English translation of the Hebrew original.
I understand that, from now on, every news studio will focus on one thing: how Iran will respond to Zahedi’s assassination.
My honest answer is that I do not really know, and I doubt anyone does.
But because public paranoia keeps rising with every broadcast, I want to try to offer my scenario for what might happen.
To begin, I want to return to the event most similar to the current assassination: the killing of Qassem Soleimani, and examine Iran’s response afterward.
Five days after the assassination, at precisely the same time of day that Soleimani was killed, Iran launched ballistic missiles at American air bases in Iraq.
The American forces stationed at those bases received advance warning the evening before the attack. They therefore cleared aircraft from the hangars and had time to take shelter several hours before the strike.
Because of the advance warning, no one was killed. However, several American soldiers required evacuation to hospitals in Iraq after the attack, and many dozens more were reported to have suffered brain injuries.
That did not prevent the Iranians from presenting the attack as a success and telling the Iranian public that 80 soldiers had been killed.
When I analyze Iran’s response to the current event, I am guided by two basic assumptions:
First, Iran does not currently want to enter a regional war, for reasons I will explain in the future. That would disrupt its strategic plan, which is why we did not see Hezbollah join the war after October 7.
Second, Iran will not be able to let this event pass without a response that goes beyond the current deterrence equation.
In other words, not more of what we have seen so far in the war, but a much more substantial response, both in capabilities and in the damage inflicted.
This leads me to hypothesize that, as after Soleimani’s assassination, Iran will choose a similar form of response.
It is important to emphasize that Iran could have inflicted heavier damage on the Americans after Soleimani’s assassination. It deliberately chose, however, to cause measured damage that the Americans could absorb without escalating into a regional war.
Following that hypothesis, I assume we will again see a precision-weapons strike: several ballistic missiles or a drone swarm, similar to the Aramco incident, which I will also discuss later. It would hit a military or civilian target, causing substantial reputational or economic damage but little loss of life.
Taking the hypothesis further, I assume such an attack would not come from Iran itself—at least not openly—because of its reluctance to trigger regional escalation. For the same reason, the attack would not come from Lebanon either.
That leaves one of the proxy theaters: Syria, Yemen, or Iraq.
If I have to choose, I rule out Syria. Although it fits the symbolism the Iranians favor, they consider it highly penetrated by intelligence services.
The Yemeni theater is too far away and has not demonstrated impressive precision-weapons capabilities, either in the current war or before it.
That leaves Iraq.
If I take one more gamble, the hands operating these weapons will be exclusively those of Iranian personnel.
The Iranians will not allow even the slightest chance that unskilled hands could carry out an operation with such an explosive potential to trigger regional war.
That is where my hypotheses end.
I know this is a sequence of assumptions built on one another, and that my chances of being wrong are quite high in such a situation. Still, I felt it was important to explain what I consider the most likely scenario.
I sincerely hope none of this happens, and that this thread turns out to be complete nonsense.
P.S. The moment I hit send on this thread, my computer crashed and I had to reconstruct it.
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