Iran’s series of ballistic-missile salvos aimed at Israel signal Tehran’s desire to project power across the region, put Washington on the defensive and demonstrate that it retains significant strike capabilities despite the intense air campaign waged against it by the U.S. and Israel.
Tehran’s leaders appear to be gambling that missile attacks and President Trump’s desire to keep a possible peace deal on track will pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back his offensive against the Iranian allied-Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, after Israel launched an airstrike in Beirut on Sunday.
After a series of tit-for-tat exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran, Tehran said Monday it had ceased its attacks but warned that they would resume and could widen if Israel continued to strike, including in southern Lebanon. Israel also ended its attacks on Iran but would continue to operate against Hezbollah, including in the south, a person familiar with the matter said.
Iran’s regime has been emboldened by surviving more than a month of airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel and has established some deterrence against future attacks by showing it can inflict costs on the global economy by blockading the strategic Strait of Hormuz and attacking its relatively vulnerable Gulf neighbors.
The White House’s reluctance to restart the war despite constant challenges to Trump’s two-month ceasefire has bolstered Tehran’s confidence that it can be more assertive without triggering military blowback.
“Iran’s decisions show they believe they have the upper hand, with Trump deterred from renewing the fighting,” said Ofer Guterman, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “It allows them to project power, and not in a trivial way.”
Iran remains vulnerable with its economy in shambles, no control of its airspace and little demonstrated ability to inflict the sort of strategic damage that could head off determined Israeli attacks.
But the regime’s willingness to escalate has managed to roll back some of the U.S. and Israel’s gains of the 12-day war last June, after which Iran looked exposed and Hezbollah had been cowed, Guterman said.
Iran has also shown in weeks of skirmishes that it has more than enough missiles to stay in the fight despite U.S. and Israeli efforts to degrade those capabilities. U.S. intelligence agencies assessed in April that Iran emerged from the initial 40-day phase of the war this spring with thousands of ballistic missiles intact.
Tehran’s top officials are now touting their ability to use force to threaten U.S. and Israeli interests and shape the diplomatic off-ramp. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Iranian lead negotiator Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf have each echoed the message.
“The Iranian nation has shown in its struggle against the United States and the Zionist regime that the era of cost-free threats against Iran has ended,” Ghalibaf said last week.
Since the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began in late February, a new generation of hard-line Iranian leaders has jettisoned decades of caution in attacking Israel and critical targets in neighboring countries. Their goal is to restore deterrence by responding to any challenge to their interests and make sure neither the U.S. or Israel come out of the war with a sense they have won.
The weekend’s escalation began after Israel launched an airstrike on Beirut on Sunday, testing a brief ceasefire that Trump imposed when intensified fighting in Lebanon a week ago threatened the talks with Iran.
Iran responded with a series of missile attacks on Israel that did little damage. Israel retaliated by striking an important Iranian petrochemical plant and air defenses. It was the first exchange of direct fire between the two rivals since Trump declared a halt to the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran in April, and a gamble that even striking Israel wouldn’t cause a resumption of the war.
Iran’s strikes showed once again that Trump will publicly pressure Netanyahu to scale back attacks if he feels a diplomatic deal is in danger, exposing Israeli-U.S. tensions over ending the war that Tehran hopes to exploit.
Trump said Monday on social media that “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’”
Israel wants the freedom to keep attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon even if the war in Iran ends. It also would prefer to keep going at Iran to further degrade its industrial capacity and put pressure on the regime, though it realizes it needs Trump’s approval and U.S. military support to fully resume hostilities. Netanyahu said on Monday that he had acted to ensure that Iran and Hezbollah couldn’t “impose on us an intolerable new equation,” in which Israel was unable to respond to the Lebanese group’s or Tehran’s attacks.
After the Israeli strike on Beirut on Sunday, Iran’s attack displayed its determination to maintain the link between the two fronts in the war, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at International Crisis Group.
“Iran has left Washington trying to separate two fronts whose key triggers remain outside the U.S.-Iran channel: Israel’s asserted freedom of action in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s refusal to stand down,” he said. “The war has certainly made Iran less, not more, risk averse.”
Iran’s attack on Israel also underscores how direct conflict between the two regional enemies, unthinkable before 2024, is being normalized.
Back then, it was Iran and its proxies, the self-styled Axis of Resistance, that were on the defensive. Israel picked off Iranian commanders in Lebanon and Syria, eventually provoking Iran’s first direct attack on Israel in April 2024.
After Israel killed Hamas’s top official and the longtime leader of Hezbollah, Iran attacked Israel again that fall. Israel’s response was precise and militarily damaging.
With Hezbollah weakened and the collapse of the pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s military influence in the region was at a low point. Hezbollah was coerced to accept a ceasefire, backing down from its previous stance that it wouldn’t accept a truce without a corresponding ceasefire in Gaza.
Now, Iran is seeking to show that it will take risks to champion its militia allies’ cause.
Since the start of the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, Iran’s militias have shown they remain a threat. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq launched drones into Saudi Arabia while Hezbollah, which sat on its hands during last June’s U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, repeatedly fired on Israeli targets. That extended Iran’s reach during its campaign of missile and drone attacks against Israel, Gulf countries and other regional states including Turkey and Azerbaijan.
It isn’t clear whether Iran’s assertive military strategy will prevail. Israel remains determined to weaken Hezbollah, and it showed by retaliating against Iran that there is a limit to Washington’s willingness or capability to constrain it.
Eyal Hulata, a former Israeli national security adviser now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said Tehran faces a basic problem in trying to paint itself as an emboldened power: Its ability to harm Israel is significantly weaker than Israel’s ability to hurt it.
Iran is trying to make up for this by taking more risks.
“In the past you had the proxies protecting Iran, and Iranians were very risk averse in terms of using missiles and drones,” said Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of the Iran division of Israeli defense intelligence. “Now it’s the opposite—Iran is using its capabilities in order to protect the axis itself.”
Write to Laurence Norman at [email protected] and Jared Malsin at [email protected]