Israel launches long-awaited counterstrike on Iran

Israel launched its long-awaited retaliatory strikes on Iran early Saturday local time, the Israeli military said. Israel had vowed payback for Iran’s Oct. 1 attack, during which the Islamic republic launched about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. 

In a statement, Israel Defense Forces said that “in response to months of continuous attacks” from Iran, it conducted “precise strikes on military targets in Iran.”

Sean Savett, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told CBS News in a statement that “we understand that Israel is conducting targeted strikes against military targets in Iran as an exercise of self-defense and in response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack against Israel on October 1st.” 

A source told CBS News the Israeli attack was limited to military targets, and not nuclear or oil installations.

The U.S. was given an advanced warning of the attacks, the source said. 

“The regime in Iran and its proxies in the region have been relentlessly attacking Israel since October 7th – on seven fronts – including direct attacks from Iranian soil,” the IDF said in its statement. “Like every other sovereign country in the world, the State of Israel has the right and the duty to respond.”

Very few of Iran’s missiles made it past Israel’s advanced missile defense systems, and there were no casualties from the Oct. 1 attack, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed to make Iran “pay for it.”

“The regime of Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves,” the Israeli leader said in a statement shortly after the Iranian attack on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “They will understand.”

President Biden and Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have both said Israel had the right to defend itself and respond to the Iranian attack, but Mr. Biden was clear that he would not support an Israeli attack targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities or major oil infrastructure. 

In anticipation of the Israeli response — and any potential Iranian counter-response — the U.S. sent Israel a new missile defense system in mid-October. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Oct. 21 that the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system had arrived in Israel, along with about 100 American troops.

Iran defended its missile attack on Israel as a “legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime — which involved targeting Iranian nationals and interests and infringing upon the national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

U.S. officials told CBS News before the Iranian attack that Tehran had been ready to strike Israel on short notice since early August, when Iran first threatened to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. 

Israel has killed several senior Iranian and Iran-backed military and paramilitary commanders in strikes across the region, although it did not publicly claim responsibility for Haniyeh’s death.

An Iranian diplomatic source told CBS News immediately after the Oct. 1 missile attack that Iran’s leadership had been “under heavy pressure to take action” amid escalating Israeli attacks on Iran’s close ally Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and has long been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S., Israel and many other countries.

Israel has mounted a blistering offensive against Hezbollah — by far the most powerful of Iran’s so-called proxy groups in the region — since mid-September, killing many of its senior leaders and bombing its strongholds in Beirut’s southern suburbs and across the south of Lebanon, near the Israeli border. 

The Israel Defense Forces have also carried out ground operations in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese public health ministry says Israel’s operations in the country since September have killed about 1,500 people and displaced some 1.2 million from their homes.

The IDF said it had been forced to launch its assault on Hezbollah in response to the group’s year-long barrage of rocket and drone fire targeting northern and central Israel. Hezbollah has vowed to continue those attacks on Israel until the war with its fellow Iranian benefactor Hamas in Gaza comes to an end.

This is a developing story and will be updated. 

contributed to this report.