Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel on Tuesday, most of which were shot down, according to Israeli authorities.
The attack was the latest in a series of escalations in the Middle East and came on the same day Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon.
Here are some of the questions FactCheck read about the conflict.
Why did Iran attack Israel?
Iran said the attack was in retaliation for the killing of senior figures in Hamas and Hezbollah – groups funded by Iran and designated as terror organizations by Britain, the US and other Western countries.
Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political wing, died in Tehran in July. According to reports from the New York Times and others, he was killed by an Israeli-planted explosive device at the guesthouse where he worked.
And on September 27, Israel killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah in an attack on an apartment building that collapsed four buildings, killing at least eleven people and wounding over a hundred others, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Why did Israel attack Lebanon?
Israel has been in on-and-off conflict with Lebanon-based Hezbollah since the group’s creation in 1982.
Hezbollah does not rule Lebanon, but it has representatives in the Lebanese parliament and controls a large area in the south of the country due to its significant military forces.
Considered the world’s largest paramilitary force, Hezbollah has an estimated 30,000 active fighters and up to 20,000 reserves – along with a stockpile of between 120,000 and 200,000 missiles and rockets. That’s according to figures from the US think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies that covers the period before the latest escalation. Both US and Israeli sources reported that Israel had recently destroyed half of Hezbollah’s arsenal.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets and missiles into Israel since October 7, in what the organization says is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The violence has forced 60,000 Israelis to flee northern Israel.
The Israeli government says this week’s raids into Lebanon are designed to push Hezbollah back from the border to allow displaced Israelis to return home.
Although it must be said that the Israeli attack on Lebanon in the period since October 7 displaced more than 100,000 Lebanese from the south of the country even before the escalation two weeks ago – and since then it has increased to about a million people, according to Lebanon. government.
The latest FactCheck analysis of conflict data found that Israeli attacks on Lebanon outnumbered Hezbollah by five to one between October 2023 and September 2024. We found that these attacks caused thirty deaths in Lebanon for every one killed in Israel. Our figures cover the period up to September 20, which means there was no escalation of hostilities.
A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told FactCheck that the casualty figure was a “false attempt to create a proportional numbers game” and “simplified the fact that Hezbollah launched a war on Israel”. He said the IDF attack was “in accordance with international law” and required “all possible precautions to minimize harm to civilians”.
Could the Middle East conflict lead to ‘World War 3’?
Within minutes of Iran’s missile attack on Israel, Google searches for the term “World War III” have risen to their highest level since April (when Tehran last fired directly into the country).
And US presidential candidate Donald Trump said Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris were “leading us to the brink of World War III”.
In theory, if an all-out war develops between Iran and its proxies and Israel, it could affect other countries in the region and around the world.
As well as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Iran’s allies include the Syrian government, the Houthis in Yemen (also a British-designated terror organization), and several Shiite groups in Iraq. It also has ties to Russia, and recently provided Moscow with ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Israel’s most important ally is the US. And in the face of a missile attack this week from Iran, it also received military support from Britain.
Iran said it considered its latest attack on Israel to be over “unless the Israeli regime decides to retaliate”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was a “big mistake” for which Iran would “pay”.
Israel now “has the justification to retaliate against Iran and also drag the United States into the conflict”, said Shahram Akbarzadeh, professor of Middle East and Central Asian Politics at Deakin University, Australia.
But while “some kind of Israeli response is almost inevitable”, Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute said Iran had caused enough damage to Israel to “restore its credibility (…) without triggering a massive Israeli response”.
Speaking after Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday night, a White House spokesman said “we do not want to see this conflict continue to escalate” and the US “will continue to try and prevent the outbreak of a full-scale (regional) war in the region in the coming days and weeks”.
