On Saturday night, Iran launched a barrage of over 300 drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles toward Israel as a response to a suspected Israeli attack earlier this month on an Iranian diplomatic complex in Damascus, Syria.
In what a former senior U.S. official called a “performative” attack, only a small portion of the missiles landed in Israel on a military base in Israel’s south, Israel said. A southern Israeli hospital reported that it is treating 12 patients.
Israel is yet to decide on an appropriate response to the attack, although Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi warned of “a decisive and much stronger response.” In the meantime, it reopened its airspace early Sunday and lifted a sheltering order, with the expectation of no further major aerial threats in the short term.
For President Biden, who had to cut his weekend trip to his beach house in Delaware short in light of the attack, this “amounts to a scenario he’d greatly sought to avoid since the start of the current Middle East conflict,” CNN reported.
Despite his tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over the war in Gaza, in light of the drone strike, NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson confirmed Biden’s support of Israel is “ironclad.”
Biden’s decisions are weighed down by the importance of positioning himself favorably in the upcoming elections. His failure to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza after the events of October 7th eroded “his support with key constituencies.”
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