Iranian Insiders Warn That Attacking Israel Is a Trap

Iran lobbed hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in April in the hope of changing the rules of engagement: Israel had struck an Iranian consulate in Damascus, and Tehran sought to deter any further such direct actions against its interests. Those hopes were shattered last week when an operation attributed to Israel took out Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief, on Iranian soil. Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of President Masud Pezeshkian.

The badly humiliated Iranian regime now seems poised to launch a new attack on Israel—one that Western officials believe is imminent. The Jordanian foreign minister made a weekend trip to Tehran, the first of its kind since 2005, but seems not to have changed the will of Tehran’s leadership. (Notably, the minister reportedly told Iran that Amman wouldn’t open its airspace to attacks by Iran, the United States, or Israel, which could mean that it will shoot down Israel-bound Iranian missiles over its skies, just as it did back in April.) Today, Iran’s foreign ministry held a reception for ambassadors based in Tehran, to set out its legal case for striking Israel. On the same day, Russia’s national security adviser was in Tehran, holding meetings with Iran’s top military officials. Moscow claimed to have arranged this trip months ago, but it coincided exactly with the U.S. Centcom Commander Michael Kurilla’s visit to Israel.

In an ominous sign of what’s to come, Iran’s state TV is broadcasting vox-pop interviews, in which ordinary people on the streets of Tehran urge Iran to attack Israel, even suggesting that it should hit Tel Aviv or “turn Haifa into rubble.” Such interviews are widely known to be pre-staged. Actual sentiments on the Iranian street are likely quite different: Iranian voters repeatedly reject hard-line candidates, and ordinary people have little to gain from a war with Israel.

[Read: Ordinary Iranians don’t want a war with Israel]

The Iranian regime has nonetheless threatened for decades to destroy Israel. The willingness to hit it directly is new, however, and based on fresh calculations by the regime’s security and military elites.

To understand these calculations better, I spoke with Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the country’s security elites. He told me that the Iranian regime has become more willing to directly engage Israel not out of ideological zeal but because it seeks to prevent Israel from changing the balance of power in the region (he wouldn’t say in what manner, but he was likely referring to Israel expanding ties with regional Sunni Arab states in recent years). To that end, Najafi said, Iran is even ready to enter an “all-out regional war.” The April attacks, Najafi told me, were not designed to cause any casualties, but the one that’s coming will be “probably more decisive and more painful.”

Hawkish views, such as Najafi describes, undergird Iran’s support for the anti-Israel militias it calls the Axis of Resistance. And they are most likely widely shared within the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the powerful militia that will direct the attacks on Israel.

But these attitudes are not uniform across the Iranian establishment. In the past few days, even as the drums of war have beaten louder than they ever have, some within Iran’s establishment have raised their voice to urge a cautious response to Haniyeh’s assassination. These dissenters claim that the Israeli attack is an attempt to prevent Pezeshkian’s new government from patching up Iran’s relations with countries in the region and the West. Iran should do all that it can not to broaden the regional conflict, they urge.

The kernel of this argument was evident in the reaction of Javad Zarif, Iran’s former foreign minister, to Haniyeh’s killing. Zarif, who headed Pezeshkian’s transition team and is now vice president for strategic affairs, took to X to accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “pushing the region and the world to the brink of catastrophe.” He urged the United States and the European Union to “stop shielding Netanyahu’s madness and join the world in ending his suicidal chaos.”

Zarif promptly came under attack for focusing his ire on Netanyahu and not Israel as a whole, and for separating the United States from Israel. The regime’s official response, by contrast, claimed that the U.S. was complicit in the assassination, despite American denial of any involvement.

[Read: Is Iran a country or a cause?]

Other figures close to Pezeshkian have made the case more forthrightly. Iran must work together with countries in the Middle East and Europe, as well as “parts of the U.S. government,” to bring down Netanyahu, declared Hossein Marashi, a former vice president and the head of a prominent reformist party. Marashi told reporters that Iran should respond militarily to the assassination, “but only if we don’t move inside the trap set out by Israel’s rulers and don’t help bring about an expansion of war, which is what Netanyahu wants.”

Hamidreza Dehghani, Iran’s former ambassador to Qatar, made a similar case: Netanyahu killed Haniyeh to prolong the war in Gaza, undermine Iran’s new government, and boost the chances for a Republican victory in the U.S. presidential election, he claimed. An Iranian response “without prudence,” he warned, will help Netanyahu achieve his goals. Mohammad Sadr, a former deputy foreign minister and a current member of Iran’s Expediency Council, echoed this view: To avoid walking into “Israel’s trap,” Sadr said, Iran shouldn’t “act with haste.” The Iranian reformist press has picked up this line of reasoning. Iran’s response to Israel should make sure “a war wouldn’t break out … for Iran not to fall into Netanyahu’s trap,” urged an editorial in the reformist daily Etemad.

A centrist outlet took a more aggressive tack, but its logic was ultimately similar: Asre Iran ran a long story about Eli Cohen, the legendary Israeli spy who once infiltrated the highest echelons of the Syrian regime. Cohen got to where he was by being the loudest anti-Israel voice in every room in Damascus, the outlet said; if Iran wants to find who helped Israel infiltrate its ranks, it should start by looking at anti-Israel hard-liners who ask for harsh policies that will help bring about Iran’s isolation. Both outlets urged Iran to focus on its domestic woes instead.

Will any of these voices of caution and restraint make a difference?

“Zarif and co. are making their case, but the hard-liners are not even pretending to listen,” a political consultant close to the former foreign minister told me, on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “It doesn’t look good at all.”

As the head of Iran’s national-security council, Pezeshkian should technically have at least some role in shaping the debate. But he lacks any foreign-policy experience and seems overwhelmed by the moment. He is thus unlikely to be a forceful proponent for Zarif’s views, especially because he has repeatedly declared his primary loyalty to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the old, hard-line ayatollah who has brought his country closer than it has ever been to a catastrophic war. “No one knows what’s going on in Khamenei’s office,” the political consultant said.