The war between Israel and Iran “came out of the shadows”

The attack of Israel against Will It was not the fierce response that US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders feared.

They called on the Israeli government to put an end to the dangerous series of events that began with Israel’s assassination of a top Iranian general in Damascus on April 1.

LOOK: What is the strategic importance of Isfahan, the Iranian city targeted by the attack attributed to Israel

More than six months after Hamas’ attacks on Israel, the war continues in Gaza and has spread to both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border and the Persian Gulf.

The fear is that the Middle East is on the brink of all-out war, with both global and regional dangers.

The Iranians are downplaying what happened in Isfahan.

Initial reports said there was no attack. Later, a state television analyst claimed that air defenses had disabled drones launched by “infiltrators”.

Official media published humorous photographs of miniature drones.

Israel responded to last Saturday’s attack from Iran. Despite years of enmity and threats, it was the first time since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 that Iran launched a direct attack from its territory against Israel.

During this attack, the Iranian government launched more than 300 missiles and drones. Almost all of them were destroyed by Israeli air defenses, supported by forces from the United States, the United Kingdom and Jordan.

The Iranians made their intentions clear, giving Israel and its allies time to prepare, and quickly issued a statement at United Nations headquarters in New York that their retaliation was over.

Biden urged Israel to “accept victory,” but Israel insisted it would fight back.

From the beginning, this crisis has shown how poorly Iran and Israel understand each other. Both miscalculated, deepening the crisis.

Iran’s leaders oppose the existence of Israel. (REUTERS).

Israel seemed to believe that Iran would respond with nothing stronger than outrage when it killed General Mohammed Reza Zahedi in Damascus.

The airstrike destroyed the consulate in the Iranian diplomatic complex in Damascus and killed six other people, including another general.

Pressures for Netanyahu within his government

Iran announced that it considered the incident an attack on its own territory. Israel claimed that the facility was not protected by diplomatic conventions, as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had turned the site into a military outpost.

Iran, like Israel’s Western allies, did not accept a unilateral reclassification of the building’s status, and the government in Tehran hoped that Israel would agree to put an end to the events following its response.

This was another serious miscalculation.

If there are no more attacks after the attack on Isfahan, immediate tensions will ease.

What happened overnight could be an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to respond without antagonizing Biden any more than he already has.

If so, another question is whether the attack will be enough for Israel’s former war cabinet generals, who are believed to want a strong response, restore, in his opinion, Israel’s ability to deter its enemies.

The United States pressured Israel not to take any steps that could trigger a larger conflict. (REUTERS).

Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition allies also demanded fierce retaliation from Israel.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said the Israelis must have “freaked out” when Iran attacked.

In a social media post, he described the attack in Isfahan as “weak”.

The best option for the region, in the opinion of Western governments, is that both Iran and Israel put an end to the saga.

However, although this is the end of this phase of this crisis, new precedents have been set.

Iran attacked Israel with a direct offensive and Israel responded with its own direct attack.

This is a change in what is often referred to in the region as “the rules of the game” that govern the long-running conflict between Iran and Israel.

The long clandestine war between the two countries came out of the shadows.

In the process, Iran and Israel demonstrated that, for all their obsessive attention to each other, they are not good at reading each other’s intentions.

In a highly flammable part of the world, this is not encouraging.

Source: Elcomercio