Israel vows response after Iran hits it with salvo of ballistic missiles

JERUSALEM/BEIRUT: Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for Israel’s campaign against Tehran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, and Israel vowed a “painful response” against its enemy.

Alarms sounded across Israel and explosions could be heard in Jerusalem and the Jordan River valley after Israelis piled into bomb shelters. Reporters on state television lay flat on the ground during live broadcasts.

Israeli army radio said nearly 200 missiles had been launched into Israel from Iran. Israel’s military later sounded the all-clear and said residents were free to leave their shelters.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Iran had launched tens of missiles at Israel, and that if Israel retaliated Tehran’s response would be “more crushing and ruinous”.

But Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the attack would have consequences, as did Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon.

“As we have previously made clear to the international community, any enemy that attacks Israel should expect a painful response”, Danon said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a few other ministers were meeting in a bunker near Jerusalem, where the security cabinet was due to convene shortly, two Israeli officials said.

Israel’s military was not aware of any injuries from the Iranian missile attacks, Hagari said. But the Palestinian civil defence authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank said a man was killed near Jericho and falling rocket debris had caused damage and started fires in the area.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters the order to launch missiles at Israel had been made by the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei remains in a secure location, the senior official added.

Tehran informed Russia before the missile attack and alerted the U.S. “shortly before”, said a second senior Iranian official.

Reuters journalists saw missiles intercepted in the airspace of neighbouring Jordan.

Oil prices shot up 5% on the news of the Iranian missile strikes, which raise the prospect of a wider war between the two arch enemies.

A previous round of Iranian missiles fired at Israel in April – the first ever – were shot down with the help of the U.S. military and other allies. Israel responded at the time with airstrikes in Iran, but wider escalation was averted.

ESCALATION IN LEBANON

Iran had vowed to retaliate following Israeli strikes that killed the top leadership of its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, including that group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, a towering figure in Iran’s network of fighters across the region.

Israel said overnight that its troops had launched ground raids into Lebanon, though it described the forays as limited.

In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States was prepared to help Israel defend itself from Iranian missile attacks.

“We discussed how the United States is prepared to help Israel defend against these attacks, and protect American personnel in the region,” Biden said on X about a meeting held with Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House national security team earlier in the day.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking after Iran fired its salvo of missiles at Israel, condemned what he called “escalation after escalation”, saying: “This must stop. We absolutely need a ceasefire.”

Israel in a post on X criticised Guterres for not holding “Iran responsible for firing 181 ballistic missiles at 10 million Israeli civilians.”

Though so far characterised by Israel as limited, a ground campaign into Lebanon for the first time in 18 years pitting Israeli soldiers against Hezbollah, Iran’s best-armed proxy force in the Middle East, would be a major regional escalation.

More than a thousand Lebanese have been killed and a million have fled their homes in weeks of intense Israeli airstrikes.

In the latest announced killing of a senior Hezbollah figure, Israel said on Tuesday it had assassinated a commander named Muhammad Jaafar Qasir, describing him as in charge of weapons transfers from Iran and its affiliates.

Near the city of Sidon along the Mediterranean south of Beirut, mourners wept over coffins containing black-shrouded bodies of people killed in Israeli strikes.

“The building got struck down and I couldn’t protect my daughter or anyone else. Thank God, my son and I got out, but I lost my daughter and wife, I lost my home, I have become homeless. What do you want me to say? My whole life changed in a second,” said resident Abdulhamid Ramadan.