At first glance, Tehran’s retaliation for Israeli attacks in Lebanon might seem like a reckless act that risks rekindling a devastating regional war.
For Iran, that is a risk worth taking, one critical to fighting back against what it sees as Israel’s efforts to shift the regional balance of power, while Iran and Washington try to negotiate a deal to end the conflict.
“Failure to respond would signal weakness,” said Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
For weeks, Iranian officials had criticized but largely tolerated Israeli strikes on its most important ally, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, warning that the fellow Shiite Muslim force should be included in the regional cease-fire it agreed upon with Washington in April.
As long as Israel’s attacks were contained to southern Lebanon, Iran had complained but not responded. Iran had warned that calculus would change if Israel expanded those strikes to the southern outskirts of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, where Hezbollah is dominant.
“Iran’s attack in defense of Lebanon was not merely a military response; it was the formal declaration of a strategic doctrine, said Sadegh Larijani, the chairman of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council, which advises Iran’s supreme leader.
“If any component of the Axis of Resistance is attacked, the response will extend beyond geographical borders and will alter the regional balance of power,” he said, using Iran’s term for the network of allied militant groups in the region that includes Hezbollah.
Iran wants to show it is serious about defending its regional militia allies. That position had been undermined by its former leaders when they refrained from retaliating against Israeli attacks in 2024 that badly degraded Hezbollah and killed its charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Since the U.S.-Israeli war began in February and killed much of Iran’s top former leadership, including its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s new rulers believe their willingness to act more aggressively — from blockading the vital Strait of Hormuz to attacking its Gulf neighbors — has been a major success.
To them, analysts say, being more aggressive allowed them to not only survive Washington and Israel’s attacks, but to inflict economic pain and emerge with strategic leverage through control of the strait, a crucial global shipping route for oil and gas.
Hard-liners see this as a repudiation of the comparative restraint the previous leadership often showed in military confrontations. In 2020, Tehran pursued only limited retaliatory strikes against Washington after it assassinated one of its most powerful military leaders, Qassem Soleimani. And it limited its retaliation against a U.S. base in Qatar after the 12-day war last June. The result, hard-liners argued, was only more U.S. and Israeli attacks.
By contrast, they see Iran’s more aggressive stance as arguably more useful. Last week, President Trump convinced Israel not to strike Beirut. Now, after Israel’s strikes on Beirut’s outskirts and Iran’s retaliation, Mr. Trump called for both sides to step back.
“We speak to those who break their commitments in the language of ‘power,’” Mohammad Mokhber, a hard-line political figure in Iran, wrote on social media after the strikes.
The defense of Hezbollah is not only posturing. Iran assessed the group’s ability to continue attacking northern Israel during the recent war as critical to giving Iran room to focus its attacks on its oil-rich Gulf neighbors, said Hamidreza Azizi, an Iranian security expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Allowing Israel to weaken Hezbollah further, he said, would therefore be militarily costly for Iran in a future conflict, which it deems inevitable.
Iran also saw its retaliation as necessary, he said, because it views Israel’s attacks as part of an apparent U.S.-Israeli strategy to try to quietly erode its strategic gains in the recent conflict even as it tries to negotiate a deal to end the war with Washington.
For weeks, U.S. forces have been quietly escorting vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. Many analysts describe this as a U.S. attempt to alleviate pressure on the global economy while it tries to increase the economic pressure on Iran by reinforcing its own blockade of Iranian vessels. Iran worries that Israel’s efforts to weaken Hezbollah are another facet of that strategy.
The Iranians see these moves by the United States and Israel as a way to use the cease-fire to “shape the realities on the ground in a way that would erode the leverage Iran has achieved during this war,” Mr. Azizi said.
Tehran’s willingness to retaliate so forcefully is also an indication, diplomats in contact with Iranian officials say, of how comfortable it is with the idea of a return to war.
They believe it would take a great deal for Mr. Trump, facing a deepening global economic crisis and midterm elections this fall, to rejoin the fray.
“They don’t think Trump is going to go to war,” said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. “But even if he does, they’re fairly confident they can manage it.”
Sanam Mahoozi contributed reporting.
