Week of Iran-Israel strikes marks a Mideast ‘Game Changer’
Israel ended with relief Friday after Tehran declared it had defeated what it said was a small attack on its territory by Israeli drones. But while the strike, which Israel didn’t officially claim, avoided touching off fresh escalation for now, there was no escaping that the tit-for-tat exchange ushered in a new era where the two adversaries look more willing to fight each other directly rather than through proxies. And that, government officials and experts fear, could lead to open war.
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“The past week has been a game-changer,” said Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department official who’s now vice president at the Brookings Institution. Iran’s massive missile attack on Israel six days ago “has changed the nature of this conflict and I don’t see it changing back even though the Israelis were very, very calibrated in their response,” she said. “The baseline for escalation is much higher.”
Oil prices eased Friday and markets appeared relatively unfazed after it became clear that the strike on Iran was far more limited than initially feared. Publicly, Israel’s allies were rejoicing that Friday’s strikes were so small, even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had rejected their appeals not to retaliate at all after it was able to all but neutralize Iran’s unprecedented missile attacks last weekend.
Yet that calm belied a deeper unease among US and foreign officials. A senior European official warned that the situation remains very tense, with no
