Israel's Strike on Iran: Limited Hit, Major Message

Tensions had been simmering for years between Israel and Iran. ATTA KENARE / AFP
Tensions had been simmering for years between Israel and Iran. ATTA KENARE / AFP
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Israel's Strike on Iran: Limited Hit, Major Message

Tensions had been simmering for years between Israel and Iran. ATTA KENARE / AFP
Tensions had been simmering for years between Israel and Iran. ATTA KENARE / AFP

Israel's apparent strike on Iran was deliberately limited in scope but sent a clear warning to the country's leadership about Israeli abilities to strike at sensitive targets.
Tehran refuses to recognize Israel, and for decades the two countries have waged a shadow war marked by covert Israeli operations inside Iran, and Iranian backing for anti-Israel militant groups including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But while the surge in tensions over the past weeks has calmed for now, the shadow war has entered a new phase, carrying more than ever the risk of open conflict between the foes, analysts say.
The current escalation comes against the background of Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel followed by the Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip.
It began when Israel was blamed for carrying out an air strike on April 1 against Iran's consulate in Damascus, killing seven Iranian officials from the Revolutionary Guards.
Iran responded with its first-ever direct attack on Israel, involving hundreds of drones and missiles, though almost all were shot down by Israel and its allies.
Amid fears of a major Israeli retaliation to that attack, which could itself provoke another Iranian response, Israel instead chose a much more limited option in the face of US pressure.
'Remind Iran'
According to The New York Times, which cited Israeli and Iranian sources, the target was the radar system of a Russian-supplied S-300 missile defense system at an airbase in the central province of Isfahan, the region that hosts the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
The origin of the strike is not entirely clear, but it included at least one missile fired from a warplane outside Iran and small attack drones known as quadcopters that could have been launched from inside Iran itself and were aimed at confusing air defenses, the reports said.
Israel, in line with its usual policy, has not confirmed or denied carrying out the strike on Iran or the April 1 attack in Syria.
"The purpose of the operation was precisely to remind Iran what Israel could be capable of," said Arash Azizi, senior lecturer at Clemson University in the United States.
"The choice of the airbase near Isfahan was significant because this is the main source of air defense support for all the nuclear installations in the province," he told AFP.
Israel is long believed to have carried out sabotage operations inside Iran through its Mossad espionage agency.
Most famously, according to US media reports, Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in 2020 by Mossad using a machine gun that had been assembled close to his home by its agents and then fired remotely after they left.
According to some outlets, including television channel Iran International, Israeli agents have even captured and interrogated Revolutionary Guards inside Iran to obtain intelligence.
There have also been suspicions, after mysterious explosions around sensitive sites, that Israel has already carried out drone attacks inside Iran, but this has never been confirmed.
'Rubicon crossed'
Iranian officials have been at pains to almost laugh off the Israeli strike, with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian telling NBC News the weapons used were at the "level of toys".
Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, meanwhile, praised the country's armed forces for their "success".
But Alexander Grinberg, expert on Iran at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said Israel's choice and designation of target was in itself indicative of the presence Mossad has inside Iran.
"Israel's message is 'We can strike anywhere in Iran' given that Isfahan is in the center of Iran, relatively far away, and Israel knows exactly where it can strike," he said.
Grinberg said it was logical that Iran has not confirmed that the air base was hit: "From the moment you recognize the true scale of damage, you admit the power of the enemy."
Holly Dagres, non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, said if Israel's attack involved small quadcopters, "these small drones were likely launched from inside Iran".
This would highlight "yet another instance in which Mossad has a presence on the ground and how Iran is its playground", she said.
While the current escalation phase appears to be over, Israel could yet launch more retaliation against Iran, and tensions may also surge again if Israel launches its long-threatened offensive on Rafah in Gaza.
"In some ways, we are now back to the pre-April 1 rules of operation: the realm of gray area and unattributable operations, sabotage," said lecturer Azizi.
"That suits both Iran and Israel well. But the rubicon crossed on April 1 still matters and makes the stakes higher," he added.



Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS

It was their most challenging mission.
US Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.
Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.
Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.
In a report released this week, the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier's construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The US military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general's report said.
The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.
Beefing up training Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no US troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, US service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.
“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel's port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.
Communication difficulties While his command headquarters was on the US military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.
“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.
The US Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.
Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn't do, including moving aid onto the shore.
Communications were a struggle.
“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.
When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.
Some of the pier's biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.
“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. "There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”
One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.
That "may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.