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. Kirby did reiterate his country's commitment to defending Israel and specified that the United States is observing the situation “very closely.” The American Embassy in Israel has issued a security alert to its citizens in which it prohibits “employees of the US Administration and their families from making personal trips outside the metropolitan areas of Tel Aviv (…), Jerusalem and Beersheva until further notice.” India, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia have also urged their nationals not to travel to the region, as has France. Paris has also ordered the return of the families of its diplomatic staff in Iran. Spain advised against traveling to Israel since the start of the war, but has not now updated those travel recommendations.
The newspaper The Wall Street Journal had previously assured that Israel is preparing for that 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 Thursday night that his country's intelligence reports indicate precisely that this attack may be on Israeli territory, and not against targets abroad, a scenario that some experts consider more likely. This Thursday, 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 – traveled to Israel to coordinate with his ally in case this aggression has place. Kurilla has traveled periodically to the Jewish state in the more than six months of Israel's war in Gaza.
For his part, Iran's Foreign Minister, Hosein Amirabdolahian, 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 on the consulate and residence of the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (Syria) on April 1, in which 13 people died, including seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, enables his country to “punish” Israel . In this context, “legitimate defense becomes a necessity,” the minister assured his counterparts, as Amirabdolahian wrote on his account on X (formerly Twitter).
Iran, said the head of its diplomacy, “does not seek to expand the scope of the war, but rather the return of stable security in the sensitive region of West Asia, something that is related to the containment of the bellicose and unbalanced leaders of the Zionist regime. and the permanent cessation of war crimes by that regime against Gaza and the West Bank.”
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“Strategic patience”
Despite this threat of an alleged Iranian attack endorsed by the White House, this Friday, groups of friends sunbathed on terraces on Jaffa Avenue in Jerusalem, without showing any apparent sign of alarm. Nor do citizens in Iran seem to be worried 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 “Israel's attacks and provocations.” It refers to how, before the bombing of the consulate on April 1, there were others against leaders of the Revolutionary Guard in Syria, such as the one that on December 25 killed another official of that body, Sayyed Reza Mousavi. Iran, he emphasizes, has until now maintained a policy of “strategic patience and moderation.” 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 [en Damasco]which can technically be considered Iranian territory, as the supreme leader said [ayatolá Ali Jamenei] in their 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, a novel one stands out. That of the possibility of an Iranian attack against the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory that, for the most part, has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
Fereshteh Sadeghi points out, for his part, that “the authorities [iraníes] They are carefully evaluating the situation. Iran went through a devastating war in the 1980s, which Iraq had started (…). 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. To avoid a major war, 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,” the analyst 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. Other warplane attacks occurred in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. These victims have raised the death toll in the war to 33,634, according to that source. About thirty people have died from starvation in Gaza and of them, at least 27 were children, according to the UN. 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.
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, between the Israeli towns of Zikin and the Gazan towns of As Siafa. 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 in which seven aid workers from the NGO World Central Kitchen died. That pass remains closed.
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