“This attack is the illustration of a real failure” of Iran, believes a specialist

Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel on Tuesday in response to the assassination of the leaders of Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas. Paradoxically, this event shows that the Islamic Republic is fundamentally not able to fight back, according to Frédéric Ancel, doctor in geopolitics and lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

In almost six months, this is the second attack perpetrated by Iran against Israel. A new stage in this conflict in the Middle East was reached on Tuesday, October 1. Iran announced that it had fired nearly 200 missiles into Israeli territory to avenge the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah killed Friday in Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assures that Iran in “will pay the price“.

“We are in an escalation of the conflict. Will it go up another notch? questions General Olivier Kempf, associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research and director of the “La Vigie” firm. We will probably have an Israeli reaction. And the question that we do not yet know today is: will Iran still retaliate in the face of an Israeli response?“For Frederic Encel, doctor in geopolitics and lecturer at Sciences Po Paris and author in particular of The Geopolitical Atlas of Israel at Éditions Autre, “qualitatively, Iran could not do more than what they are doing now.”

“Yesterday’s attack is an illustration of a real failure for the Iranian army,” believes Frédéric Encel. CIn recent years, Iran has greatly developed its military resources. For the Middle East specialist, if Iran “had to react somehow” after the heavy blows to the pro-Iranian Hezbollah, several of whose military leaders were killed by Israel, and after a week of strikes in Lebanon, the Islamic Republic is basically not in a position to respond. “When you launch 200 missiles, when you kill one person, especially a Palestinian Muslim from the West Bank (…) the king is naked,” points out Frédéric Encel.

The attitude of Arab countries is of course one of the keys to this crisis. “We can clearly see that despite the war (in Gaza), the rise in tensions since October 7, Egypt and Jordan, already signatories to peace treaties since 1978 and 1994 respectively, have maintained their treaty” with the Hebrew State, notes Frédérique Ancel.

“Israel is trying to reassure its Arab partners of its ability to provide them with aid and protection against the Shiite axis.”

Frederic Encel, doctor in geopolitics

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“We can clearly see that Abraham’s agreements with four other Arab states (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco) hold up perfectly“, continues Frédéric Encel.

In this confrontation, the objectives are clear for these specialists. “Since October 7, everyone has been fighting to restore their credibility. Israel wanted to restore its military credibility and its intelligence services and today, it is the same thing from Iran“, says Olivier Kempf.

Israel wants to prove that “October 7 will have been a parenthesis and not normality“, explains Frédéric Encel, and this is what the government has been committed to since the start of the conflict. “They have clearly shown Lebanon in recent weeks that they are capable of preventing October 7 from Lebanon.“, he concludes.