Tensions in the Middle East are rising.

The Israeli army launched a series of attacks against nuclear facilities and other military targets in Iran early Friday morning as part of what it dubbed Operation Rising Lion.

In a televised statement shortly after the attacks began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the goal was to “counter the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival” and warned that the offensive would continue for as many days as necessary.

“Today, Iran is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the Iranian regime pose an existential threat to the State of Israel and a significant threat to the rest of the world,” he said.

Tehran’s response to these attacks was swift. Iran launched dozens of ballistic missiles toward Israel on Friday night, in what it described as the beginning of its “crushing response” to the Israeli attacks of recent hours.

Most of the projectiles were intercepted by Israeli defense systems, as were the hundreds of drones that Iran had sent to Israel hours earlier.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the Israeli attacks were “a declaration of war.”

These events are the latest episode in an old enmity.

Israel and Iran have been locked in a bloody rivalry for years, the intensity of which fluctuates depending on the geopolitical situation. Their standoff has become one of the main sources of instability in the Middle East.

For Tehran, Israel is the “little Satan,” the United States’ Middle East ally, which they call the “great Satan.”

Israel accuses Iran of funding “terrorist” groups and carrying out attacks against its interests, motivated by the ayatollahs’ anti-Semitism.

The rivalry between these “archenemies” has left a huge number of dead, often as a result of covert actions for which neither government admits responsibility.

Tensions between the two, however, have reached unprecedented levels since the October 7, 2023, attacks by the Palestinian militia Hamas against Israel, which killed 1,200 people and sparked the current war in Gaza.

Since then, Israel has been fighting Iran’s allies in the Middle East (Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi militia in Yemen).

And, perhaps more importantly, for the first time, Israel and Iran have begun launching direct attacks against each other, as they have in recent hours.

Throughout history, however, these two countries were not always at odds.

How the rivalry between Israel and Iran began

In reality, relations between Israel and Iran were quite cordial until the 1979 Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollahs seized power in Tehran.

In fact, although Iran opposed the plan for the partition of Palestine that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, it was the second Islamic country to recognize it, only after Egypt.

At that time, Iran was a monarchy ruled by the shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty and one of the United States’ main allies in the Middle East. Therefore, Israel’s founder and its first head of government, David Ben-Gurion, sought and obtained Iranian friendship as a way to counteract the rejection of the new Jewish state by its Arab neighbors.

But in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini’s Revolution overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic republic that presented itself as the defender of the oppressed and that had its rejection of the “imperialism” of the United States and its ally Israel as one of its main identifying features.

The new regime of the ayatollahs severed relations with Israel, stopped recognizing the validity of its citizens’ passports, and seized the Israeli embassy in Tehran, handing it over to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was then leading the struggle for a Palestinian state against the Israeli government.

Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Program at the International Crisis Group think tank, told BBC Mundo that “animosity toward Israel was a cornerstone of the new Iranian regime because many of its leaders had trained and participated in guerrilla actions with the Palestinians in places like Lebanon and had great sympathy for them.”

But Vaez also believes that “the new Iran wanted to project itself as a pan-Islamic power and championed the Palestinian cause against Israel, which the Arab Muslim countries had abandoned.”

Thus, Khomeini began to claim the Palestinian cause as his own, and large, officially supported pro-Palestinian demonstrations became commonplace in Tehran.

Vaez explains that “in Israel, hostility toward Iran didn’t begin until later, in the 1990s, because it was previously perceived as a greater regional threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

So much so that the Israeli government was one of the mediators that made possible the so-called Iran-Contra program, the covert program through which the United States diverted weapons to Iran for use in the war it waged against neighboring Iraq between 1980 and 1988.

But over time, Israel began to see Iran as one of the main threats to its existence, and the rivalry between the two countries shifted from words to deeds.

A “shadow war” between Israel and Iran

Vaez points out that, also facing Saudi Arabia, the other major regional power, and aware that Iran is Persian and Shia in a predominantly Sunni and Arab Islamic world, “the Iranian regime realized its isolation and began to develop a strategy aimed at preventing its enemies from ever attacking it on its own territory.”

Thus, a network of organizations aligned with Tehran proliferated, carrying out armed actions favorable to its interests. The Lebanese Hezbollah, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, is the most prominent.

Thus, Tehran wove a network it dubbed the “axis of resistance,” stretching across Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria. This group of allies has suffered severe setbacks in the last year and a half with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria and the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Israel has not stood idly by, and has exchanged attacks and other hostile actions with Iran and its allies, often in third countries where it finances and supports armed groups fighting pro-Iranian forces.

The standoff between Iran and Israel has been described as a “shadow war” because both countries have attacked each other without either government officially admitting their involvement in many cases.

In 1992, the Iranian-affiliated Islamic Jihad group blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. Shortly before, Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi had been assassinated in an attack widely attributed to Israeli intelligence services.

For Israel, it has always been an obsession to truncate Iran’s nuclear program and prevent the day when the ayatollahs would have atomic weapons.

Israel does not believe Iran’s claims that its program is solely for civilian purposes, and it is widely accepted that it was the Israeli intelligence services, in collaboration with the United States, that developed the Stuxnet computer virus, which caused severe damage to Iranian nuclear facilities in the 2000s.

Tehran has also accused Israeli intelligence of being responsible for the attacks against some of the top scientists in charge of its nuclear program.

Israel, along with its Western allies, accused Iran of being behind past drone and rocket attacks on its territory, as well as of having carried out several cyberattacks.

The civil war raging in Syria since 2011 has provided another source of conflict. Western intelligence reports that Iran sent money, weapons, and instructors to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the insurgents seeking to overthrow him, raising alarm bells in the Israeli government, which believed neighboring Syria was one of the main routes through which the Iranians sent weapons and equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

According to the US intelligence website Stratfor, both Israel and Iran have taken action in Syria at different times to deter the other from launching a large-scale attack.

The “shadow war” reached the sea in 2021. That year, Israel accused Iran of being responsible for attacks on Israeli ships in the Gulf of Oman. Iran, for its part, accused Israel of attacking its ships in the Red Sea.

Hamas’s attack on Israel

Following the October 7, 2023, attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas against Israel and the massive military offensive launched by the Israeli army in Gaza in response, analysts and governments around the world expressed concern that the conflict could trigger a chain reaction in the region, leading to open and direct confrontation between Iranians and Israelis.

Until April 2024, both Iran and Israel had avoided escalating hostilities and large-scale fighting. That changed with Tehran’s launch of dozens of drones and missiles against Israel that month.

It was a response to the Israeli attack on its diplomatic headquarters in Damascus, which left 13 dead, including some of Iran’s most prominent senior officials, such as Revolutionary Guard General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy, Hadi Haji-Hajriahimi.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry then promised “punishment of the aggressor,” and its ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, announced that the response would be “decisive.”

This occurred on April 13, and Israel responded with another attack on Iranian soil on April 19.

Following Iran’s missile launch at Israel on October 1, 2024, and Israel’s attack weeks later, tensions reached their highest point once again.

However, the Israeli offensive launched on June 13 has elevated this rivalry to unprecedented levels, with unpredictable results.

*This article was originally published in April 2024 and was updated following Israel’s attack on Iran on June 13, 2025.