Iran likely won’t launch direct attacks against Israel, but the possibility of a regional conflagration is real.
Speculation around Iran’s involvement in Hamas’s gruesome attack on Israel has been rampant over the past week — along with questions about whether the Islamic Republic or any of its regional proxies will get involved in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Iran has denied involvement in planning the attack, but the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the slaughter in a televised address Tuesday. “We kiss the hands of those who planned the attack on the Zionist regime,” Khamenei said. “The Zionist regime’s own actions are to blame for this disaster.” Hamas, for its part, has claimed sole responsibility for the attack on October 7, in which militants killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis, mainly civilians, injured upward of 3,000, and took as many as 150 hostages.
Though Iran and Israel have been in conflict since the 1979 Iranian revolution, there has never been outright war between the two. However, Iran does support proxies in the region, including Hezbollah, the Shia militant group in southern Lebanon, which could opt to join the conflict, though thus far it’s not clear that the group has made any concrete moves in that direction. (Rockets were fired from southern Lebanon this week toward what is now northern Israel, though it’s not clear at this point whether they were launched by Hezbollah or another group.)
Iran does provide material support to Hamas as well as training and money, experts told Vox, as does Hezbollah. Proxy groups — armed groups affiliated with a state actor — like the Fatemiyoun Brigade in Syria and the Badr Organization in Iraq, as well as the Houthis in Yemen, work more in concert with the Iranian regime, but it would be incorrect to automatically put the blame for Saturday’s attack right at the regime’s doorstep.
