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The biggest attack ever. Debating a new generation of ballistic missiles. About an hour of attack. Still, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s order for a second direct strike from Tehran against Israel was merely a stopgap, rather than escalating to full-scale war in the Middle East. Here is the reading of all the experts about what happened last Tuesday, when 22nd rockets hit several Israeli cities, in two waves that lasted about half an hour, with a short break between them.
This attack by Iran against Israel was the double the size of the previous attack, in April this year, the first between the two countries. The 220 Fattah-1 ballistic missiles, never used by Tehran, were fired over a period of about 60 minutes, targeting the entire territory and forcing about ten million Israelis to resort to bomb shelters, after receiving a message and hear the warning. sirens. After all, Tehran warned the US (as did Russia) and quickly alerted the Israeli defense, which rallied to respond to what was about to come.
Most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s air defense systems, Ferra Dome and David’s Sling. Some of them fell in sparsely populated areas in central Israel, where two minor injuries and some material damagethe Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) advanced. In the occupied West Bank, a Palestinian man was killedafter being hit by debris. A Bedouin also died, according to an official US source.
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Information about an imminent attack from Iran was advanced on Tuesday evening by US officials, who warned Tel Aviv of the threat, which was expected to include between 240 and 250 ballistic missiles. At around 7:30pm local time (5:30pm in Lisbon), the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that an attack had been launched and warned civilians that they should go to bomb shelters and remain there until further notice.
“The attack continues. The explosions you hear are caused by collisions or crashes. The air defense system constantly detects and intercepts threats”, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari wrote in X in the middle of the attack. Almost an hour after the first statement, Hagari made new statements: no additional threats from Iran were identified and civilians could leave the shelters.
[Já saiu o primeiro episódio de “A Grande Provocadora”, o novo podcast Plus do Observador que conta a história de Vera Lagoa, a mulher que afrontou Salazar, desafiou os militares de Abril e ridicularizou os que se achavam donos do país. Pode ouvir aqui, no Observador, e também na Apple Podcasts, no Spotify e no Youtube]
When it was time to do the after, the United States announced that it was cooperating with Israeli troops to intercept the attacksdestroying about a dozen of the ballistic missiles. In a press conference, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed the intervention of two Destroyer warships, in cooperation with the IDF’s defense, promoting the difference in the size of the April attack. “The attack was lost and ineffective,” he said, words that Joe Biden repeated over and over again.
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Later, the US would say that some of the missiles, despite being state-of-the-art, were intercepted over Jordan.
The mass attack was launched from several Revolutionary Guard military bases in Karaj, Chermanshah and the border region with Azerbaijan. Contrary to the IDF’s reports that most of the missiles were intercepted, Iranian state television, quoted by Reuters, said that 80% of the targets had been hit – including military bases and the headquarters of Mossad, an intelligence agency Israel. It was also media linked to the Tehran regime that said this was the first use of Fattah’s latest generation hypersonic missiles.
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Iran’s confirmation of the attack came even before the IDF declared that it had already come to an end. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they launched the attacks on response to the assassination of several Hezbollah commanders in the last two weeks, in his territory, including the secretary general of the Shiite group, Hassan Nasrallah. “If the Zionist regime reacts to the Iranian operation, it will face more severe attacks,” they threatened, in a statement quoted by New York Times.
However, the same newspaper said the decision was not unanimous within Iran’s political leadership and that it was Revolutionary Guard commanders who pressured Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to approve the attack. Three Iranian military sources, on condition of anonymity, revealed that these conservative forces considered a military response the only way to maintain Iran’s strength and show its power and position in the region: lack of response was seen as a sign of weakness.
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This group, which included the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, expressed some regret about the fact that Tehran did not take action earlier, especially after the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed by Israel while he was in Iran This was the speech of the new president, Massoud Pezeshkian, at the United Nations General Assembly last week, which was considered an attempt pleasurable requests for restraint from the West and, therefore, classified as “betayal”the same three sources reported.
Still, in Tehran, this attack is understood as a standoff, rather than an attempt to escalate the war. And although, in private, the country’s new president, Pezeshkian, is worried about a direct war with Israel, in public he will always remain on Khamenei’s side, revealed one of his advisers to the North American newspaper. Be that as it may, and despite the attack being much stronger than it had been in April and using more effective weapons, not much damage had been done. If Iran wanted to escalate the war, it would have gone much further. And the US would not have known until now to warn their ally.
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We don’t know what’s coming. And that depends on Israel’s response.