How will Israel retaliate against Iran?

When Iran attacked Israel last week with a barrage of missiles, one thing was certain: Israel would hit back hard. Ten days on, that response has still not come. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, has warned that the retaliatory strike on Iran will have an element of surprise. Israel’s attack, he said, ‘will be deadly, precise and above all surprising. They will not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results.’

Gallant knows that this element of surprise is critical; without it, Israel may have insufficient conventional capability to land a decisive first-blow strike.

This weakness became apparent following Iran’s missile attack on 1 October, in which dozens of Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s sophisticated anti-missile defences. The Iranians could substantially increase the number of missiles fired in a subsequent attack, which, if aimed at a built-up area against which precision targeting was unimportant, would cause huge damage and lead to substantial casualties.