Sunak addresses Commons over Iran’s weekend attack

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today addressed the House of Commons to condemn Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel and defend the RAF’s role in interfering with and destroying Iranian drones.

Sunak said that through the attack, the “despotic regime” had shown its true colours. Iran aims to “plunge the Middle East into crisis” and engage in escalation, Sunak said. 

On Saturday, Iran attacked Israel’s territory for the first time in a war that it has previously fought through deniable proxies, assassinations and espionage. Iran’s ambush was made in revenge for an earlier attack, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus on 1 April which killed 13 people, including a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and seven other IRGC officers. Shortly after it, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that the bombing would not go unpunished.

On Saturday and into Sunday, Iran fired over 300 weapons at Israel which included 110 ballistic missiles and 36 cruise missiles. Most of these missiles and drones were intercepted by Israel’s air defence system, the US military, the Jordanian military and the RAF. Some have speculated the French military helped as well. 

One surprising element of Iran’s attack is that the Gulf states may have helped defend Israel. The Economist wrote: “Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, might have played an indirect role as well, since they host Western air-defense systems, surveillance and refueling aircraft that would have been vital for the effort.”

Israel signed a normalisation deal with the UAE and Bahrain in 2020 and it was thought to be close to signing a similar deal with American ally Saudi Arabia before Hamas’s attack on 7 October. It has been widely speculated that Iran aided and abetted Hamas’s attack to destroy this latter normalisation process which would leave Iran ostracised in the region.  

Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet met this afternoon to discuss the weekend’s events. Government spokesman David Mencer said that Israel “retains all its options”: “We reserve the right to do everything in our power, and we will do everything in our power to defend this country.” Another reported conclusion from the meeting, which seems to be at odds with US President Joe Biden’s calls for restraint, is that Israel wants to embark on military action against Iran coordinated with the US. 

In the UK, foreign secretary Lord Cameron addressed the possibility of an Israeli retaliation today. Cameron said: “If you’re sitting in Israel this morning, you’re thinking quite rightly, we have every right to respond to this, and they do. But we are urging that they shouldn’t escalate.”

Leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer was in agreement with the government’s decision to help defend Israel but was more forceful both on the need for scaled-up sanctions on Tehran but also on the need for restraint from Israel. He said that a full-scale conflict in the Middle East is in no one’s interest.

The noted British military theorist Basil Liddell Hart once wrote that “War is the realm of the unexpected.” It’s a notion that will resonate with many in Israel at the moment; just as the brutal 7 October massacre was unexpected, so too is the relative support of the Gulf states and especially the explicit military support of Jordan, a country it has not always been on peaceful terms with. 

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