The Biden administration had publicly urged Israel not to respond to the more than 300 missiles and drones launched by Iran towards Israeli territory last weekend, about two weeks after an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria killed a top general and several other people.
The Israeli strike was in one sense a rejection of Biden’s request, but senior officials concluded that Israel’s decision to target a remote part of Iran that appeared to harm no one – followed by a muted reaction from the Iranian state media – made this strike less likely. that tit-for-tat strikes will turn into a broader war. An Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said the strike was primarily intended to signal to Iran that Israel had the capability to strike targets inside the country. .
The White House declined to comment on the strike Friday. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would not discuss whether Washington was warned of the strike, but he sought to distance the United States from Israel’s action, saying that ” the United States was not involved in any offensive operations.”
The developments are a welcome change after six months in which White House officials often appeared as if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was taking every opportunity to publicly reject any request Biden made. Netanyahu’s defiance came despite the United States’ unwavering military and diplomatic support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has isolated the country on the world stage.
On Sunday, a day after Iran retaliated with missiles and drones, White House officials were deeply concerned about how Netanyahu might respond, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. But as the week progressed and Biden officials got a better sense of the planned Israeli response, they became increasingly optimistic about the U.S. ability to mitigate the risks of escalation, said a senior official.
However, there remain deep disagreements between the United States and Israel, which have not yet been resolved. In the immediate future, U.S. and Israeli officials are preparing to hold another high-level meeting on an imminent Israeli operation in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where some 1.5 million Palestinians have taken refuge after fleeing under Israeli orders.
U.S. officials have made clear they oppose a major military operation in Rafah without a “credible” plan to protect Palestinian civilians – a task that some officials and experts have called virtually impossible. Israeli officials said they still planned to go to the city to dismantle the remaining Hamas battalions.
Even as Biden and his top aides say U.S. support for Israel is “ironclad” in the face of the Iranian threat, they remain strongly opposed to an operation in Rafah that would not protect civilians, two people familiar with the discussions said.
And even if a broader conflict does not erupt immediately, Middle East experts and analysts warn that the decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel has now crossed an unprecedented threshold. Both countries have shown they are willing to strike at each other, even if cautiously – a move they have long avoided for fear of sparking a war that could become catastrophic.
“We haven’t seen the conventional regional war that everyone fears, but at any moment anything can go wrong,” said Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute. “It’s not a sustainable situation when you look at the theater as a whole.”
While Israel and Iran have been engaged in a “shadow conflict” for decades, Katulis said, their hostility has now become “an open, low-intensity direct military confrontation, and with that comes all kinds of risks “.
Biden and his top aides spent a lot of energy this week showing Netanyahu that Iran would suffer non-military consequences for its attack so that Israel would not need to retaliate, according to a senior administration official. who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
These efforts included organizing the Group of Seven to issue a statement condemning Iran, as well as the United States imposing sanctions on Tehran. U.S. officials hoped this would persuade Israel that Iran was even more diplomatically isolated.
Biden and his aides also tried to reassure the Israelis that their ability — along with that of the United States and other partners — to shoot down the vast majority of Iranian drones and missiles had restored deterrence, signaling to his neighbors that an attack on Israel would likely be unsuccessful. Several U.S. officials noted that Israeli leaders have been concerned about appearing weak since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants rampaged the Israel-Gaza border fence and killed 1,200 people, including many civilians, and took about 250 others hostage .
Israel responded with a punitive military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and men. children. Israel’s siege of the enclave has created a humanitarian catastrophe as the health system has collapsed and more than 2 million Palestinians face starvation.
But the war has spread beyond Gaza, and U.S. officials have long feared it could escalate into a major regional conflagration that would further destabilize the Middle East. Israel is also fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon on its northern border, where rocket fire has killed and injured people on both sides of the border. Tens of thousands of Israelis have yet to return to their homes in the north due to the fighting.
The escalation with Iran has particularly raised fears about Hezbollah’s reaction if tensions continue to rise. Hezbollah is the main group mandated by Tehran in the region and has military capabilities far superior to those of Hamas.
“If the Iranians really wanted to put intense pressure on Israel, in addition to shooting from Iran, they could have asked Hezbollah to open the entire border,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has worked on Middle East issues in the United States. Clinton administration.
washingtonpost
