One of the most incendiary weeks in the decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel ended with relief Friday after Tehran declared it had defeated what it said was a small attack on its territory by Israeli drones.
But while the strike, which Israel didn’t officially claim, avoided touching off fresh escalation for now, there was no escaping that the tit-for-tat exchange ushered in a new era where the two adversaries look more willing to fight each other directly rather than through proxies.
And that, government officials and experts fear, could lead to open war.
One of the most incendiary weeks in the decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel ended with relief Friday after Tehran declared it had defeated what it said was a small attack on its territory by Israeli drones.
But while the strike, which Israel didn’t officially claim, avoided touching off fresh escalation for now, there was no escaping that the tit-for-tat exchange ushered in a new era where the two adversaries look more willing to fight each other directly rather than through proxies. And that, government officials and experts fear, could lead to open war.
