Veteran Israeli experts suggest that Iran is unlikely to retaliate directly against Israel for a surgical missile attack that killed two top IRGC generals and five additional officers in Damascus.
The precision airstrike that demolished a building in the Damascus embassy compound on April 1, prompted the chief commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami to announce on Friday during the anti-Israel Quds Day that no attack on “our sacred system [regime] will remain unanswered.”
“We will make them regret this crime and other similar ones with the help of God,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said a day after the attack."
Despite Tehran's saber-rattling, Israeli experts are skeptical that Khamenei will authorize an attack, which would be directly attributable to Tehran.
Yossi Melman, a veteran Israeli columnist for the left-leaning Haaretz, told Iran International that the Iranians “will strike but not from their territory.” He said the attacks could emanate “From Iraq and or Syria and more intensively.”
The Islamic Republic has targeted Israeli diplomats for assassination and its installations via its proxies like Hezbollah across Europe over the past four decades. A telling example, Iran’s IRGC paid a Pakistani man in Germany to assassinate pro-Israel advocates, Melman noted. He also highlighted that the “Americans are warning Iran that Iran should not be involved in war.”
In a White House readout of the Thursday conversation between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the statement said “The two leaders also discussed public Iranian threats against Israel and the Israeli people. President Biden made clear that the United States strongly supports Israel in the face of those threats.”
Melman said if the Islamic Republic launched missiles at Israel from within the territory of Iran, “Israel could use Jericho missiles for the first time because they are the only missiles that can reach Iran from Israeli soil.”
Yigal Carmon, the former counter-terrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers, told Iran International "Iran is not ready nor willing to have a direct total war with Israel. Therefore even a direct Iranian attack on an Israeli embassy abroad is not probable.”
Carmon, who is the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), added, “Khamenei’s policies over the years show a combination of caution and cowardice. Iran’s reactions to Israeli and American attacks in the past show a pattern of escalation when they believe the adversary is weak. And they back down when they see their adversary is strong and shows deterrence, and is ready for war.”
Carmon famously predicted the Iran-backed Hamas attack on Israel in Iran International comment on September 5. He said a major attack will unfold either in September or October. Carmon is a fluent Arabic speaker and well-versed in the inner workings of the Islamic Republic.
He added that “Iran has a mega-plan, which is the vision and legacy of the founder of the Islamic Revolution, to turn the whole region gradually, in a long-term well planned process through local proxies, into a region under its Shiite hegemony.”
The Iranian regime’s imperialist reach has extended to Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria where Khamenei has cultivated terrorist movements and militias.
Carmon, who has been a sharp of critic of Netanyahu’s government for cooperating with the Islamist regime in Qatar in sending funds to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip prior to October 7, said “Contrary to what the Israeli establishment believe, that Israel’s preventive strikes deter Iran, the truth is that no attacks such as the one in Damascus deter it, in the same way that the killing of Soleimani did not deter Iran from pursuing its plans.”
The former colonel in Israel’s military intelligence, Carmon, warned that Iran “will follow their mega-plan undismayed by Israel’s attacks and move on to their next immediate target: Jordan.”
He said Iran seeks to “topple the Jordanian Kingdom” and, as part of its grand plan to reshape the Mideast to “turn Jordan from a pro-Western country into a country ruled by pro-Iran militias like Iraq.“
He warned that if the Jordanian state collapses into Iran’s yoke, Tehran “will activate the pro-Iran militias to attack Israel from the East, as well as escalate in the north and with whatever power Hamas still has in Gaza.”
Tehran-born Ben Sabti, an expert on Iran from the Israeli National Security and Strategy Institute, told Iran International “My assessment is that Iran won't attack Israel directly, because there is not any use in it.”
He said that “anything that Iran can do, their proxies can do too, so why will Iran, which has kept itself out of the war until now, suddenly should throw itself into the conflict.”