Iran–Israel Relations

For most of the twentieth century, Iran and Israel maintained a working relationship grounded in shared strategic interests rather than ideological affinity. Both states faced pressure from Arab nationalist movements, and both found common cause in intelligence sharing, economic exchange, and military cooperation.[1][2] That relationship was never fully public — U.S. diplomatic records describe the respective offices in Tehran and Tel Aviv as functioning "as diplomatic missions in all but name" — but it was substantive enough to include Iranian oil shipments to Israel, Israeli military sales to Iran, and joint development projects.[2]

The 1979 Iranian Revolution reversed the relationship's foundations. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic made hostility toward Israel a fundamental element of its worldview and ended the earlier diplomatic, economic, and military cooperation.[1][3] Over the following four decades, the confrontation evolved from rhetorical hostility into a multi-domain shadow war involving a regional armed network, cyberattacks, assassinations of nuclear scientists, and maritime operations.[4][5] In 2024 and 2025, it expanded into direct Iranian missile attacks and large-scale Israeli airstrikes.[5][6]

Understanding the Iran–Israel relationship requires holding two distinct periods in view simultaneously: the pre-1979 era of cooperative entente, and the post-revolutionary era of ideologically driven strategic rivalry that grew into one of the defining security contests of the twenty-first century.[3]

Formal engagement between Jewish institutional life and Iran predates Israeli statehood. In 1942 the Jewish Agency opened a Palestine Office in Tehran to assist Jewish-Polish refugees who had fled from the Soviet Union and to facilitate their immigration to the Land of Israel; that office continued operating until 1979.[1] The wartime humanitarian mission established an early pattern in which Iran served as a transit corridor and safe passage for Jewish refugees, including Jews fleeing Iraq.[7]

On the question of statehood, Iran initially aligned with Arab and Muslim opposition. Tehran voted against the United Nations partition plan for Palestine on November 29, 1947.[1] That position shifted after the Shah's 1949 visit to the United States: Iran extended de facto recognition to Israel in March 1950, and the relationship thereafter was described as "discreetly unofficial," with diplomatic missions operating in both capitals.[1] The two states established offices in each other's countries in the late 1950s, and a U.S. government memorandum characterized them as functioning as embassies in everything but name.[2]

The practical foundations of the alliance were economic and strategic rather than ideological. Iran was Israel's sole foreign oil supplier before 1979: the Shah supplied virtually all of Israel's oil before 1967, and as late as 1974 Iran provided approximately 30 percent of Israel's domestic petroleum needs, around 40,000 barrels per day.[2] Israel, facing an Arab economic boycott, depended on Iranian energy; Iran, in turn, needed reliable customers for its oil exports.[7]

Military and technical cooperation ran alongside the energy relationship. It included training and personnel exchanges, aircraft servicing, and military sales; Iran paid more than $12 million for Israeli-produced military equipment in the first four months of 1975.[2] Israeli kibbutz farmers taught agricultural methods in Tehran, Hadassah doctors and nurses taught medicine, and El Al operated regular flights to the Iranian capital.[7] Israeli experts also assisted Iranian development projects, including the Qazvin agricultural project in the 1960s, and the Six-Day War period was described as a high point in bilateral intelligence relations.[8] The U.S. State Department characterized the overall relationship as a stable entente grounded largely in shared opposition to Arab nationalism and a common interest in limiting Iraq's regional influence.[2]

The Shah departed Iran on January 16, 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran two weeks later, and the Islamic Republic was established on February 11.[1] The revolution's ideological character made its attitude toward Israel unambiguous from the outset. Khomeini stated on January 22, 1979, that he saw no legal justification for Israel's existence and declared that "Palestine belongs to the Islamic space and must be returned to the Muslims."[9]

The new authorities allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to take over the Israeli commercial headquarters that had functioned as an unofficial embassy in Tehran.[9] Israel did not recognize the Islamic Republic, and the Republic did not recognize Israel. Nevertheless, informal commercial links briefly persisted after the political rupture.[10]

The human cost of the revolution for Iran's Jewish community was immediate. Habib Elghanian, a prominent Jewish philanthropist who had supported Iran's Hebrew schools, was arrested, convicted as a "Zionist spy," and executed — an act presented by the AJC account as a signal of the new regime's hostility toward identification with Zionism or Israel.[11] Khomeini articulated a distinction between Jews and Zionists, declaring, "I am not against Jews, I'm against Zionists. You could be Jewish in this country. You cannot be a Zionist in this country."[11] Iranian Jews generally avoided public support for Israel or challenges to the regime, while the post-revolutionary period brought religious coercion, economic hardship, discrimination, conscription during the Iran–Iraq War, and emigration.[11]

About three-quarters of Iran's approximately 80,000 Jews eventually left the country.[1] Scholarship describes Iranian Jews in Israel as maintaining a distinct Mizrahi identity despite homogenizing pressures, while another study emphasizes the community's effort to sustain identities that are both Iranian and Jewish amid competing expectations from Israel and the Islamic Republic.[12][13]

Even as the rupture with Israel hardened ideologically, the Islamic Republic began constructing the regional infrastructure that would become its primary instrument for pressuring Israel. The Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad became, in 1980, the first Islamist Palestinian organization to take up arms against Israel, with Iran described as its main financial backer.[10] A JCFA analysis dates Revolutionary Guard contact with Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder Fathi Shkaki to 1987, after Israel exiled Shkaki to Lebanon, and estimates that Iranian assistance eventually reached $60 million annually.[14]

Hezbollah's formation in 1982 and its subsequent insurgency against Israel became the prototype for Iran's proxy-warfare model. Under Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force expanded that approach into a central instrument of Iranian power projection beginning in 1998.[15]

The scope of Iran's regional network grew over subsequent decades. The IRGC and its Quds Force financed, armed, trained, and in some cases directed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria.[8][5] An Israeli Foreign Ministry account describes the strategic logic as surrounding Israel with hostile fronts while retaining political and legal deniability: Iran supplied funding, training, weapons, logistics, intelligence, and operational guidance without committing its own forces to continuous direct confrontation.[5]

The Institute for National Security Studies characterizes this evolution as a shift from primarily ideological hostility toward a sophisticated strategic rivalry. Iran developed the concepts of forward defense and strategic depth — keeping potential battlefronts away from Iranian territory, reducing strategic isolation, and creating deterrent leverage through regional partners.[3] Its network was intended to encircle Israel from several directions, improve deterrence against both Israel and the United States, and coordinate military, logistical, and intelligence activity across multiple theaters.[3]

The Anti-Defamation League describes anti-Israel incitement as being disseminated through state media, educational curricula, religious sermons, international propaganda, Holocaust cartoon contests, and annual Quds Day rallies.[16] A JCFA account also documented continued calls by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials for Israel's destruction after the 2015 nuclear agreement.[17]

The Iran–Iraq War produced an anomalous episode in what had become an avowedly hostile relationship. Despite publicly backing Palestinian armed groups against Israel and having severed formal ties, Iran and Israel conducted covert arms dealings during the conflict. Israel supplied approximately 1,500 missiles to Iran during the 1980–1988 war.[10] A congressional report on the Iran–Contra affair states that Israel shipped arms to Iran from August through November 1985 and that Israeli participation continued in subsequent transactions; it also records that Israel continued providing limited military and industrial technology to Iran despite long-standing U.S. efforts to halt those transfers.[18]

The episode illustrates how pragmatic calculations of national interest sometimes diverged sharply from official ideological postures. Iran's nuclear program, which had begun under the Shah, was suspended after the 1979 Revolution and renewed in 1982 during the war with Iraq — initially because of concern over Iraq's chemical, biological, and missile capabilities rather than a specific anti-Israel objective.[3] After Iraq's decline, the program became increasingly connected to deterrence against the United States and potentially against Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.[3]

Through the 1990s and 2000s, the Iran–Israel confrontation operated largely below the threshold of acknowledged military conflict and was described as hybrid warfare involving cyberattacks, targeted killings, maritime operations, and strikes against proxy infrastructure.[19] Iran's previously undisclosed uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz was exposed in 2002, and the subsequent development of Iran's nuclear capability became a central concern for Israeli strategic planning.[20]

Israel's campaign between wars expanded from attacks on weapons transfers to Hezbollah into operations against Iranian and Quds Force targets in Syria and Iran, maritime interdictions, cyber operations, assassinations, and attacks on nuclear and military infrastructure.[3] An Israeli government document states that Iran conducted thousands of cyber-operation attempts against Israeli public- and private-sector assets, including hospitals and water, energy, and information-technology systems.[5] The same account records an Iranian armed drone launched from Syria toward Israel in 2018 and subsequent Israeli strikes on IRGC and Syrian military infrastructure.[5]

The shadow war also had a global dimension. Iran was alleged to have targeted Israeli-operated oil tankers and attempted to abduct or kill Israelis abroad, while Iranian weapons transfers sustained pressure on Israel's borders.[4] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used inflammatory rhetoric from 2005 onward to delegitimize and threaten Israel's existence, and an academic analysis describes Iranian leaders as treating elimination of the Jewish state as their proposed solution to the Palestinian issue.[20]

Iran activated new cascades of advanced centrifuges and enriched uranium at near-weapons-grade levels, prompting analysts to describe it as a possible nuclear-threshold state.[4] Iran maintained that its program was peaceful, a claim rejected by Israel, the United States, and others.[4] United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency diplomatic initiatives had not halted Iran's progress at the stage covered by a 2010 academic assessment.[20]

The shadow war crossed into open direct confrontation in April 2024. Following a strike widely attributed to Israel on Iran's embassy compound in Damascus that killed two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel on April 13–14.[21]

The assault involved more than 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles.[6] Israel reported that 99 percent of the incoming weapons were intercepted.[21] Israel's Arrow 3 and David's Sling systems participated in the interceptions, while the United States, France, Jordan, and other countries assisted.[21] Jordanian aircraft reportedly shot down drones crossing its airspace.[22] Nevatim Airbase sustained slight infrastructure damage but continued operating, and a seven-year-old girl from a Bedouin town near Arad was seriously wounded by shrapnel from an intercepted ballistic missile.[22]

A JCFA analysis characterized the attack as a shift from Iran's earlier posture of "strategic patience." Revolutionary Guard Commander Hossein Salami was quoted announcing a new equation: "Any harm inflicted by Israel on Iran's interests, officials, or citizens will be met with a retaliatory attack on Israel from Iranian territory."[23]

Iran struck again on October 1, 2024, launching approximately 180 to 200 ballistic missiles at Israel in two waves.[24][6] Iran described the operation as self-defense and as retaliation for deaths it attributed to Israel, including those of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and IRGC general Abbas Nilforoushan.[21] The United States ordered its military to help shoot down missiles targeting Israel; the White House stated that Israel, with U.S. assistance, had defeated the attack.[25] The U.S. State Department reported two civilians killed in Israel and the West Bank and at least four civilians injured in Israel and Jordan.[6] Iran submitted a letter to the UN Security Council invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter and its asserted right of self-defense.[26]

Israel responded on October 26, 2024, when more than 100 Israeli aircraft entered Iranian airspace and conducted strikes the IDF described as precise operations against military targets. Reported targets included ballistic-missile launch sites and arms-manufacturing facilities as well as advanced surface-to-air missile arrays; the IDF stated that the operation expanded Israel's freedom of action over Iranian airspace.[24]

The most intense phase of direct Iran–Israel hostilities began on June 13, 2025, when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran, targeting nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities, weapons-production sites, air defenses, military bases, and senior military and nuclear personnel.[5] Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the operation sought to neutralize what Israel characterized as an imminent and existential threat, prevent additional direct Iranian attacks, and weaken Iran's network of proxy forces.[5]

The twelve-day conflict saw Iran respond with sustained barrages of ballistic missiles and drones aimed at sites that included power stations, military bases, and intelligence facilities.[27] Iran fired more than 550 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones against Israel.[21] Israeli government and ADL figures report 28 civilians and one off-duty soldier killed and more than 3,200 people wounded or hospitalized; residential buildings, Soroka Hospital, the Weizmann Institute, other academic institutions, and religious centers were damaged.[5][21] More than 15,500 civilians were evacuated from their homes.[28]

The United States entered the conflict directly on June 22. CRS reports that B-2 bombers employing GBU-57 penetrator weapons struck three Iranian nuclear sites, including the underground Fordow enrichment facility.[7] Iran responded by firing missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on June 23.[7]

Israel struck nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, as well as ballistic-missile production facilities, senior IRGC officials, and nuclear scientists.[27] More than ten senior Iranian nuclear scientists were killed during the operation.[29] A ceasefire took effect on June 24 after Israel accepted a U.S. proposal; the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the operation as ending on that date.[5]

CRS reports that the conflict killed more than 600 people in Iran and 29 people in Israel.[7] Assessments of the damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure varied. The CIA director said some intelligence indicated that several key facilities were destroyed and would require years to rebuild, while the IAEA director general said very significant damage was expected at Fordow.[7] An INSS assessment concluded that Natanz and Fordow were probably not totally destroyed but suffered substantial damage, that Iran retained or may have relocated uranium enriched to 60 percent, and that whether the damage was sufficient to prevent construction of a nuclear weapon remained uncertain.[29]

The IAEA, as quoted in contemporaneous reporting, repeatedly stated that nuclear facilities should not be attacked because of the risks to people, the environment, nuclear safety, and regional security. It also reported that Iran had informed it of no increase in off-site radiation at the three targeted sites, while acknowledging a sharp degradation in nuclear safety and security in Iran.[28]

The June 2025 ceasefire ended the immediate hostilities without resolving the underlying confrontation. A postwar JCFA analysis describes the ceasefire as lacking a formal political agreement, oversight mechanism, or broader diplomatic framework and characterizes the resulting situation as one of "fragile mutual deterrence" without official channels or a mechanism guaranteeing stability.[27]

Iran publicly maintained that it would not abandon uranium enrichment. President Masoud Pezeshkian stated, "Iran will not retreat from its nuclear program," while also asserting that Iran did not seek war but would defend itself.[27] INSS describes Iranian voices as arguing that deterrence required stronger missiles, rehabilitation of Hezbollah and the broader pro-Iranian axis, and possible reconsideration of nuclear doctrine; it characterizes the nuclear program as an "insurance policy" for regime continuity.[29]

Israel continued accelerating Arrow missile production and maintaining Iron Dome and David's Sling readiness after the ceasefire.[27] INSS identifies Israel's longer-term objectives as blocking Iran's path to nuclear weapons, dismantling the pro-Iranian axis, and limiting Iran's ballistic-missile program.[29]

The INSS assessment describes the June 2025 war as the most intense and severe phase of the Iran–Israel confrontation to that point, while characterizing it as concluded but not resolved.[29] Whether the damage represents a strategic turning point or a temporary setback, and whether the ceasefire marks the end of direct military exchanges or merely a pause, remained contested questions in the conflict's immediate aftermath.[7][29]

Iran's nuclear program has been an intensifying driver of the Iran–Israel confrontation since the early 2000s. The program originated under the Shah but was suspended after the 1979 Revolution and renewed in 1982 during the Iran–Iraq War, initially in response to Iraq's chemical, biological, and missile programs.[3] After Iraq's decline, its strategic rationale became increasingly connected to deterring the United States and protecting against possible Israeli military action.[3]

The exposure of Iran's previously undisclosed uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz in 2002 marked a turning point in international awareness of the program.[20] Subsequent reporting described Iran as activating new cascades of advanced centrifuges and enriching uranium at near-weapons-grade levels, leading analysts to characterize it as a possible nuclear-threshold state.[4] Iran maintained that its program was peaceful, while Israel, the United States, and others rejected that assertion.[4]

For Israel, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran presents a distinctive security threat. Academic analysis identifies the possibility of Iran transferring nuclear materials or technology to Hezbollah, Hamas, or other organizations near Israel as a serious concern beyond direct state-to-state deterrence.[20] United Nations and IAEA diplomatic initiatives had failed to halt Iran's progress at the stage covered by that analysis.[20] CIA and IAEA assessments reported by CRS after the June 2025 strikes suggested significant but not necessarily permanent damage, and uncertainty remained about Iran's uranium stockpiles and the program's long-term trajectory.[7]

The Iran–Israel confrontation has had direct consequences for Jewish communities within Iran and beyond its borders. Before the revolution, Iran's Jewish community numbered approximately 80,000, and Israeli-Iranian diplomatic, economic, and military cooperation was strong.[1] The revolution's anti-Zionist character placed Iranian Jews in a precarious position and led to accusations that they supported the Shah, Israel, the Mossad, the CIA, and the United States.[30]

The execution of Habib Elghanian — who had supported Hebrew schools in Iran and was convicted as a "Zionist spy" — exemplified the dangers facing Jews associated with Israel or Zionist organizations.[11] Khomeini's formal distinction between Jews and Zionists offered limited practical security: Iranian Jews generally avoided public support for Israel, challenges to the regime, and open display of their identity.[11]

Approximately three-quarters of Iran's 80,000 Jews eventually left.[1] Accounts identify political radicalism, religious coercion, the eight-year war with Iraq, economic shortages, discrimination, conscription, and physical danger as factors behind the emigration.[11] Academic scholarship describes those who remained as asserting identities that are simultaneously Iranian and Jewish despite pressure from both the Islamic Republic and outside expectations.[13]

The Anti-Defamation League states that Iranian-backed groups have targeted Jewish communities, Israeli civilians, U.S. service members, and Western interests through bombings, assassinations, executions, cyberattacks, and missile and drone attacks.[16] Iran-backed organizations have operated against Israel from Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, while Israel has responded across several of those fronts.[31]

The Iran–Israel relationship is historically significant as a case study in how rapidly a strategic partnership can become an existential rivalry when the ideological character of one partner's government changes. The pre-1979 entente was, by U.S. diplomatic assessment, stable and mutually beneficial: Iran supplied energy that Israel could not obtain from Arab neighbors, Israel supplied military expertise and equipment, and both states cooperated against Arab nationalism and the Iraqi regime.[2] The revolution did not merely interrupt that relationship; it inverted it.

The relationship also illustrates what INSS analysts describe as the combination of revolutionary ideology with pragmatic national-interest calculations.[3] The Islamic Republic's hostility toward Israel has been consistent since 1979, but the instruments and intensity of confrontation have varied with Iranian domestic politics, regional opportunities, and deterrence. Iran developed military organizations in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria that could pressure Israel from several directions while limiting continuous direct Iranian involvement — until direct confrontation began in 2024.[5]

For Israel, the Iranian challenge combines three major components: the nuclear program, the ballistic-missile arsenal, and a regional network of political-military organizations.[15] The June 2025 war represented Israel's most direct attempt to address those threats simultaneously, but INSS concluded that the confrontation remained unresolved.[29]

The rivalry also intersects with broader American engagement in the Middle East. The United States participated militarily in the April 2024 interceptions and the June 2025 strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.[19][21] Washington also brokered the ceasefire that ended the June war.[5] Continued U.S. involvement consequently remains an important element in the conflict's strategic trajectory.[29]

Several aspects of the Iran–Israel relationship rest on intelligence assessments, attributed reporting, or the official positions of interested parties rather than independently adjudicated findings. The degree of Iranian operational control over Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis remains analytically disputed: financial and material relationships are extensively documented, but some analyses emphasize the organizations' local interests and political agency.[15][3]

Casualty and damage figures from the 2024–2025 direct exchanges vary across sources. April 2024 projectile totals differ slightly by counting method.[21][6] The October 2024 Iranian attack was reported as approximately 180 missiles by one account and approximately 200 by the U.S. State Department.[24][6] Figures for Iranian casualties and nuclear-facility damage from June 2025 remain subject to revision, and assessments of whether the strikes delivered a lasting setback differ among U.S., IAEA, and independent analyses.[7][29]

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs document presenting Israel's account of Operation Rising Lion identifies its factual, intelligence, legal, and casualty assessments as Israel's governmental position rather than a neutral adjudication.[5] Iran's invocation of Article 51 to justify its October 2024 attack and Israel's alleged responsibility for the Damascus strike preceding the April attack are politically contested.[26][21] These disputes do not alter the documentary record that the attacks occurred, but they caution against treating any single party's characterization of intentions, proportionality, or legal compliance as settled fact.