Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

As drones and missiles are fired, we ask if Iran and Israel are heading for war? RUSI's Director-General, Dr Karin von Hippel joins us.

The overnight airstrikes highlighted the “disparity” between the Israeli and Iranian militaries but was just “a fraction of what Israel could conceivably do”, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute said. Matthew Savill said there was a “neat symmetry” to the targeting of an airbase outside Isfahan, given the Iranian attacks on the Nevatim Air base in the Negev desert six days ago. “Iran had to fire over a hundred ballistic missiles to get four or five through Israeli air defences. But the Israelis might have fired just a handful at a military base, signalling the disparity in relative air defences,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt that Isfahan is near some nuclear facilities. It makes the not so subtle point ‘We could if we wanted to’.”

Figures in Nato and Western governments have predicted a war with Putin could break out in a matter of years. However, Edward R Arnold, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, suggested that conflict with Russia was less likely as its armed forces were degraded by the strain of fighting in Ukraine. “Vladimir Putin will be looking pretty closely at what happens in the Middle East,” he added. “It’s all helping Putin at the moment because while focused on the Middle East we are not as focused as we have been on Ukraine.”