Iran is weighing how to respond to Israel’s attack. Here’s what may happen next.

• Israel launched “precise strikes” on Iran on Saturday, killing four soldiers.
• The strikes were a long-awaited retaliation to an Iranian missile attack earlier in October.
• Here’s how Iran may respond.

Iran is weighing up its next move after Israel executed a long-awaited retaliation this weekend.

The Israel Defense Forces said it carried out “targeted and precise strikes” on Iranian military sites on Saturday. Four soldiers were killed following the attack, Iran’s military said, according to the IRNA state news agency.

The strikes, which came almost four weeks after Iran launched around 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the killings of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, appear not to have been as deadly as some had predicted; experts previously said that Israel may have considered assassination attempts or targeted Iran’s nuclear sites or oil facilities.

Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Kent, told Business Insider that a larger-scale attack would have given Iran “no choice but to escalate” the conflict.

He added that pressure from the US likely drove Israel to pursue a more restrained strategy.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, a senior US administration official said the US was not involved with the planning or execution of Israel’s retaliatory operation.

However, they added that President Joe Biden and his national security team encouraged Israel “to conduct a response that was targeted and proportional with low risk of civilian harm.”

Questions are now being raised over how Iran will proceed.

Iran could look for an ‘off-ramp’ or launch a ‘small-scale’ retaliation

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Sunday that Iranian officials should decide how to respond to the attacks, adding that they “should neither be magnified nor downplayed.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry wrote on X that Iran considered itself “entitled and obliged to defend against acts of external aggression.”

But Iran has also seemingly sought to downplay the impact of the strikes, saying it successfully intercepted the attacks while sustaining only “limited damage.”

Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, said that could be a sign that Tehran “is looking for an off-ramp, even if it claims otherwise.”

“Iran may be frustrated that its deterrence against Israel has waned, but it’s unlikely to be temerarious in trying to restore it,” he said.

Speaking to The New York Times, Yoel Guzansky, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank, said: “The music that I hear from Iran is basically saying, ‘Oh, this is nothing,'” but he added that it still marked the “beginning of a new phase, a dangerous one, with many more sensitivities.”

“It is possible for the two sides to close this round at least, and that we will not see an Iranian retaliation — or if we’ll see it, it will be small in scale,” he added.

Voller said that should Iran choose to respond, it could turn to its proxies to defend its nuclear program.

“We must remember that Israel’s end goal is to bring the Iranian nuclear program to an end, and any Iranian retaliation will provide Israel with the opportunity to continue pursuing this goal,” he added.

Israel could strike again

Voller said Iran may be deterred from launching a direct counterattack because of Israel’s track record and “proven capability of reaching Iranian sensitive targets.”

He added that Israel’s targeting of Iran’s military sites, including its air defense system, would allow it to launch further air attacks if Iran were to escalate the conflict.

Israel is also one of the world’s top military spenders as a share of GDP, and it receives large amounts of military aid from the US to maintain what it calls a “qualitative military edge” over neighboring countries.

And recent events will likely have reinforced to Iran’s leaders that the country is “overmatched militarily,” Panikoff said, “which, for a regime that prioritizes stability above all else, makes entering into a full-scale war an illogical choice.”

The Israeli military has said it would be “obligated to respond” if Iran attacked again.

Ellie Geranmayeh, the deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Times that further attacks from Israel shouldn’t be ruled out, especially after the US election in November.

“There will be a sigh of relief across Iran and the region that the US managed to restrain Netanyahu for now,” Geranmayeh said, referencing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“But the fear is that this is a temporary restraint leading up to the US elections. The ‘lame duck’ phase ahead could be a moment where we see renewed Israeli attacks inside Iran — as a perceived golden window to further deplete Iranian capabilities,” she added.