Iran-Israel: What are the two sides' defense strategies?

For Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, Tuesday's missile attack on Israel is "concluded, unless the Israeli regime decides to invite further retaliation."

"In that scenario, our response will be stronger and more powerful," Araqchi, who used to be a senior member of Iran's nuclear negotiating team, said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

So far, Iran has argued that Tuesday's attack with around 180 missiles had come in response to Israel's recent killings of Hezbollah leaders and its current incursion in Lebanon.

Tehran said the missiles had only targeted Israel's military infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to fight back. "Iran made a big mistake tonight and it will pay for it," he said on Tuesday.

The US said it would support Israel to ensure Iran faced "severe consequences" for Tuesday's attack. The Pentagon also confirmed that it had fired around a dozen interceptors against the Iranian missiles.

 
In turn, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards explicitly threatened the US, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, a Middle East professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told DW.

"They said if you attack our refineries, we will set fire to your refineries as well as refineries and oil fields throughout the region, including in Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain," he said.

Israel "not interested in deescalating"

And yet, many in Israel view the current situation as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn the entire Middle East upside down and decisively weaken Iran, Fuchs added.

"Israel is anything but interested in deescalating the situation at the moment," he told DW.

However, if Israel were to target Iranian oil facilities or even nuclear installations, the situation in the entire Middle East would become truly unpredictable, he told DW.

According to U.S. website Axios, a "significant retaliation" will be launched within days. According to their reporting, Israeli officials said that oil production facilities and other strategic sites would be in the focus.

Israel has been fighting the Iran-backed terror group Hamas in its war in Gaza — which was triggered by the militia's attack on Israel on October 7 — for almost a year in the country's south.

It has also increasingly attacked the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon — whose armed wing is labelled as terrorist group by the European Union — following a year of limited fighting at Israel's northern border.

This week alone, Israel carried out a least a dozen airstrikes against targets in Beirut's southern suburbs while Hezbollah kept firing rockets into Israel. 

Also, strikes by the Iran-linked Houthi group in Yemen continue.

On Wednesday, the Houthis said they had launched strikes "deep into Israeli territory".

Dangerous escalation

Further reports point to up to 40,000 Iran-aligned fighters who are on hold in neighboring Syria near the border with Lebanon.

"Fighters from Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan have previously declared their solidarity with Hezbollah and a commitment to fight if called upon," Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East Security at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, or RUSI, told DW.

"The risk of a buildup of Arab fighters drawn from across the so-called axis of resistance [countries and groups that view the US and Israel as enemy] coalescing on Syria's porous border to support Hezbollah has been brewing for some time," she confirmed.

In her view, increasing the potential impact of the Iranian proxis is part and parcel of Iran's two-pillar security policy. "A latent military nuclear capability and the deployment of a network of aligned militia, or the ‘Ring of Fire', which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, armed groups in Syria and Iraq, and the Ansar Allah, or Houthi movement, in Yemen," she said in a recent analysis on the think tank's website.  

"So far, the first pillar has served to constrain Iran from taking overt belligerent action against Israel out of fear that an Israeli retaliation on its territory would damage its nuclear programme, setting it back by years and at great cost," she wrote, adding that the second pillar by definition requires ongoing organisational resilience and offensive military competence of its allies.  

But given the current escalation it's unclear whether these two pillars will avert a wide regional war.

"If Israel's limited raids into southern Lebanon would lead to a prolonged entanglement and combat with Hezbollah on the ground, this might trigger [these] Iran-linked fighters to try to infiltrate into Lebanon," she told DW. 

Edited by: Andreas Illmer