As rockets and missiles streaked across Lebanese and Israeli skies Sunday, the moment people across the region lived in fear of seemed as if it might have arrived: all-out war.

But very quickly Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah wrapped up their exchange with both claiming victory and signaling that the fighting — for now, at least — was done.

That ambiguous result, however, revealed something: Neither Hezbollah nor its regional patron, Iran, have found a better way to respond to embarrassing Israeli strikes in a way that could warn Israel off another attack, yet not provoke an even bigger war that could be devastating for them.

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Iran’s Response Remains Unknown

Iran’s response — if it comes — remains an unknown, and Tehran could still choose a course of action that regional observers have not predicted. But Hezbollah’s choice to stick to a limited attack is an option some regional experts now think may reflect plans from Iran, as it considers how to settle its own score with Israel.

“The Iranians keep dropping hints about striking a target with precision,” said Mohammed Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst and editor of an independent regional website, Amwaj.media. “Precision and proportion is now key to how we look at this.”

Just a few weeks ago, the region was — once again — in an extraordinarily precarious position, months after Israel launched its deadly Gaza Strip war in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.

The latest round of Middle East brinkmanship began last month, when Israel blamed Hezbollah for a rocket that struck a soccer field and killed children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Hezbollah denied responsibility.

Then Israel launched a retributive escalation that quickly set the entire region on edge.

On July 30, Israel struck Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, to kill one of Hezbollah’s top commanders, Fouad Shukur. Hours later, an explosion killed Hamas’ top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

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The Haniyeh assassination, which both Hamas and Iran blame on Israel, was an extreme provocation for Iran’s leaders.

“If Israel can get away with killing Iranian allies in the middle of Tehran, there is no safe haven for Iranian leadership anywhere. That signal of weakness to opponents, at home and abroad, is intolerable for Iranian leaders,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “Their dilemma was that there is no way that objective can be achieved at a low cost and many ways in which it can backfire.”

Yet not responding, he said, is as much an existential threat as the risks of retaliation.

Part of what complicated any response for Iran was that it had already flexed its military muscle in response to an apparent Israeli strike in April that successfully targeted its embassy compound in Damascus, Syria. Back then, Tehran responded by firing a barrage of more than 300 missiles and armed drones at Israel — but appeared to telegraph that attack well in advance, offering Israel and the United States an opportunity to prepare air defenses and down nearly everything that was fired.

For weeks, the concern among regional leaders and experts was less that Iran and Hezbollah wanted war, and more that their best option for a dramatic retaliation was by deploying a coordinated regional show of force with other Iran-backed militant groups in Yemen and Iraq. Such a move could have resulted in a far less predictable outcome than intended by those who would have carried it out — such as hitting a site with a large number of civilians, which would have spurred Israel to jump further up the escalation ladder.

Hezbollah, which has been branded a terrorist group by Washington and is the most powerful militia supported by Iran, would have been critical to any such coordinated response.

Hezbollah’s move to act first and alone signals that option was likely ruled out, regional experts said. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said in a speech after Sunday’s attack that “people can take a breath and relax.”

For Hezbollah, risking all-out war had a high political cost: With Lebanon still reeling from a devastating economic crisis and a yearslong political vacuum, it faces intense pressure from other segments of society not to drag the country deeper into crisis. And tens of thousands of Hezbollah’s supporters in southern Lebanon have been driven from their homes by near-daily Israeli strikes.

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Regardless of how Hezbollah’s response is assessed in Tehran, regional diplomats pointed to several recent comments by Iranian leaders, released shortly before and after Hezbollah’s strikes, that hint at an impending, but probably a targeted and limited retaliation.

Last week, when Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, visited pilgrims who were chanting slogans to avenge Haniyeh’s death, he replied: “You will hear good news about revenge, God willing.”

Shortly after Hezbollah’s strikes, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told students at a gathering that a response “does not always mean taking up arms; rather, it means thinking correctly, speaking properly, understanding things accurately and striking the target with precision.”

Experts say, however, that these recent comments hint that Iran’s response will look less like what it did in April — though that cannot be ruled out — and more like a targeted attack.

Tehran’s main calculation is finding a response that does not risk pulling in the United States, whose warships have deployed around the region.

“The Iranians got cold feet,” said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations. McKenzie said that Iran would possibly retaliate by striking “a soft target” — one not heavily protected — such as an embassy or other facility in Europe, Africa or South America.

Iranian leaders are also likely to delay any response as long as talks are ongoing to broker a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, some U.S. officials said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Erika Solomon/Arash Khamooshi
c. The New York Times Company