Israel has struck Iran in a “targeted and precise” attack in retaliation for Iranian attacks on Israel earlier this month, the country’s military has said, announcing that the strikes have concluded.
“I can now confirm that we have concluded the Israeli response to Iran’s attacks against Israel. We conducted targeted and precise strikes on military targets in Iran — thwarting immediate threats to the State of Israel,” a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said in a video statement.
“Our planes have safely returned home.”
The Israeli military targeted “missile manufacturing facilities,” where it said Iran manufactured the missiles used to attack Israel over the last year.
Israeli warplanes also hit “surface-to-air missile arrays and additional Iranian aerial capabilities, that were intended to restrict Israel’s aerial freedom of operation in Iran.”
Earlier, the IDF said the attack was launched “in response to months of continuous attacks from the regime in Iran against the state of Israel.
“The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since October 7 on several fronts, including direct attacks from Iranian soil,” it added.
Iran said that two of its soldiers had been killed in the Israeli attack, and confirmed that military sites were targeted in the region surrounding the capital, Tehran, and other parts of the country. It said the strikes caused “limited damage.”
The semiofficial news agency Tasnim reported that Iran was resuming flights as normal after a brief interruption.
Earlier, several explosions were reported to have rocked Tehran and the nearby city of Karaj, local media reported in the early hours of October 26.
State television and the Fars news agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as well as CNN, also reported the explosions.
Iran has been on edge for several weeks, with many government officials and observers around the globe saying they expected Israel to strike its archrival in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack earlier this month — which Tehran said was in itself retaliation for an earlier attack by Israel.
The Israeli strikes reportedly did not target energy or nuclear facilities.
In one of the first Western reactions to the strike, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Iran should not respond.
“On the question of the strikes, I think we need to be really clear that Israel does have the right to defend itself, but we are urging, and have been urging all sides to show restraint, and that is why I am very clear today, Iran should not be responding to this,” Starmer said in Samoa, where he is attending a Commonwealth summit.
White House National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Washington was advised of the strikes ahead of time, calling them “an exercise of self-defense and in response to Iran’s ballistic-missile attack against Israel on October 1.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, about the strikes.
Austin reiterated that the United States was committed to Israel’s security.
Israel has a right to defend itself, though Washington was determined to prevent the conflict from expanding, Pentagon press secretary Pat Ryder said in a statement.
Around the same time, an Israeli air strike targeted some military sites in Syria’s central and southern parts, according to the Syrian state SANA news agency.
Concerns have been growing that Iran and the United States would be drawn into a regional war amid Israel’s intensifying assault in Lebanon on Hezbollah — a militant group and political party that controls much of southern Lebanon.
The air strikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon have been accompanied by a ground operation.
Hezbollah, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, while the European Union blacklists its armed wing but not its political party — has supported another Iran-backed group, Hamas, which has been the target of a withering assault by Israel over the past year.
Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, triggered the current war when its fighters crossed into Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed some 1,200 people. They also took around 251 hostages back to the Gaza Strip.