By Guardian- Patrick Wintour - Sat 26 Oct 2024 14.47 BST

Political elite under pressure from variety of sources, with US urging Iran to step back from the brink

The Iranian government has belittled the scale and effectiveness of the Israeli attack on its military sites, but hardliners in the parliament insisted the strikes breached Iranian red lines and required a swift response, preferably at a time when Israel is already enmeshed in Lebanon and Gaza.

The internal Iranian debate on how to respond to the long-awaited Israeli attack turns on whether to treat Israel’s breach of Iranian national sovereignty as too grave to be ignored, or instead to heed the advice coming from the region and from the US to acknowledge the relatively limited nature of the attack and to step back from the brink by not launching reprisals.

In making its decision, the Iranian political elite will have to weigh conflicting political, diplomatic and military pressures. But the initial tone from the government was one of patriotic pride at the performance of the air defences, rather than calls for immediate retribution. Some even claimed that the air defences proved better than Israel’s Iron Dome.

In what amounted to a holding statement, the foreign ministry condemned the attack, adding: “Iran feels entitled and obliged to defend itself against foreign acts of aggression.”

The Iranian government spokesperson, Fatemeh Mohajerani, said that “only limited damage has been done”, and that the pride of Iranians had been strengthened by their response to the attacks.

But an internal political debate has already started on how to respond which is likely to replicate differences inside the political elite that have been evident ever since Iran surprisingly elected the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian as president, partly on a ticket to improve relations with the west.

Amir-Hossein Sabeti, the ultra-conservative MP for Tehran, said on X: “Stable security depends on authority and a strong response to the smallest mistake of the enemy. Although the mountain of the Israelis gave birth to a mouse, the violation of Iran’s red line and the invasion of the country’s territory must be answered at a level that will surprise them.

“The best time to respond is when they are engaged in an attritional war in Gaza and Beirut.”

On social media there were calls for Operation True Promise 3, a reference to the code name given to Iran’s first two attacks on Israel.

By contrast, the former Tehran University professor Sadegh Zibakalam said: “Israel’s early morning air attack on Iran was more than a military achievement for Tel Aviv, it was a diplomatic success for Washington, which was able to force Netanyahu strictly to limit the attack so that Iran does not have to retaliate. Americans have shown for the umpteenth time they do not want war with Iran.”

Many ridiculed Israel’s attack as weak, after the preceding week’s threats to attack Iran’s oil and nuclear sites. Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, wrote in the first minutes after the attack on X: “I entered Tehran through Mehrabad airport a few minutes ago and passed through a number of streets, I did not see anything unusual. The Zionist enemy is like small change, it only makes noise but has no value or effect. They are too weak to seriously harm Great Iran.”

Hesamoddin Ashena, an adviser to Iran’s former president Hassan Rouhani, wrote: “You played with the lion’s tail. This is not Palestine, nor Lebanon, Iraq, nor Afghanistan. This is Iran.”

Some of the big military and political players in Iran have yet to make statements.

Diplomatically, the Iranian foreign ministry will also be listening to the advice from the region, especially from Saudi Arabia, with which it is trying to rebuild ties.

Iran will be pleased with the messages of solidarity from across the Gulf including Oman, Riyadh, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, signs that the country’s recent diplomatic push in the region has paid dividends. Such public displays of solidarity are not automatic between Iran and its Arab neighbours.

Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, reflected widespread sentiment, saying: “We are very concerned by the flagrant violation of aggression on Iran this morning. Thankfully, the damage appears limited and we dearly hope there are no casualties.

“It’s time for the world to wake up to the urgent need to address the root causes of this crisis, above all Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation of Palestinian lands.”

The Jordanian army stressed that it had not allowed Israel to use its airspace. Some of this Arab support, however, is likely to be contingent on Iran not escalating the crisis. It was noticeable that neither Saudi nor the UAE named Israel in their condemnatory statements.

Hardliners in Tehran in turn will be asking what this show of regional solidarity represents in practice, and whether Iran’s best route to security remains, as they have always insisted, in restoring the battered “axis of resistance”.

On the military side, daybreak allowed Iran and open source experts to survey the scale of the damage, including the death of two Iranian army soldiers, even if the government ordered Iranians not to upload pictures.

The fact that Tehran returned to normality within hours, with schools opening, traffic jams resuming and the stock market rising, raises the bar for those calling for military reprisals.

Military analysts appear to feel that Iran’s air defences outperformed expectations.

Iran’s own assessment of its air defences is at odds with Israel’s claims that it operated in the skies above Iran with near impunity.

Shahabeddin Tabatabaei, a reformist member of the information council of the Iranian government, wrote in his account on X: “The fake regime’s attack was defeated by the country’s integrated air defence system.”

But Iran knows that another attack on Israel will lead to recently installed US defences being engaged, and there is no guarantee that America would sit out a further Israel response to an Iranian attack, taking the world closer to a direct Iranian-US conflict, probably the penultimate rung on the escalatory ladder before a full-scale regional war.

Moreover, the chain of responsibility, from Iran’s perspective, started with an Israeli bombing on 1 April on the Iranian consulate in Damascus that killed nine Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps officers. Iran responded with Operation True Promise 1 on 13 April, a highly signalled attack using drones and missiles.

Israel retaliated on 19 April, with limited airstrikes on an air defence radar close to a nuclear site in Iran.

Subsequently, the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on 31 July, and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut on 27 September along with the IRGC deputy commander of operations, Abbas Nilforoushan.

This led to Iran’s response on 1 October, labelled Operation True Promise 2, in which about 200 ballistic missiles were fired at Israel. On this sequencing, Iran feels entitled to respond to restore deterrence.

Pezeshkian feels personally burnt, as the government chose in August not to respond militarily after Haniyeh’s assassination because of assurances given indirectly by the US that the peace talks in Gaza were two weeks from a breakthrough. Subsequently, the US was unable to deliver Israel’s backing for the ceasefire.

So, further western promises that diplomats are on the cusp of a breakthrough, either in Lebanon or Gaza, will be viewed sceptically in Tehran.

Talks about a Gaza ceasefire are due to restart on Sunday and there are some signs that the Israeli army may want a break in Lebanon. If Iran in this context did decide to call it quits with Israel on this third and most dangerous front then no one would be happier than the White House. Some faith would be restored in its ability to de-escalate events. But at present such a pre-election hail mary seems unlikely.