Iran responds to Israel’s devastation of Hezbollah with missile attack

Iranian missiles are slicing through the evening sky over Tel Aviv as Tehran responds to the killing of Hezbollah leader and terrorist mastermind Hassan Nasrallah. Some reports on Israeli television put the number of missiles at 100, while the head of emergency medical organization Magen David Adom has told Channel 12 that the number is in the hundreds.

Videos uploaded to social media show some ballistics being intercepted. The attack has coincided with a shooting incident in nearby Jaffa, where two terrorists are reported to have murdered eight and injured a further seven. It is not clear whether the two incidents are linked.

The next few hours will give us a better picture of the true scale of this operation. As it stands, a few hundred missiles is a payload that looks impressive on TV but isn’t about to bring Israel to its knees. If this is the extent of the Iranian response to Israel’s devastation of Hezbollah, it will indicate that Tehran has decided on a mostly symbolic return of fire for now. Something to appease its hardliners and flex its military muscle, but not so much that it risks drawing Israel into a direct confrontation. However, we will have to wait to see if this wave of missiles is followed by others, which would point to a more aggressive pushback.

Even then, however, Iran will want to avoid a hot war with Israel, especially one month before a US presidential election. Tehran still hopes to revive the nuclear deal cancelled by Donald Trump and the Harris campaign would not appreciate war and national security becoming central issues ahead of election day.

There will be an additional concern that open conflict between Iran and Israel, or further escalation between the Jewish state and Tehran’s proxies, could see the return of campus unrest and large-scale anti-Israel demonstrations in major cities. If there is a backdrop Kamala Harris does not want as election day draws near, it is scenes of student radicals and other activists tearing down American flags and replacing them with Palestinian, Iranian or Lebanese ones.

The repercussions of what we are seeing over Tel Aviv this evening could stretch far from that city’s shore.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.