Joe Biden has said he would not support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites, as the US sought to temper Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday and contain a rapidly escalating regional conflict.
Biden’s comments came after the top Israeli diplomat at the UN warned his country’s retaliation for an Iranian salvo of nearly 200 ballistic missiles would be heavier than Tehran “could ever have imagined”. On the same day, the Israeli chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, warned: “We have the capabilities to reach and strike any point in the Middle East”, a reality that Israel’s enemies would “soon understand”.
There is general acceptance in Washington that Israel will carry out a military response that is almost certain to go further than the only previous Israeli airstrikes against Iran, when missiles were fired at an air defence installation near Isfahan, after a previous Iranian aerial attack in April this year.
But the Biden administration fears that a major Israeli response, particularly one targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, could trigger further escalation that could ultimately draw in US forces, and potentially lead to an Iranian decision to try to build nuclear weapons.
Almost all the incoming Iranian missiles on Tuesday were intercepted by Israel’s layered air defences, and the sole fatality was a Palestinian killed by falling debris on the West Bank. An unspecified number of the missiles, however, landed on or near Israeli airbases at Nevatim and Tel Nof, damaging office buildings and other maintenance areas, though not aircraft or personnel.
Washington first raised the alarm a few hours before Iran’s missile launch on Tuesday night and since then US officials have been locked in urgent talks with their Israeli counterparts on their country’s response.
Second only to nuclear sites in terms of their devastating impact, Israel is reported to be considering a broad attack on Iran’s oil installations, as well as airstrikes on military bases, or targeted assassinations, which Israel has used widely in the region. The US meanwhile is thought to be suggesting their own economic measures on an already heavily sanctioned country, as a complement to Israel’s military reaction.
Benjamin Netanyahu convened a meeting of his top security officials at the Israeli defence headquarters, the Kirya in Tel Aviv, on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the country’s options after a round of conversations with Washington.
As Israel contemplated opening a fourth front with its regional enemies, eight Israeli soldiers were confirmed killed and a significant number wounded in three clashes with Hezbollah, following Israel’s first significant ground incursions across the Lebanese border since 2006.
The Israeli military said the incursions launched on Tuesday were aimed largely at destroying tunnels and other Hezbollah infrastructure along the border. It deployed more units in the north on Wednesday, and issued evacuation warnings to Lebanese residents in more than 20 border towns, telling them to move across the Awali River, 60km (37 miles) inside Lebanon, suggesting more ground operations were to come.
Most of the Israeli casualties on Wednesday came from a commando brigade involved in a confrontation with the Shia militia just over the border from the Israeli community of Misgav, while two soldiers from the Golani Brigade were killed in a separate incident in Maroun-el-Ras district in southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah said its fighters wounded and killed a group of Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon after detonating an explosive device, and claimed it had destroyed three Israeli Merkava tanks with guided rockets in the Lebanese border town of Maroun el-Ras. The Guardian was unable to verify the circumstances of any of the incidents.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on Wednesday that an Israeli airstrike had killed three people in Damascus, flattening a building in the Mazzeh district, an area favoured by Hezbollah militants and IRGC officers.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are still fighting Hamas in Gaza nearly a year after war broke out there. They are conducting regular raids aimed at militants on the West Bank, and for the past two weeks they have taken the war to Hezbollah with targeted assassinations, devastating airstrikes across Lebanon, culminating on Tuesday with cross border incursions by ground troops.
The stated aim of the Lebanon offensive is to create conditions to allow over 60,000 Israeli residents displaced by Hezbollah attacks over the past year, to return to their homes. But the killing of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike on Friday, triggered Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday, in reprisal for the death of Tehran’s closest partner in the region.
The UN security council convened on Wednesday to discuss the worsening conflict, with the secretary-general, António Guterres, warning that “time is running is out” and that the “deadly cycle of tit-for-tat violence must stop”.
Iran justified its attack as self-defence in a letter to the security council saying that “in full compliance with the principle of distinction under international humanitarian law, has only targeted the regime’s military and security installations with its defensive missile strikes”.
Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, rejected that claim, describing Iran’s missile attack as “a calculated attack on a civilian population”.
“Israel will respond,” Danon told reporters. “Our response will be decisive, and yes, it will be painful, but unlike Iran we will act in full accordance with international law.”
He added later that it would worse than the Iranians “could ever have imagined”.
The US envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, called for the security council to impose “serious consequences” on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, for Tuesday’s attack.
“The Iranian regime will be held responsible for its actions,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “And we strongly warn against Iran – or its proxies – taking actions against the United States, or further actions against Israel.”
The spreading crisis comes at a fraught moment for Joe Biden less than five weeks before an election in which he hopes to pass occupancy of the White House to his vice-president, Kamala Harris.
While showing staunch support for Israel, he is seeking to stop the US being drawn directly into a conflict with Iran, well aware that Israel sees Iran’s nuclear programme as a potentially existential threat but cannot inflict significant damage on it militarily on its own.
“It is a widely held assumption that Netanyahu’s preference, across years in government, has been to bring the US into a direct military confrontation with Iran, and that now appears to be closer to fruition than ever,” Daniel Levy, the president of the US/Middle East Project policy institute, said.
Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said: “I think Israel’s impressive successes, both in the military field and in the intelligence arena in the past few weeks have enticed some in the Biden administration, who were advising cautiousness before, to consider options of going for the jugular now and continuing to further weaken Iran and its allies in the region, or even potentially targeting Iran’s nuclear programme.”
Vaez warned that: “Whether the US is involved or not, such an attack would certainly be the last straw in Iranian political decision to develop the ultimate deterrent.”