Today was supposed to be the day we sent our kids back to nursery. For two weeks, my toddler and baby have been home with a nasty stomach bug that turned out to be shigella, a bacterium that causes dysentery and that has been ripping through Israeli troops in Gaza. Then, on Saturday night, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesperson for the IDF, announced that schools and nurseries would be closed nationwide today, due to the Iranian threat.

The parents’ WhatsApp groups grumbled that this, alone, was a disproportionate response by Iran, throwing Israel into turmoil the week before Passover. But then the news reports became starker: we should expect a drone and rocket attack within hours.

Israel and Iran have been fighting a shadow war for decades

At around 10.30 p.m., we were told that the drones had been launched and were on their way. It was an odd experience. Israelis have become used to the rhythm of rocket attacks, where we have just seconds to run to our bomb shelters. The slow-flying drones were expected to arrive in five or six hours.

In the end, nearly all the incoming drones were destroyed by a mix of Israeli air defenses and by the US Air Force, RAF, and the French and Jordanian air forces. But the sirens still rang out at 2 a.m. as Iran added some long-range ballistic missiles into the mix. These were also mostly intercepted by Israel’s long-range Arrow anti-missile platform. Only one person was injured, a Bedouin girl hurt by falling shrapnel from a successful interception.

For nearly two weeks, Israelis had been nervously awaiting the response to the strike on a building that may or may not have been a part of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. The attack killed Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Depleted food stocks in Israelis’ safe rooms were replenished and people made plans for how to react if a siren sounded in the day or night. Some were even more anxious, researching flights out of the country.

In the six months since the Hamas massacres of 7 October, Israel has been fighting to end Hamas’s rule in Gaza and secure the return of the dozens of hostages still held by the terror group. The war has led to widespread loss of life and destruction for Gazan Palestinians, but Israeli civilians have largely been unscathed since the initial Hamas surprise attack. Rocket fire from Gaza has dwindled and many Israeli residents have already returned to their homes near the Gaza border.

The same can’t be said about northern Israel. Hezbollah’s constant hail of rockets, missiles and drones has left the north of the country nearly abandoned. The conflict there has been intensifying, with the Israeli Air Force striking Hezbollah positions deep inside Lebanon, and Hezbollah launching enormous rocket volleys on northern towns. Further afield, Israel has come under fairly regular drone and missile attacks from the Houthis in Yemen, and occasionally from pro-Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq.

Iran is the thread that links all these groups. In a sense, Israel has been in a hot war with Iran, through its proxies, since 7 October. That war has been kept on a low burn, partly due to the efforts of Joe Biden, who backed his October warning of ‘Don’t’ with two aircraft carriers. That warning perhaps gave Israel the confidence to push limits with Iran too, assassinating one general in the IRGC’s Quds force in December, and another in January. Both were also in Damascus.

This time it was different. Iran chose to interpret an Israeli strike on a location that Iran claims was a consular building – a claim that is disputed – as if it was an attack on Iranian soil. They promised a fiery revenge against Israel.

Despite the dramatic rhetoric, Iranian diplomats busily rang their counterparts in the West to promise that their response would be ‘controlled’ and ‘non-escalatory’. Then, last night, they launched an enormous attack: 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles, according to the IDF.

Well-connected reporters like Yaakov Katz believe that Israel miscalculated two weeks ago. Military intelligence didn’t expect Iran to respond any differently over this assassination than it had for the previous two killings, and ministers weren’t briefed that a massive Iranian response was a possibility. But Iran also appears to have made the same miscalculation.

President Biden is reportedly calling for Israel to just call last night a victory, take the newly-generated goodwill and work with western and Arab countries to further isolate Iran. That’s not going to happen. The sheer scale of the attack won’t be something that any Israeli government can ignore, particularly this Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a weak prime minister desperately trying to see off calls for an election and utterly reliant on his far right coalition partners.

The question is whether Israel can break out of the cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that has the potential to lead to open war, and calibrate a genuinely proportional response. In practice, that may not be possible. Iran considers its barrage last night to have been a proportional settling of scores, so any Israeli response will be seen as opening a new account. And yet, in the Middle East, failing to respond will also be perceived as weakness by Israel’s many other enemies.

Israel and Iran have been fighting a shadow war for decades. That war has most famously been fought by proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and more recently the Houthis. But it’s also been waged through assassinations of nuclear scientists, computer viruses like Stuxnet, cyber warfare on both sides, and deniable clashes at sea. Iran’s overnight barrage of drones and missiles is perhaps the most overt act in that long-running conflict. Perhaps neither country wants to be drawn into a full scale open war, but it will take both calm heads and a lot of luck to find a path that leads to de-escalation.