The Daily - Iran Retaliates

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Israel’s series of military successes against its longtime adversary Hezbollah had raised the question of whether the militant group’s backer, Iran, would retaliate. On Tuesday, that question was answered, when Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel.Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The Times, and Farnaz Fassihi, The Times’s United Nations bureau chief, discuss how they see events developing from here.Guest: Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Farnaz Fassihi, the United Nations bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Fiery balls of light could be seen falling from the sky over Jerusalem and loud explosions could be heard in Tel Aviv and other areas as Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel.After the missile attack, Israel may be more prepared to risk war with Iran.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. And this is The Daily. Israel's stunning series of military successes against its longtime foe, Hezbollah, raised the question of whether the group's backer, Iran, would retaliate. On Tuesday, we got the answer, with the largest missile attack on Israeli territory in the country's history. Today, my colleagues Patrick Kingsley and Farnaz Fassihi on how Israel and Iran each see this dangerous moment

and where it might lead. It's Thursday, October 3rd. So Patrick, the Middle East was already in chaos and has only gotten worse and really seems to be on the edge of some big, dangerous unknown. Can you give us the state of affairs at 9.50 a.mam on Wednesday? It feels like we may be witnessing some kind of paradigm shift, the power dynamics in the region possibly shifting before our eyes. Hezbollah, the very powerful militia in Lebanon, adversary of Israel, state within a state within Lebanon, is severely weakened. Israel has been assassinating its leaders methodically over the last several weeks, exploding Hezbollah's pages and communications devices, mounting some of the most intense bombardments

in contemporary warfare, killing many Hezbollah operatives, but also many civilians. And the culmination of this was the assassination of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday evening. That was a seismic event. Nasrallah was immensely influential, immensely powerful. And it's hard to overstate how much of a blow his death was to Hezbollah. He was their talisman, he was their longtime leader, their strategist. In particular, he was a key ally of Iran. And he had turned Hezbollah into one of the strongest fighting forces

in the Middle East and in the process provided Iran with a strong military ally that was able to act as a powerful and menacing deterrent to Israel. Should Israel ever decide to attack Iran and to destroy Iran's nuclear program? So just an enormous blow, not just to Hezbollah, which for many decades had been this kind of loaded gun pointed at Israel's head, but the regional power behind Hezbollah, Iran. Exactly. But why now? I mean, since October 7th, Israel and Hezbollah have been going back and forth over that border.

That's displaced tens of thousands of people, but it's been bumping along in a kind of low grade way for months. Why did Israel choose this moment to kill Nasrallah? All the while, it was expected that if the war in Gaza reached a conclusion, the war between Israel and Hezbollah on the northern border would die down, that there would also be a diplomatic solution between the two sides there. But what happened this summer was the gradual realization that the war in Gaza was not going to end anytime soon, that there was not going to be a truce between Hamas and Israel. And the result was that Israel decided that it could no longer wait for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with its Lebanese adversary,

and decided to try and end it by military means. And so a few weeks ago, they started escalating, moving beyond this low intensity border war, and eventually culminating in the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. And we had expected that if Israel escalated to this extent, Hezbollah would match it with the same kind of intensity, firing deep into Israeli territory, bombarding Israel's biggest cities with barrages of rockets and missiles, potentially taking out Israel's power grid.

In reality, that did not happen. And why not? It's not entirely clear, but there were two possible reasons. One, Hezbollah was genuinely thrown into disarray, its leaders killed, its strategists dead. Israel may have taken out so many Hezbollah rocket stockpiles that the group simply was not able to follow through on its long planned assaults. In addition, Iran, its biggest benefactor and key ally, also for weeks did not seem prepared to get involved. Israel killed Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniyeh,

in July. And Iran said that it would respond in revenge for that attack because he was killed in an Iranian military compound in Tehran, the Iranian capital. But Iran didn't respond to that. And it didn't respond when Hezbollah's commanders started getting killed. It didn't respond immediately when Nasrallah was killed. And it fell over the weekend like Israel had changed the rules of the game, that contrary to expectations, it had sufficiently instilled fear in Hezbollah and Iran, destroying their

military capabilities to the extent that they were not able of firing back. And that led, late on Monday, to Israel taking things a step further and sending ground forces into Lebanon, invading Lebanon with several thousand troops. And it felt that Israel had been able to make more and more dramatic moves without facing significant consequence from Hezbollah and its benefactor, Iran. Patrick, I'm thinking back to the beginning of the Gaza War and the big fear of the US and the rest of the world was that if Israel escalated against Hezbollah, it would be met with a giant response and it would pull Iran in and eventually the US into this big regional war. This is why the Biden administration encouraged Netanyahu not to do it.

But as this was playing out, as we were watching this over the past 10 days or so, it felt like maybe everyone was wrong. Like that Israel could roll through, could decimate Hezbollah, and really not face a huge consequence. Exactly, and that's how it felt until mid-afternoon on Tuesday, when we started getting reports from our sources saying that maybe Iran, after all that, was planning a massive attack.

A statement just out from the White House, here it is, quote, the United States has indications that Iran is preparing to eminently launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel. And suddenly the assumption that Iran was not going to respond to any of these moves over the last week appeared to have been proven wrong. There were attacks in closed structures, There were 300 people in closed buildings and 30 people outside. Israel implemented sudden restrictions on movement and the number of people that could gather in one place,

which is always a sign that the Israeli authorities think an attack is imminent. And then at 7.30 local time... We started to hear the chilling sound of the air raid sirens that are triggered whenever there is an incoming rocket or missile attack and that prompted millions of Israelis to hurry into the bomb shelters that are installed in many homes and workplaces. Dana we're seeing them coming from multiple directions here, to my left. And within under 15 minutes... Oh, Jesus.

Oh, God. OK, guys, we've got to get off the roof. These are coming down right next to us here. Please do, do. We started hearing the sounds of the missiles arriving. RUMBLING All told, Israel says that roughly 180 missiles were fired in several waves over the course of about an hour.

It was one of, if not the biggest attack of its kind in the history of warfare. Many, if not most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel's air defense system. And US naval forces stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean helped shoot down more. Some fell to earth causing craters in several parts of Israel. The upshot was that only one person was killed, a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank.

And there was not significant damage to Israeli infrastructure apart from three air bases and possibly the area of the Mossad headquarters, the headquarters of Israel's foreign intelligence agency. Nevertheless, it felt like a significant escalation from Iran. There were missiles aimed and which even hit some of the densest urban areas in the country. And it feels like Iran did this knowing that Israel would feel that it had little or no choice but to respond in kind. Well, where is it going to go from now? How is Israel thinking about the retaliation to what

you're saying is this huge counterattack from Iran. Now we're waiting very intensely to see how Israel responds. From what we understand, both listening to the words of Israeli leaders themselves, but also talking behind the scenes to officials and diplomats and analysts, there is no way that Israel will let this pass. They will respond and those options include taking out oil refineries, taking out military bases, and also at the far end of the spectrum, targeting Iran's nuclear facilities

in which Iran is accused of trying to build a nuclear bomb. You mentioned that the US military was actively shooting down rockets alongside the Israeli air defense. Do we expect the US to be actively involved in the retaliation? And will that effectively be the United States being drawn into a war with Iran? That's the million dollar question right now. How much support is the US going to give Israel? There are certain things that Israel will find it very difficult to do without US support. That includes targeting

those nuclear facilities, many of which are housed deep below ground, and which require rare kinds of bunker busting bombs and particular kinds of planes in order to carry those bombs. And all of that, according to military experts, really requires American support, know-how, and even the US to carry it out in the first place. And from what we understand from talking with US officials, the US is very unlikely to give that kind of support. But there are still very many other options that Israel doesn't need the support of the Biden administration to carry out. And that includes targeting the oil production facilities. It includes targeting military bases. They've already shown they have the ability to do that. And there's every expectation that they'll

do the same in a more dramatic fashion in the coming days. So if we see Israel hit Iran's nuclear sites in retaliation, we should consider that a big escalation. But so far that seems unlikely and you'd expect other targets to be hit instead. Yes, exactly. At the same time though, you can't rule anything out. To Israel's critics, Israel is the main source of unrest in the Middle East. It's failed to reach peace with the Palestinians. It's invading Lebanon. It's bombing Beirut. But in the mind of many Israelis, they feel like they are the victims of a malign alliance led by Iran that contains many powerful proxies across the Middle East.

And they feel that they have not done enough to project strength and to deter Iran and its allies from attacking Israel in the future. And the backdrop to all this is the deep feelings of guilt and regret from both Israel's military establishment and its political leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu about their failure to prevent the Hamas-led attack on October 7th last year. And it's possible that those kinds of emotions also inform their responses to subsequent threats ever since. Right. The biggest sign of weakness for Israel in a very long time, in a perception that they seem very keen to reverse. They feel they're facing an existential

threat and to combat existential threats you have to not only project strength, but to be strong. And what makes this such a recipe for disaster is that they are not alone in this. Iran also feels more or less the same way, that they feel a threat from Israel and they feel they have shown weakness in the past months and need to rectify that. After the break, Farnas Fasihi on Iran's perspective. We'll be right back. So we just talked to our colleague Patrick Kingsley and he told us that right now Israel feels like it needs to appear strong because they see

Iran and Iran's proxies as an existential threat. That's why they're going so hard after Hezbollah, Iran's number one proxy. But he also said that Iran feels the same way, that they need to appear strong in the face of Israel's attack on those proxies. And you, Farnaz, are our resident Iran expert with deep sourcing inside government circles. Tell us what all of this looks like from Iran's point of view. From Iran's point of view, they also feel like they're under attack. The investments that they've made in the militia that are aligned with them in the region, the military alliance

known as the Axis of Resistance from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Houthis in Yemen, the militias in Iraq and Syria, it had viewed these militia as its forward defense, as a way to deter attacks on its own soil, and as a way to sort of keep a balance of power with both Israel and the United States. So Israel's wave of attacks recently on particularly Hezbollah that culminated in the killing of Mr. Nasrallah was a tremendous blow to Iran. It diminished a force that it had relied on if it came under threat. So for Iran, the same way that Patrick explained that Israel feels it has an existential threat, Iran feels like it's under existential threat. So following Mr. Nasrallah's killing, they faced a choice to go attack Israel directly and retaliate and risk an

all out war that could threaten their own existence or if they were going to lay low but risk looking weak and invite possible attacks. Either way, for Iran, it was a difficult dilemma to face. So what are they weighing as they're trying to make this choice between going hard on Israel or restraining themselves? They are weighing whether Iran can afford to not respond to Israel. You have to remember that in July, Israel assassinated Hamas's political leader, Ismail Haniya, into Iran on the eve of the inauguration of the new president. They killed him in a very secure compound of the Revolutionary Guards. And for Iran, this was a big humiliation.

It was very damaging to their sense of national security or to being able to protect their key allies and guests on their own soil. And for a few weeks, the immediate reaction from Iranian senior leaders and military commanders was a pledge to take revenge against Israel, to strike back against Israel. There was a lot of diplomacy, particularly by the US through its allies, to try to convince it to exercise its strength, telling Iran that if you attack Israel, you're going to

jeopardize a ceasefire that is being negotiated between Israel and Hamas for Gaza, that you may risk taking the region into a wider war. And so they convinced Iran to hold back. And so Iran did not retaliate at that time. Yeah, and it felt very surprising because this was the mighty, all-powerful, much-feared Iran, and they were humiliated on their own soil. And they just don't hit back, which really defied expectations. It really did defy expectations, restraining themselves only to see in a few months that Netanyahu was more emboldened, that it went into Lebanon with the explosion of the Pagers and the walkie

talkies and the strike on Hezbollah commanders and ultimately the killing of Mr. Nasrallah. Iranian officials that I've been speaking to say that in retrospect, that decision was wrong. And the reckoning inside Iran is that if they had reacted to Mr. Hani's killing, perhaps Nasrallah would be alive. And that now, looking ahead, they can't really have the world sitting with that impression, right? Israel will keep going further and further and the world will see Iran as a kind of a paper tiger. Exactly. This is the narrative that they wanted to change, that Iran was weak, that Iran was not going to defend itself. And also remember, Sabrina, officials were telling me that they were also worried that

these military alliances they'd made in the region would look at Iran and say that you're not defending us, that your closest ally was killed by Israel and you did nothing. So they also wanted to bolster those ties and sort of not give the impression that Iran would take it all and not respond. Iran very much felt like Netanyahu was blowing through all the red lines, particularly with the killing of Nasrallah, and that they needed to reestablish some rules. So after days of debating, the senior military commanders and the generals won the debate inside Iran and convinced supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei to order direct strikes against Israel.

Right. And that is exactly what we saw happen last night, overnight, the largest military barrage in the history of the Israeli state, as Patrick was saying. Exactly. And now, Iranians are anxious. The majority of people don't want war. And everyone's waiting to see what's going to happen. So it feels worth pointing out at this point that the Iranian response was huge and meant to inflict serious damage to Israel, but of course it didn't succeed. So I guess the question is, did this attack make Iran look strong like they wanted, or did it actually reinforce how incapable they've been in recent times to hurt Israel? I think from the perspective of the Iranians and from the perspective of the region, it restored some of their credibility,

both at home among their constituents and also regionally on the Arab street, as we saw a lot of cheering in many Arab cities last night for Iran's actions. But in terms of military tactical success, you're right that if the aim was to take out Israeli military bases, they didn't achieve that because Israel has the superior military power and air force than intelligence to Iran. But if we want to take a broader look at Iran's strategy, this just escalates the stakes. It makes it a lot more difficult to calculate a war with Iran. That sure, Iran is maybe not as strong

as it wants to project, but it's not going to be defeated easily. That if Israel or the United States or its allies decide to attack it, they're going to have a wider regional chaos and mess on their hands. And I think for Iran's purposes, that message is also something that they wanted to send. But how do they fight back? Iran's military, as you said, is not a match for Israel's. And their main proxy, Hezbollah, is severely weakened. So what do they have to fight back with?

Well, Iran's defense strategy has been mostly investing in its missiles and drones, and also investing in unconventional warfare by arming and funding and training these militia groups in the region. So one view is that in the short term, Iran may not be a match for Israel's superior air power, but in the long term, because of these proxies and because of the investments that it has made in the region, that it could win the longer game or it could inflict more pain that way. As we've seen with the wars in Afghanistan and with the war in Iraq and elsewhere, superior

military powers don't always win the longer game. And the other thing that we've been hearing from senior Iranian officials in the past few months is this idea that if Iran feels an existential threat, it might change its nuclear doctrine and policy. Iran has maintained all these years that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but it has crossed the threshold of being a nuclear capable state, meaning that if it decides that it wants to pursue a weaponized program, it can. I see.

Now, experts say that building a bomb would take closer to a year. But this is something that is even currently being discussed. Just following Nasrallah's killing, there were analysts on state television saying that in order to protect the Islamic Republic and the country, Iran needed to build the ultimate deterrence, which is a nuclear bomb. Unless, of course, Israel takes out that capability first by bombing it. Yes, but that's very challenging. It's not easy. It would require the help of the United States. And on Wednesday, President Biden said that he's against an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. But the question is whether Israel has other ways, including covert attacks.

And if it does decide that unilaterally it wants to bomb the nuclear facilities, will it draw in the United States, even if it doesn't want to? And then if the US is drawn into this war, will Iran's powerful allies, Russia and China, also enter the war? Right. Iran has forged very close military and intelligence ties with Russia and very close economic ties to China. So you could see a scenario where this war and this conflict could very quickly morph into something much

bigger than between Iran and Israel. And one thing we've learned from all these wars in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Syria and Gaza and Lebanon and now potentially Iran, is that these wars start in one way, but there's no telling how they will end and what the consequences will be and what other actors will get involved. And right now we're in one of those pivotal moments where the chaos and violence that we've seen raging in the region for the past year could get worse in unpredictable ways. We just don't know.

Farnaz, thank you. Thank you for having me, Sabrina. On Wednesday, Israel said that eight of its soldiers had been killed in close-range combat in southern Lebanon. It appeared to be the first direct ground confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel since Israel's invasion of Lebanon began. The fighting showed that Hezbollah remained capable of carrying out deadly attacks. Meanwhile, in Lebanon's capital, several huge explosions erupted around midnight, and the Lebanese Health Ministry said early Thursday that six people had been killed.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday, a federal judge partly unsealed a new filing from special counsel Jack Smith, arguing that the case that former President Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election should go forward, despite a recent Supreme Court ruling on his immunity from prosecution for official conduct. Smith used the 165-page brief to paint the indictment's many individual allegations as private acts, writing that, quote, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.

The brief includes new details about Trump's response to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. When an aide informed President Trump that his social media post had endangered the safety of Vice President Mike Pence, Trump responded, quote, So what? And President Biden ordered 1,000 active duty troops to help with Hurricane Helene relief efforts. At least 176 people have died, and it remains unclear how many are still missing. Biden visited North and South Carolina to assess the damage. And Vice President Kamala Harris scrapped her campaign plans in Pennsylvania and instead went to Georgia to pledge the administration's

support for recovery. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, As the Chetravedi, Luke Vanderplug, and Diana Nguyen with help from Mary Wilson and Muzh Zaydi. It was edited by Paige Cowitt and Liz O'Balen. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, and Rowan Nimisto. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi.

See you tomorrow. 1