Powerful detonations shake the air, while lights pierce the darkness at altitude. The announced attack by Iran, by drones and missiles, targeting Israeli territory has just begun, on the night of Saturday April 13 to Sunday April 14. It’s a little after 1 a.m. and no one knows, at that moment, whether to let themselves be carried away by curiosity or by fear. In the street, onlookers point out to each other the bright streaks in the sky, a sign of the activity of the Iron Dome’s protection systems, including the use of the Arrow system, capable of destroying warheads beyond the atmospheric layer .
We see these showers of light from the old city of Jerusalem, which creates the false impression that the holy places could be targeted, when they are only missiles destroyed in the distance, at altitude. Sirens scream, mixed with repeated orders to go to shelters. And then, very quickly, it’s all over. It lasted less than an hour. In other parts of Israel, the same scenario is playing out. A 7-year-old girl, injured by shrapnel in the south of the country, is the only recorded victim. The Nevatim air base, in the Negev (south), was hit by missiles without the installations being seriously damaged. A military intelligence site in the north was also hit, with no known damage.
The unprecedented attack launched by Iran against Israel is part of the sequence opened, after October 7, 2023, by the war in Gaza, leading to a gradual escalation between Israel and the axis of resistance (the regional allies of the Iran) which has raised fears, for six months, of a regional conflagration. It was carried out using drones and ballistic missiles in response to strikes attributed to the Jewish state on 1er April, against a building of the consular section of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the Syrian capital, which left seven Iranian Revolutionary Guards dead, including two generals.
This response had been in preparation for two weeks. It had been announced on numerous occasions, then given as imminent, notably by American sources, who raised the possibility of direct strikes on Israeli soil, with the fear of seeing an escalation to the dimensions of a regional war.
Already, late Saturday morning, Tehran had claimed the capture by the Revolutionary Guards of a commercial ship chartered by a company linked to an Israeli businessman in the Strait of Hormuz. Later in the day, suicide drones were launched from Iran, and immediately detected. The time needed to reach Israel through Iraq and Jordan was estimated at between five and six hours. None of these planes, nearly two hundred in total, ultimately reached the Israeli border, having been shot down in flight over Jordan and Iraq. Destroyed carcasses will be found not far from the Jordanian capital, Amman, about sixty kilometers from Jerusalem.
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