All eyes on Israel as world living in dangerous times faces new moment of peril

For decades, the enmity between Iran and Israel was played out in the shadows. So plain to all were the risks of a direct conflict that it remained a confrontation of proxies, carried out to a drumbeat of unclaimed assassinations and cyber assaults.

Under cover of darkness on Saturday night all that changed as Iran unleashed its barrage of some 300 drones and missiles on Israel. Consequently, a world already living in dangerous times faces a moment of giddying peril.

Western capitals – led by Washington – tempered their condemnation of Tehran yesterday with calls for restraint amid fears that the tinder-box of Middle Eastern politics is a now single spark away from regional conflagration.

It is on one level a terrifying game of brinkmanship.

Tehran has insisted that its purpose for this weekend’s assault – vengeance for the killing of its generals at a diplomatic mission in Syria – has been served. For its part, Israel can claim with satisfaction that an air defence system which swiped 99 per cent of Iran’s projectiles from the skies showed the ayatollahs’ rage to be impotent.

And yet the wider calculus that the Iranian regime, for all its bullying swagger, wants to avoid a wider war now hangs by a thread. All eyes are on what Israel, which has promised to “exact a price” from Iran at a time of its choosing, decides to do next.

But one thing is clear: Tehran’s decision to turn a shadow war into a direct conflict makes any slide towards regional conflagration all the more difficult to halt.