The military spokesman for Israel, Daniel Hagari has said that the latest Iranian attack will have consequences as they have plans and would eventually operate at its decided time.
This comes in as Iran launched around 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday in response to the killings of Tehran-backed militant leaders, prompting alarms all over the regions. Though most of the missiles were intercepted by Israeli air defences or by allied air forces before they reached Israel.
In a statement by the Israeli military, they said: “Missiles were launched from Iran towards the State of Israel,” as sirens sounded nationwide, announcing after about an hour that the attack was over with a “large number” of missiles intercepted.
Israeli medics also reported that two people were lightly injured by shrapnel in the country’s centre, while in the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian was killed in Jericho “when pieces of a rocket fell from the sky and hit him”, the city’s governor Hussein Hamayel told AFP.
This was Iran’s second direct attack on Israel after a missile and drone attack in April in response to a deadly Israeli air strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus. They had launched a missile attack on three military bases in Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv.
The recent attack according to Iran was in response to Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last week as well as the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran bombing widely blamed on Israel.
UN chief Antonio Guterres condemned the “broadening conflict in the Middle East”, saying in a statement: “This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.”
While Iran-backed groups across the region had already been drawn into the Gaza war, sparked by Palestinian group Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Tehran had largely refrained from direct attacks on its regional foe.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,638 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.
