Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the strikes “severely harmed” Iran and achieved all of Israel’s goals.

By Javed Ali, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/israels-latest-strike-against-iran-may-actually-de-escalate-regional-tensions-for-now-at-least-242276

Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid praised the work of the military but said Israel should have struck harder.

“The decision not to attack strategic and economic targets in Iran was wrong. We could and should have exacted a much heavier price from Iran,” Lapid wrote in a post on X.

Israel attacked Iran with a series of pre-dawn airstrikes Saturday in what it said was a response to the barrage of ballistic missiles the Islamic Republic fired upon Israel earlier in the month.

The Israeli military said its aircraft targeted facilities that Iran used to make missiles fired at Israel as well as surface-to-air missile sites. There was no immediate indication that oil or missile sites were hit — strikes that would have marked a much more serious escalation — and Israel offered no immediate damage assessment.

Israel’s military confirmed Friday that its troops were operating around Kamal Adwan hospital in north Gaza. The hospital’s director had said the facility was facing a catastrophic situation with bombardment, Israeli troops preventing the entry of crucial aid and patients dying for lack of medical supplies.

In a social media video posted late Thursday, the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, said the hospital had been directly shelled by a tank, a claim the Israeli military did not immediately respond to.

Vice President Kamala Harris will team up with Beyoncé on Friday for a rally in solidly Republican Texas aimed at highlighting the perilous medical fallout from the state's strict abortion ban and putting the blame squarely on Donald Trump.

It's a message intended to register far beyond Texas in the political battleground states, where Harris is hoping that the aftereffects from the fall of Roe v. Wade will spur voters to turn out to support her quest for the presidency.

The Israeli military conducted operations overnight into Friday in Khan Younis, killing 38 people and injuring more than a dozen others, health officials said.

Palestinians who were killed or injured were taken to the European and Nasser Hospitals. Records from the European hospital obtained by the AP showed at least 15 members from al-Farra family were killed, including 13 children.

Israel estimates it has killed 2,000 Hezbollah militants since its military began fighting the Lebanese group along its northern border in October 2023.

The army did not explain how it arrived at that number on Thursday. It was not possible to independently corroborate its count.

Caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists after a strike in the country's south on Friday killed three media workers, in what he called a "war crime".

"The new Israeli aggression targeting journalists" was among the "war crimes committed by the Israeli enemy", Mikati said in a statement, adding the attack was "deliberate" and "aims to terrorize the media to cover up crimes and destruction".

An Israeli airstrike killed three journalists as they slept at a guesthouse in southeast Lebanon early Friday, a rare strike on an area that had so far been spared the hostilities in the rest of the region.

It was the latest in a series of Israeli attacks against journalists covering the war in Gaza and Lebanon in the past year.