Who attacked first in the Israel-Iran war?

2024 · 2025 · 2026 · Iran, directly

Israel struck first, and said so, on 13 June 2025: airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program and its military leadership, launched the day after the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board formally found Iran in violation of its nuclear obligations for the first time in twenty years. That strike came after two direct Iranian missile attacks on Israeli soil in the eighteen months before it, and after decades in which Iran had already been fighting Israel through proxies rather than its own uniforms. The first-shot fact and the first-aggression fact point in different directions, and an honest account keeps them separate. Iran’s ring of fire →

What preceded the war

Iran had not needed to attack Israel directly for decades, because it was already doing so through others. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps built, arms and funds Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as its “axis of resistance,” and Iranian training and money sit behind the 7 October 2023 massacre that opened the current war in Gaza. Iran’s nuclear program dates to 1957 and went covert under the Shah’s successors; the 2015 nuclear deal froze it in exchange for sanctions relief, the United States withdrew in 2018, and by 2025 Iran had enriched uranium to levels with no civilian purpose, enough for multiple weapons if pushed to weapons grade. On 12 June 2025 the IAEA’s board voted that Iran was in breach of its obligations, the first such finding in two decades. Israel struck the next day.

The exchanges, in order

1 April 2024: Israel bombed Iran’s consular annex in Damascus, killing IRGC commanders who ran the proxy war against it. 13 April 2024: Iran answered with its first-ever direct attack on Israeli territory, some 300 drones and missiles, nearly all intercepted by Israel, Jordan, the United States and Britain together. 31 July 2024: Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a bomb in a Tehran guesthouse while in Iran for the president’s inauguration, an assassination on Iranian soil widely attributed to Israel. 27 September 2024: Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, was killed in Beirut, part of the wider campaign against Iran’s network that had opened its own front on 8 October 2023. 1 October 2024: Iran fired roughly 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, its second direct attack. 13 June 2025: Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, hitting Natanz and other nuclear sites and killing senior IRGC figures, among them armed-forces chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri and IRGC commander Hossein Salami, along with several of Iran’s nuclear scientists. Iran answered with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than a thousand drones across the following days. 21 to 22 June 2025: the United States struck the underground enrichment plant at Fordow along with Natanz and Isfahan in Operation Midnight Hammer, seven B-2 bombers dropping 14 GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs alongside submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles, the weapon’s first combat use. 23 June 2025: Iran fired a token, telegraphed barrage at the US base at Al Udeid in Qatar, intercepted, widely read as a face-saving finale rather than an escalation. 24 June 2025: a US and Qatari-brokered ceasefire took hold, ending what is remembered as the Twelve-Day War.

Forces and casualties, honestly counted

Israel fought with air superiority, precision munitions and layered missile defense; Iran fought with ballistic missiles, drones and a nuclear program it could not defend from the air, since not a single Iranian fighter jet rose to meet the American bombers over Fordow. Israeli medical officials counted 28 Israelis killed and roughly 3,000 wounded by Iranian missile fire over the twelve days, ages ranging from a seven-year-old cancer patient to a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. Iranian tallies vary by source and by who is still counting: Iran’s own judiciary put the toll inside Iran at 935, including 38 children and 132 women; independent monitors put total dead closer to 1,100 to 1,200 once military and unidentified dead are added, with thousands more wounded. Among the dead were IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists targeted individually, and Iranian civilians killed by missile strikes and by the collapse of buildings near military sites. Both figures are worth stating plainly rather than rounding toward whichever side a reader prefers.

The war reignites, February 2026

The June 2025 ceasefire held for eight months before it broke. On 28 February 2026, US and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes, reported at nearly 900 in twelve hours, against Iranian missile, air-defense and leadership targets under the Israeli codename Operation Roaring Lion. Israeli officials said the dead included Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, along with armed-forces chief Mohammad Bagheri’s successor, senior intelligence officers and members of Khamenei’s own family; Iran initially disputed the claim, then confirmed his death, and Iran’s Assembly of Experts named his son Mojtaba Khamenei as successor in early March. Israel’s stated aim, in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s words, was to remove the regime’s capacity to rebuild the weapon it had spent decades pursuing while financing the proxies that fight Israel on its behalf. Hezbollah reopened its own front within days, Iran moved to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and by mid-2026 a fragile US-brokered memorandum, signed at Versailles in June, was still being tested by strikes and near-misses on both sides. The identity of who fired first in February 2026, an open US-Israeli strike on a state that had spent thirty years arming, funding and directing the groups killing Israelis and Americans, is not seriously in dispute; what remains unsettled, as of this writing, is how the war ends.

How it’s misrepresented today

The most common distortion collapses the whole sequence into a single freeze-frame: “Israel bombed Iran,” full stop, as though the strike arrived from nowhere against a peaceful neighbor. Missing from that frame are the two Iranian missile barrages that preceded it, the IAEA finding that triggered it, and the decades in which Iran fought Israel through Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis rather than risk its own air force. A second distortion runs the other way, crediting the 2025 and 2026 strikes with ending Iran’s nuclear program outright; UN assessments after Midnight Hammer described a setback of months to a few years, not a permanent end, which is a large difference for policy even if a small one for headlines. Both distortions serve the same purpose: making a documented, dated sequence of attacks and counterattacks sound instead like an unprovoked war of choice. It was not the first war Iran’s proxies fought against Israel, and on the record so far, it has not been the last.

Iran’s Ring of Fire · The History They Skip · Hezbollah · Who attacked first on the Lebanon front in 2023 · Hassan Nasrallah · Axis of Resistance

Sources

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