Israel launched a retaliatory strike against Iran early Friday, targeting military sites in a limited response to Iran’s recent missile barrage against the Jewish state.
The strike hit a military base in the northern city of Isfahan, U.S. officials told the New York Times. The city is home to the Iranian regime’s nuclear and conventional-missile programs. The nuclear facilities around Isfahan are “completely secure,” according to state-controlled media, and the International Atomic Energy Agency said there had been “no damage” to nuclear facilities.
Israeli officials notified the Biden administration on Thursday that they planned to launch limited reprisal strikes against Iran within 24 to 48 hours, Fox News reported. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declined to confirm that report at a Friday morning press conference and said that the U.S. was not involved in offensive operations against Iran.
President Ebrahim Raisi had warned that “the tiniest act of aggression” on Iranian soil would be met with overwhelming force, but Iran notably did not respond immediately to the incursion into its airspace.
The 8th Shekhar Base of the Iranian air force was a possible target. The base is home to multiple squadrons of Iran’s F-14 “Tomcat” fighters. The U.S. retired its Tomcats in 2006 due to a combination of the aircraft’s excessive maintenance demands and technological advancements rendering the platform obsolete. The material readiness of the Iranian air force’s Tomcats is unknown.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials said an Israeli attack was also launched against Tabriz, a region 500 miles north of Isfahan, but that the attack was stopped. State media in Syria, an ally of Iran, said that Israeli missiles had also struck air-defense systems in southern Syria.
Further explosions were reported near Baghdad, in an area used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to meet with proxies in the region.
Dubai-based air carriers FlyDubai and Emirates were observed diverting around Isfahan, located in central Iran, in the early hours of Friday morning local time. Flights to Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan are suspended, according to state media.
The reported strikes come hours after Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said in an exclusive interview with CNN that Iran’s response to military action from Israel would be “immediate and at a maximum level.”
Amir-Abdollahian’s remarks follow Iran’s attack last week when it and its proxies launched approximately 300 missiles and drones at Israel in a blanketing effort to overwhelm Israeli missile defenses. Coalition forces, the U.S. foremost among these, shot down the overwhelming majority of the incoming munitions using a combination of ship- and aircraft-based weapons systems.
The U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, the decorated Carney (DDG-64), and the Arleigh Burke (DDG-51), were responsible for downing several Iranian missiles using, for the first time ever, the Navy’s SM-3 interceptor missiles. The SM-3 was designed to seek and destroy ballistic missiles, including ICBMs, outside the atmosphere.