If you follow what’s been going on in recent days in the Middle East from only the BBC and Sky, it must seem as if Israel has broken a series of ceasefires in order to satisfy either some insatiable appetite for war or – as much coverage seems to imply – some sort of crazed bloodlust.

Iranian military capability has taken a huge hammering

Reality is, of course, very different. It’s a statement of fact that Israel’s overnight strikes on Iran were in response to yesterday’s Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel. But that doesn’t get us very far. So why did Iran attack Israel, when – in theory – it’s in the middle of negotiations for some sort of broader deal with the United States?

Those negotiations need to be seen for what they are: the Iranians taking full advantage of the latest display of what has become known as TACO – Trump always chickens out. The regime believes (almost certainly correctly) that Donald Trump has tired of military action, and so are doing what they do best: continuing to pour poison across the region with attacks on the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait and now Israel, while purporting to be seeking some sort of deal.

But the specific explanation for this latest Iranian attack lies with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon.

Whatever your views of the rights and wrongs, or even the military and strategic sense, of the joint Israeli and US attack on Iran following Israel’s operations in Gaza, at least two things are clear. First, Hamas – also an Iranian proxy – is severely degraded, albeit not actually destroyed. Even more significantly, Iranian military capability has taken a huge hammering. While it is still able to launch missiles – as we saw last night – both its launch capability and its missile stockpiles have been denuded. More importantly, its ability to manufacture replacement missiles appears to have been almost entirely wiped out.

In that context, the importance of Hezbollah to Iran is even greater than before the post-October 7 2023 wars. The terrorist organisation has retained its threat to Israel, both through drones and missiles. It is not quite the one thing Iran has left, but almost: so Hezbollah must be protected at all costs.

Now look at all this from the Israeli perspective, in the context of president Trump’s sudden decision to stop military action against Iran before its objectives were fully met. Iran’s ability to threaten Israel took a severe beating, not least through the near-destruction of its nuclear programme. But Trump’s capriciousness left dangerous holes in the project to neuter Iran’s military threat – particularly in the form of Hezbollah, which has continued to attack northern Israel. So Israel had little choice from its own security standpoint but to go after Hezbollah itself.

The Iranians would not stand by and see one of their few remaining military cards taken out – hence its missile attack yesterday. But the missiles were not the point in themselves. The real point of Iran sending them was to test how Israel would respond – or not. None of us knows for sure what Trump has actually been telling Benjamin Netanyahu. But for public consumption, he has told Netanyahu not to respond to Iranian attacks – and indeed not to attack Hezbollah.

(There is, of course, a possibility that their actual conversation was very different and that this is all some sort of staged lesson for Iran by the US and Israel – so that the regime learns that even without US help, Israel will act.)

There is no way that any Israeli leader could sit back and do nothing while Iran launches a missile attack. Not because of the fact of any one specific attack, but because this would lead to a new paradigm in the region: that Hezbollah is somehow inviolate, that Iran is able to protect its proxy and Israel is unable to respond to Hezbollah’s attacks.

Israel did what any sovereign nation would do: it acted last night in its own defence. In response, Iran has discovered that even if Trump has decided he wants out, Iran does not get to determine what happens next.

There’s an interesting parallel with Ukraine which, far from folding after Trump decided he had had enough, has instead found alternative means to take the fight to Russia.

Whatever comes next, Iran cannot now assume that it can exploit any gap between the US and Israel.