What to Know: How Israel Could Retaliate Against Iran

Iran and Israel avoided direct confrontation for years, fighting a shadow war of secret sabotage and assassinations. But the two countries are now moving closer to open conflict, after the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and Tehran’s ballistic missile barrage on Israel, its second in less than six months.

Israel seems prepared to strike Iran directly, in a more vigorous and public way than it has before. Iran has a number of sensitive targets, including oil production sites, military bases and nuclear sites.

Here’s an overview of what an Israeli attack could look like.

Iran’s oil industry

Iran’s oil and gas facilities are mostly clustered in the west of the country, near Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A significant number of facilities are off Iran’s coast or on islands, such as its main oil export terminal on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf.

Damaging oil facilities could harm Iran’s already frail economy and disrupt global oil markets a month before the U.S. elections. Iran produces about three million barrels of oil per day, or about 3 percent of world supply. Its biggest customer is China.

An Israeli strike on Iranian oil installations might prompt Iran to target refineries in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Iran might also threaten the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical conduit for oil produced in the Persian Gulf, the source of nearly one-third of the world’s oil production.

The resulting energy supply shock could cause surging prices for gasoline, fuel and other products made with petroleum, like plastics, chemicals and fertilizer. It could threaten many economies with the risk of recession. And the effects would be most potent in nations that depend on imported oil, especially poor countries in Africa.

Iran’s nuclear facilities

Israel sees Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its existence. But Israeli officials have said they have no immediate plans to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities — these include uranium production and enrichment plants, uranium mines and research reactors — in retaliation for the recent missile barrage.

Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without help from the United States. Mr. Biden said in early October that he would not support an attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

Even if Iran accelerates its efforts to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb, experts say the country would be months and possibly as long as a year away from creating a nuclear weapon.

A long-distance attack

If Israel wants to use its powerful air force to retaliate, its planes would have to fly long distances. But it has recently shown that it could do so.

In attacks against the Houthis in Yemen at the end of September, Israeli forces flew more than a thousand miles to attack power plants and shipping infrastructure, using reconnaissance aircraft and dozens of fighter jets that had to be refueled in midflight.

Attacking Iran by air would involve similar distances, but it would be far more hazardous. Iran has much stronger air defenses than Lebanon and Yemen do.

In April, in retaliation for Iran’s first missile barrage, an Israeli airstrike damaged an S-300 antiaircraft system near Natanz, a city in central Iran critical to the country’s nuclear weapons program. Western and Iranian officials said that Israel had deployed aerial drones and at least one missile fired from a warplane in that attack.

“I think it’s likely they’ll mimic the April operation and try to take out Iran’s early warning systems and air defenses to make way for an air attack,” said Grant Rumley, a former Pentagon official and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The question will be how extensive and whether they’ll go into Iranian airspace.”

But Israel may not have to rely on its air force alone in an attack on Iran.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, Israel has other options: Jericho 2 medium-range ballistic missiles that can fly about 2,000 miles, and Jericho 3 intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can reach targets more than 4,000 miles away.

John Ismay and Peter S. Goodman contributed reporting.