The night the missiles crossed the sky

On the evening of October 1, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, and the sky over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv carried the warhead of a night that the region had spent weeks preparing for. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called the volley its answer to the killings of the year, the deaths of Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah and the commanders who had fallen in the campaign against Hezbollah, and the attack was the second direct strike of the year, after April’s exchange, and by any measure the largest. Israel’s air defences, backed by the American and allied patrols that have guarded the country since the spring, intercepted most of the missiles; a handful struck the centre of the country, and a man in the West Bank was killed by falling debris. The sirens sounded across the country, the airports closed, the schools stayed shut, and the night became the longest that the Israeli home front had known since the war with Hamas began.

The attack carried its own technological signature. Iran claimed to have used its Fattah hypersonic missile for the first time, and its generals announced that about ninety per cent of the volley had hit its targets, a claim that the interceptors’ work made hard to credit but impossible to disprove; the numbers on both sides, as usual in this war, were weapons of the argument itself. What mattered more than the arithmetic was the fact of the attempt: the second time in six months that the Islamic Republic has chosen to strike Israel directly, from its own soil, rather than through its proxies.

The context was a region already at full stretch. The ground operation in Lebanon had begun the day before, the campaign against Hezbollah’s leadership had removed the organisation’s command in a matter of weeks, and the war that began in Gaza a year ago had become, by the autumn, a war on several fronts. The Iranian strike was the escalation that the commentators had predicted ever since the killing of Nasrallah, and its arrival on the first day of the new month made the prediction routine rather than wise; the real question, which no prediction could answer, was what Israel would do in reply.

The reply, when it came, would be shaped by the same constraints that had shaped the spring: the American pressure against a wider war, the Iranian calculation that its own escalation could be absorbed, and the mutual knowledge that a full exchange would be ruinous for both regimes. The night of October 1 raised the stakes of that calculation, and the missile defence that held through the night bought the time that the diplomacy of the following weeks would use, or waste.

The missiles crossed the sky over a country that has learned to read the radar screens and the sirens as the grammar of its existence. The war’s anniversary approaches, the fronts are open in Gaza and Lebanon and now in the air over the heartland, and the night’s arithmetic, 180 missiles against a wall of interceptors, will be quoted in the months ahead by both sides as proof of their own strength. The dead of the night were few, the damage was contained, and the escalation was, in the narrow sense, absorbed. The region’s relief was real and it was short, because the reply had not yet been written, and because the war that produced the volley shows no sign of knowing how to end.