Iran said it asked the US to “step aside” as the country prepares a response to a suspected Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria while Hezbollah, its main proxy in the Middle East, warned the Jewish state it’s ready for war.

In a written message to Washington, Iran “warned the US not to get dragged into Netanyahu’s trap,” Mohammad Jamshidi, the Iranian president’s deputy chief of staff for political affairs, wrote on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The US should “step aside so that you don’t get hit.”

“In response, the US asked Iran not to hit American targets,” Jamshidi said.

The US hasn’t commented on the alleged message Iran had sent.

CNN reported that the US is on high alert and is preparing for a “significant” response from Iran against Israeli or American targets in the region.

NBC, citing two unnamed US officials, said President Joe Biden’s administration is concerned any attack could be inside Israel, specifically against “military or intelligence targets, rather than civilians.”

The White House took the unusual step of communicating directly to Iran that the US was unaware Monday’s strike in Damascus would happen, Bloomberg reported. That suggested the US was trying to prevent its own forces and bases in the Middle East being attacked.

The Islamic Republic has said it will deliver a “slap” to Israel, its arch enemy. Still, it’s unclear when that would happen or whether Iran would try to attack Israel directly or through one of its proxy groups such as Hezbollah, based in Lebanon.

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The airstrike hit the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing at least seven Iranians, including two generals. While Israel has repeatedly targeted Iran-linked assets in Syria over the past few months, this was the first time an attack struck an Iranian diplomatic building.

Israel has been on alert since then, canceling home leave for combat troops, calling up reserves and bolstering air defenses. Its military scrambled navigational signals over Tel Aviv on Thursday to disrupt GPS-navigated drones or missiles that might be fired at the country.

Tensions between Israel and Iran have worsened since Israel’s war against Hamas — another Islamist group backed by Tehran — erupted in October.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday said a response from Iran is undoubtedly coming. But, he said, his group won’t “interfere in such decisions.”

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“And after that, how Israel will behave, the region would enter in a new phase,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

Nasrallah, who lives in hiding, highlighted the coordinated work of Iran’s so-called resistance groups in the region.

Hezbollah, the Middle East’s most powerful militia, said it’s yet to use its “primary arsenal” in the daily skirmishes with Israel along the southern border of Lebanon, which started soon after the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Hezbollah is “completely prepared and ready” for any war with Israel, Nasrallah said.

US braces for retaliation after attack on Iran consulate

Shortly after an airstrike widely attributed to Israel destroyed an Iranian consulate building in Syria, the United States had an urgent message for Iran: We had nothing to do with it.

But that may not be enough for the U.S. to avoid retaliation targeting its forces in the region. A top U.S. commander warned on Wednesday of danger to American troops.

And if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent broadening of targeted strikes on adversaries around the region — to include Iranian security operatives and leaders — deepens regional hostilities, analysts say, it’s not clear the United States can avoid being pulled into deeper regional conflict as well.

The Biden administration insists it had no advance knowledge of the airstrike Monday. But the United States is closely tied to Israel’s military regardless. The U.S. remains Israel’s indispensable ally and unstinting supplier of weapons, responsible for some 70% of Israeli weapon imports and an estimated 15% of Israel’s defense budget. That includes providing the kind of advanced aircraft and munitions that appear to have been employed in the attack.

Israel hasn’t acknowledged a role in the airstrike, but Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday that the U.S. has assessed Israel was responsible.

Multiple arms of Iran’s government served notice that they would hold the United States accountable for the fiery attack. The strike, in the Syrian capital of Damascus, killed senior commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for Syria and Lebanon, an officer of the powerful Iran-allied Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, and others.

American forces in Syria and Iraq already are frequent targets when Iran and its regional allies seek retaliation for strikes by Israelis, notes Charles Lister, the Syria program director for the Middle East Institute.

“What the Iranians have always done for years when they have felt most aggressively targeted by Israel is not to hit back at Israelis, but Americans,” seeing them as soft targets in the region, Lister said.

On Wednesday in Washington, the top U.S. Air Force commander for the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, said Iran’s assertion that the U.S. bears responsibility for Israeli actions could bring an end to a pause in militia attacks on U.S. forces that has lasted since early February.

He said he sees no specific threat to U.S. troops right now, but “I am concerned because of the Iranian rhetoric talking about the U.S., that there could be a risk to our forces.”

U.S. officials have recorded more than 150 attacks by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria on U.S. forces at bases in those countries since war between Hamas and Israel began on Oct. 7.

One, in late January, killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens more at a base in Jordan.

In retaliation, the U.S. launched a massive air assault, hitting more than 85 targets at seven locations in Iraq and Syria, including command and control headquarters, drone and ammunition storage sites and other facilities connected to the militias or the IRGC’s Quds Force, the Guard’s expeditionary unit that handles Tehran’s relationship with and arming of regional militias. There have been no publicly reported attacks on U.S. troops in the region since that response.

Grynkewich told reporters the U.S. is watching and listening carefully to what Iran is saying and doing to evaluate how Tehran might respond.

Analysts and diplomats cite a range of ways Iran could retaliate.

Since Oct. 7, Iran and the regional militias allied to it in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen have followed a strategy of calibrated attacks that stop short of triggering an all-out conflict that could subject Iran’s homeland forces or Hezbollah to full-blown war with Israel or the United States.

Beyond strikes on U.S. troops, possibilities for Iranian retaliation could include a limited missile strike directly from Iranian soil to Israel, Lister said. That would reciprocate for Israel’s strike on what under international law was sovereign Iranian soil, at the Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus.

A concentrated attack on a U.S. position abroad on the scale of the 1983 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut is possible, but seems unlikely given the scale of U.S. retaliation that would draw, analysts say. Iran also could escalate an existing effort to kill Trump-era officials behind the United States’ 2020 drone killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

How far any other retaliation and potential escalation goes may depend on two things out of U.S. control: Whether Iran wants to keep regional hostilities at their current level or escalate, and whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right government does.

Sina Toossi, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, said analysts in Iran are among those trying to read Netanyahu’s mind since the attack, struggling to choose between two competing narratives for Israel’s objective.

“One perceives Israel’s actions as a deliberate provocation of war that Iran should respond to with restraint,” Toossi wrote in the U.S.-based think tank’s journal. “The other suggests that Israel is capitalizing on Iran’s typically restrained responses,” and that failing to respond in kind will only embolden Israel.

Ultimately, Iran’s sense that it is already winning its strategic goals as the Hamas-Israel war continues — elevating the Palestinian cause and costing Israel friends globally — may go the furthest in persuading Iranian leaders not to risk open warfare with Israel or U.S. in whatever response they make to Monday’s airstrike, some analysts and diplomats say.

Shira Efron, a director of policy research at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum, rejected suggestions that Netanyahu was actively trying with attacks, like the one in Damascus, to draw the U.S. into a potentially decisive conflict alongside Israel against their common rivals, at least for now.

“First, the risk of escalation has increased. No doubt,” Efron said.

“I don’t think Netanyahu is interested in full-blown war though,” she said. “And whereas in the past Israel was thought to be interested in drawing the U.S. into a greater conflict, even if the desire still exists in some circles, it is not more than wishful thinking at the moment.”

U.S. President Joe Biden is facing pressure from the other direction.

So far he’s resisting calls from growing numbers of Democratic lawmakers and voters to limit the flow of American arms to Israel as a way to press Netanyahu to ease Israeli military killing of civilians in Gaza and to heed other U.S. appeals.

As criticism has grown of U.S. military support of Israel’s war in Gaza, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has increasingly pointed to Israel’s longer-term need for weapons — to defend itself against Iran and Iranian-allied Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. is ″always concerned about anything that would be escalatory,” Miller said after the attack in Damascus. “It has been one of the goals of this administration since October 7th to keep the conflict from spreading, recognizing that Israel has the right to defend itself from adversaries that are sworn to its destruction.”

Israel for years has hit at Iranian proxies and their sites in the region, knocking back their ability to build strength and cause trouble for Israelis.

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, one of a network of Iran-aligned militias in the region, that shattered Israel’s sense of security, Netanyahu’s government has increasingly added Iranian security operatives and leaders to target lists in the region, Lister notes.

The U.S. military already has deepened engagement from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea since the Hamas-Israel war opened — deploying aircraft carriers to the region to discourage rear-guard attacks against Israel, opening airstrikes to quell attacks on shipping by Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen.

It is also moving to build a pier off Gaza to try to get more aid to Palestinian civilians despite obstacles that include Israel’s restrictions and attacks on aid deliveries.

Biden says Israel doing what he asked on Gaza aid

US President Joe Biden stops to speak to the press before boarding Marine One as he departs from the South Lawn of the White House.

US President Joe Biden said Friday that Israel was heeding his demand to let aid into Gaza, a day after he warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a sharp shift in policy.

Asked as he left the White House whether he had threatened to stop military aid to Israel in the call with Netanyahu, Biden replied: "I asked them to do what they're doing."

Biden then brushed off a suggestion he might be abandoning Israel, saying: "Is that a serious question?"

In a tense call on Thursday, Biden warned Netanyahu that US policy on Israel was dependent on the protection of civilians and aid workers in Gaza, following an Israeli strike that killed seven staffers with US-based charity World Central Kitchen.

Hours after the two leaders spoke, Israel announced it would allow "temporary" aid deliveries into famine-threatened northern Gaza through the Israeli port of Ashdod and the Erez border crossing.

Israel also said it was firing two officers after finding a series of "grave mistakes" led to the drone strikes that killed the World Central Kitchen aid workers.

The White House has however said Israel must do more to meet the promises it had made to Biden.

"It's important for those commitments to be fully realized and to be rapidly implemented," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a call.

Kirby added however that the United States did not expect to carry out its own probe into the deaths of the aid workers, who included US-Canadian citizen Jacob Flickinger.

"There are no plans for the US to conduct an independent investigation or a separate investigation into this event," Kirby said.

Biden's warning of a change in policy was the clearest hint yet of possible conditions to Washington's military support since the start of Israel's war on Hamas, sparked by the militant group's October 7 attack.

The US president has stood by Israel, despite concerns over the mounting Palestinian death toll and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.

But with the US presidential election looming in November, Biden faces growing opposition to his Gaza policy from Muslim and young voters, with key allies calling on him to change course.