Middle East - Israel-Gaza warIsrael-Gaza briefings: Have Iran-Israel missile strikes changed the Middle East?
| | Israel-Gaza briefings: Have Iran-Israel missile strikes changed the Midd...Political and military leaders are still absorbing the extraordinary exchange of fire, writes James Landale. |
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News in the Middle East moves fast. One moment it is all about unprecedented missile and drone attacks between Iran and Israel. The next the headlines return to the fighting and suffering in Gaza.
But policymakers, analysts and military leaders are still absorbing the extraordinary exchange of fire just days ago between two old adversaries, one that arguably came a small technological failure away from triggering a devastating international conflict.
It is worth considering how close they came to the edge and how deep the abyss that lay before them. This was the first time Iran and Israel had attacked each other directly.
Some analysts say the Iranian attack was the largest combined missile and drone assault ever - bigger than anything Russia has levelled against Ukraine. It was certainly the first external bombardment of Israel since Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles in 1991.
Most of the 300-plus Iranian drones and missiles were shot down or failed en route. But I watched from our office in Jerusalem as the night sky was lit up by Israeli air defences trying to bring down the ballistic missiles flying overhead. All it would have taken is for one GPS guidance system to fail for a missile to land in an urban area at huge civilian cost.
"I don't think people realise how close we were that weekend," one senior Western security official told me. "It could have been a very different story."
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