran, where Iran develops missile, nuclear and drone technology. Quadcopter drones exploded into a building, killing an engineer and injuring another person, Iranians with knowledge of the attack said at the time.

• January 2023: A drone attack on an Iranian military facility in January 2023 caused a large explosion in the center of Isfahan, the city near the air base that was struck on Friday. At the time, Iran made no effort to hide the fact that an attack had happened, but said it had done little damage. Iranian state media reported that drones had targeted an ammunition manufacturing plant but had been shot down by a surface-to-air defense system.

Blinken says the U.S. has not been involved in ‘offensive operations’ in Iran.

But Mr. Blinken would not even directly confirm the Israeli strike, which appeared to be the country’s first military response to Iran’s attack last weekend, referring instead to “reported events,” and he would not say whether the United States had been notified in advance of the Israeli action. Shortly before he spoke, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told reporters that the United States had been “informed at the last minute” of the Israeli strike.

“But there was no involvement on the part of the United States,” Mr. Tajani said. “It was simply information which was provided,” adding that he believed the G7’s collective efforts deserved credit for “the small scale of the event.”

Mr. Tajani did not say how he knew the United States had not been notified in advance, but he had recently come from a meeting with Mr. Blinken and other G7 ministers. A senior American official said on Friday that Israel had notified the United States through multiple channels shortly before its attack on Iran.

The G7 weighed in collectively in a statement concluding the three-day meeting, urging countries to prevent further escalation “in light of reports of strikes” on Friday. The G7 includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and the European Union.

The statement also said that the member nations “condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s direct and unprecedented attack” on Israel.

“Israel and its people have our full solidarity and support and we reaffirm our commitment toward Israel’s security,” it added.

The G7 also issued a new warning to Tehran, demanding that “Iran and its affiliated groups cease their attacks” throughout the Middle East and saying that “we stand ready to adopt further sanctions or take other measures.”

Mr. Blinken said of Iran that “degrading its missile and drone capabilities” was a key G7 goal.

Mr. Blinken also addressed the ongoing conflict in Gaza, pointing a finger at Hamas for the failure so far to reach a cease-fire deal that would include the release of Israeli prisoners.

“The only thing standing behind the Gaza people and a cease-fire is Hamas,” he said.

But he also addressed a major friction point with Israel, warning against what Israel says is its planned attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have sought shelter from fighting elsewhere in the enclave. Israel has said an invasion of Rafah is necessary to eliminate Hamas battalions in the city.

“We cannot support a major military operation in Rafah,” Mr. Blinken said. Mr. Blinken said that protecting and caring for civilians amid such an operation was “a monumental task for which we have yet to see a plan.”

Asked about the U.S. veto on Thursday of a United Nations Security Council resolution to recognize a Palestinian state, Mr. Blinken said that while the United States supports the creation of such a state, doing so requires negotiations and that the proposed resolution “will have no effect on actually moving things forward and achieving a Palestinian state.”

He added: “You can put something down on a piece of paper and wave it around. It has no effect. What does and can have an effect is actual diplomacy.”

Mr. Blinken also noted that, under U.S. law passed by Congress, U.N. acceptance of a Palestinian member state would require “cutting off all of our funding for the United Nations.”

World leaders call for de-escalation after Israel’s strike in Iran.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, told reporters during a visit to China: “It is absolutely essential that the region remains stable and that all sides refrain from further action.”

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said the Group of 7 nations — which includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — had changed the agenda of its meeting Friday on the resort island of Capri to “address the Iran issue and put priority attention on the Middle East.”

“The political goal of the G7 is de-escalation,” Mr. Tajani said.

The government of Jordan, which has been criticized in the Arab world for playing a role in intercepting Iran’s attack last weekend, issued an especially pointed plea.

“Israeli-Iranian retaliations must end,” Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister said on Friday. He urged the international community to turn its attention back to Gaza, where six months of Israel’s bombardment and ground invasion have killed over 33,000 people and led to extreme hunger in parts of the territory.

“The inhumane war on Gaza must end now,” Mr. Safadi said. “The focus of the world must remain on ending the catastrophic aggression on Gaza.”

Israel informed the U.S. shortly before it struck Iran, an American official says.

“We were not surprised,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

Publicly, Biden administration officials were tight-lipped about Friday’s strike, refusing to comment at all about it. Administration officials were keeping quiet to avoid getting the United States pulled into the conflict between Iran and Israel, the official said.

Speaking to reporters in Capri, Italy, at a meeting of foreign ministers from Group of 7 nations, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declined to address the strike, saying only that “the United States was not involved in any offensive operations.” He added that the G7 was urging all parties to de-escalate.

Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, told reporters in Capri that the United States had been “informed at the last minute” of the Israeli strike.

Michael Crowley contributed reporting from Capri, Italy.

Israel’s strike was smaller than expected, and so was Iran’s reaction.

Foreign leaders advised Israel to treat its successful defense against Iran’s missile barrage as a victory that required no retaliation, warning against a counterattack that might further destabilize a region already roiled by Israel’s wars with two Iranian allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, and tensions with a third, the Houthis in Yemen.

But when it finally came early on Friday, Israel’s strike appeared less damaging than expected, allowing Iranian officials and state-run news outlets to downplay its significance, at least for now. In public, no high-ranking Iranian official had blamed Israel for the strike by Friday evening, even if in private several had acknowledged Israel’s hand. The lack of public attribution from the Iranian government or acknowledgment of responsibility from Israel gave Tehran the chance to move on without feeling humiliated, analysts said.

Iranian officials said that no enemy aircraft had been detected in Iranian airspace and that the main attack — apparently on a military base in central Iran — had been initiated by small unmanned drones that were most likely launched from inside Iranian territory. The nature of the attack had precedent: Israel used similar methods in an attack on a military facility in Isfahan last year.

By sunrise, Iranian state-run news outlets were projecting a swift return to normalcy, broadcasting footage of calm street scenes, while officials publicly dismissed the impact of the attack. Airports were also reopened after a brief overnight closure.

Analysts cautioned that any outcome was still possible. But the initial Iranian reaction suggested that the country’s leaders would not rush to respond, despite warning in recent days that they would react forcefully and swiftly to any Israeli strike.

“The way they present it to their own people, and the fact that the skies are open already, allows them to decide not to respond,” said Sima Shine, a former head of research for the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and an Iran expert.

But, she added, “We have made so many evaluation mistakes that I am very hesitant to say it definitively.”

In a miscalculation that set off the current round of violence, Israel struck an Iranian Embassy compound in Syria on April 1, killing seven Iranian officials, including three senior commanders.

For years, Israel had launched similar attacks on Iranian interests in Syria, as well as in Iran, without provoking a direct response from Iran. But the scale of Israel’s attack on April 1 appeared to end Iran’s patience, with the nation’s leaders warning that it would no longer accept Israeli strikes on Iranian interests anywhere in the region. Two weeks later, Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel, causing little damage but shocking Israelis with the scale of the attack.

Even if Iran does not respond in a similar way to Israel’s strike on Friday, it has left the world guessing about how it would respond to future attacks, Ms. Shine said.

The Syrian authorities said on Friday that Israel had again struck a site in Syria, about the same time as the attack on Iran. It was the kind of attack that Israel had made dozens of times in the past without provoking a direct Iranian reaction, but which — given Iran’s response to Israel’s April 1 strike in Syria — might now prompt a more aggressive retaliation from Tehran.

“The question is whether they will stand by their red line,” Ms. Shine said. “But what exactly is the red line? Is it only high-ranking people? Is it only embassies? Or is it every Iranian target in Syria?”

For some analysts of Iran, it is unlikely that the Iranian government seeks an all-out war, given that its main priority is to sustain its power at home amid rising domestic discontent. Across recent decades, Tehran has attempted to gradually expand its regional influence through proxies and allies, rather than risking it all in a direct confrontation with Israel.

While Iran’s recent missile strikes successfully challenged Israeli assumptions about how Iran operates, “at the end of the day, escalation is not in Iran’s interest,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a research group based in London.

“Above all, it is seeking to preserve the regime’s security and stability,” as well as strengthening its allies and gradually reducing American influence on the Middle East, Dr. Vakil said in an email. “De-escalation allows it to get back to those goals which require patience and slow gains amid regional vacuums and chaos,” she added.

Within Israel, some portrayed the country’s strike as a failure that caused little damage and suggested that Israel had, ultimately, been intimidated into carrying out only a minor retaliatory assault compared to Iran’s much more aggressive attack. In an apparent allusion to the strike on social media, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli government minister, wrote a single word, roughly translated as “Pathetic!” Before the attack, Mr. Ben-Gvir had pushed for a stronger response.

Others hailed it as a deft tactical success that gave Iran the chance to avoid retaliating without losing face, while still proving to Tehran that Israel can strike undetected at the heart of Iranian territory — and do so with much more subtlety than Iran’s own attack last weekend.

Nahum Barnea, a prominent Israeli commentator, compared Israel’s strike to the biblical story of how David, the ancient Jewish leader, attacked King Saul, another biblical figure. In the story, David chose not to kill Saul despite having the chance to do so, and instead sliced off a sliver of Saul’s robe.

“The intention was to signal to the Iranians that we can get to Iranian soil,” Mr. Barnea said in an phone interview. “Not to open a front.”

But if it seemed on Friday that moderation had won out for now, experts warned that it was only a matter of time before another serious clash occurred.

“The recent open confrontation between the two is just the beginning,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli professor who teaches Iranian studies at Reichman University in Israel. “Sooner or later, the two will directly confront each other again.”

Cassandra Vinograd, Johnatan Reiss and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

Isfahan is one of Iran’s most historic cities and home to military facilities.

That has made the city, home to roughly two million people today, one of the tourist centers of Iran.

Isfahan is also a center of missile production, research and development for Iran. That includes the assembly of Shahab medium-range missiles, which can reach Israel and beyond. And it is the site of four small nuclear research facilities, all supplied by China many years ago.

The Natanz uranium enrichment site is also in Isfahan Province, along with an air base that has long hosted Iran’s fleet of American-made F-14 Tomcats — purchased before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to The Associated Press. A Russian-made S-300 air defense battery has also been seen in Isfahan, according to an assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Israeli attack early on Friday — which Iranian news agencies said had not hit Isfahan’s nuclear facilities — was not the first time the area has been targeted.

In January 2023, Israel carried out a drone attack on a military facility in the middle of Isfahan, according to senior intelligence officials who were familiar with the dialogue between Israel and the United States about the strike. The facility’s purpose was not clear, and neither was how much damage that attack caused.

At the time, Iran made no effort to hide the fact that an attack had happened but said it had done little damage. Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, reported that the drones had targeted an ammunition manufacturing plant and that they had been shot down by a surface-to-air defense system.

A muted initial response in Iran and Israel suggest both want to avoid escalation.

In Israel, officials described the strike as a limited response designed to avoid escalating tensions. Pundits on the country’s morning news shows said the strike did not appear to cause significant damage to military sites in Iran.

“Israel can do elegant military maneuvers that are not noisy or cause significant military damage but which deliver the message Israel wants,” Dana Weiss, a diplomatic affairs analyst for Israel’s Channel 12, told viewers. “And that is what we have seen them do.”

State television in Iran said military and nuclear facilities in Isfahan were safe and broadcast footage of the city looking calm in the spring light. One newsreader there described the attack as “not a big deal.”

Social media users in Iran, including some connected to the country’s military, mocked the Israeli strike as a puny response to the roughly 300 missiles and drones that Iran launched at Israel last weekend.

In one video that was widely shared online Friday, a girl throws a paper airplane at an apartment building and compares it to the Israeli strike, giggling as the folded paper hits the concrete structure.

Iranian officials told The New York Times that a strike had hit a military air base near Isfahan. But Brig. General Siavash Mihandoust, the most senior military official in Isfahan, told state television that any explosions heard there on Friday were not caused by Israeli strikes, attributing them to air defense systems shooting down “flying objects.”

Some in Israel celebrated the strikes, including elected leaders from the country’s right-wing parties.

Tally Gotliv, a lawmaker from the Likud party, wrote on X, “A morning in which our head is proudly up. Israel is a strong and forceful country.”