CNN’s Jeremy Diamond reported from Tel Aviv, Israel that Israeli forces conducted a strike within Iran, which was confirmed by U.S. sources.
The strike was a reaction to Iran’s attack on Israel on April 13, which led to a warning from Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian that further action by Israel would deserve a response that was “immediate and at a maximum level.”
Following Friday’s Israeli strike, Diamond reported that there were no plans for a further response from Iran:
[O]ver the course of the last, nearly week since Iran carried out that attack on Israel, we have been hearing this talk of threading the needle, of trying to find a way for Israel to respond militarily to what they viewed as a crossing of a red line by Iran, by carrying out an attack from Iranian soil, targeting Israel directly, using its own forces rather than its proxy forces in the region. And it appears that this response that we saw last night, done very quietly, without any public comment so far from the Israeli government, appears to have been that attempt to thread the needle, to carry out an attack on Iranian soil without doing so publicly and without, it seems, causing significant casualties.
What we understand from a regional intelligence sources that Iran is not expected to retaliate any further. Basically saying, this source saying that the tit for tat between these two countries, at least directly, again, I’m not talking about the battles between their proxy forces, but at least directly that that this exchange of fire appears to be over, for the moment. And that is quite notable because it was only yesterday that we heard the Iranian foreign minister warning directly that if Israel struck Iran directly, that Iran’s response would be immediate and it would be overwhelming. And so it appears that this kind of quiet attack that Israel appears to have carried out overnight in terms of public messaging, that that may have been enough to avoid that kind of retaliation and to avoid all-out war between these two countries.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
