Tel Aviv: The Israeli military said early on Saturday that it had begun striking Iran in response to several Iranian attacks on Israel, raising fears that a long-brewing confrontation between two of the most powerful militaries in the Middle East could escalate into an all-out war.
Iran is attacking Israel since Oct 7 and the alter chose to retaliate.
The military said in a statement at 2.30 a.m. that it was “conducting precise strikes on military targets in Iran,” adding that it was acting in response to more than a year of attacks on Israel by Iran and its allies across the Middle East.
Israel did not immediately say where or how the strikes were being carried out. Three news agencies run by different branches of the Iranian authorities reported that several blasts were heard near Tehran early on Saturday, but gave no further details.
There was no immediate confirmation that Israel’s attacks had caused the blasts. The agencies said that Tehran itself had not been hit and that civilian airports were operating normally.
But the blasts occurred close enough to the Iranian capital for them to be heard by residents, bringing a war that for Iranians had previously felt far away precariously close to home.
Two Israeli officials said that Israel was attacking military sites that had been involved in recent attacks on Israel, and that the strikes would continue through the early hours of Saturday morning . The officials said that Israel was not striking energy infrastructure, including oil production sites. Two other officials said that the strikes had been carried out by fighter jets. All the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Israel’s attack marked the first time that a foreign air force had struck Iran since its war with Iraq in the 1980s. During that eight-year conflict, the fighting was mostly concentrated along Iran’s border with Iraq; the area around the capital, Tehran, was largely not a target.
The Israeli strikes on Iran, more than 1,000 miles from Israel, came 26 days after Iran fired several waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, forcing millions of Israelis to take cover in bomb shelters, and damaging several homes and air bases.
The latest retaliation followed a year of rising confrontations between Israel, Iran and its proxies, in the shadow of the war in Gaza.
For years, Israel and Iran have fought a clandestine war in which both sides attacked each other’s interests and allies, while rarely taking responsibility for their attacks. That covert conflict turned into an open confrontation earlier this year, as the war between Israel and Hamas, Iran’s ally in Gaza, dragged the two countries into a direct clash.
After Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, prompting a devastating Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza, Iran’s other proxies in Middle East began striking Israel in solidarity with their Palestinian ally. To deter that Iran-led alliance, Israel scaled up its attacks on Iranian interests around the region, culminating in a strike in April on Damascus, Syria, that killed several senior Iranian commanders.
Later that month, Iran fired a massive barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting Israel to attack an Iranian military base before tensions ebbed.
The two sides edged closer to all-out war in the summer after Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political wing, who was visiting Iran at the time of his death, and assassinated several leaders of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia that had been striking Israel since the start of the war in Gaza.
Earlier this month, Iran fired more ballistic missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s killing of Mr. Haniyeh, as well as that of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and a senior official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Israeli air defenses intercepted many of the Iranian missiles, which killed a Palestinian in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but no Israelis.
Israeli leaders vowed to respond with their own attack, which had been expected this weekend.
