After Years of Vowing to Destroy Israel, Iran Faces a Dilemma

NY Times-Nov1st2025

For more than four decades, Iran’s rulers have pledged to destroy Israel. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rarely appears in public without wearing a black-and-white checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh.

Iranian military commanders gloat over training and arming groups across the region that are enemies of Israel, including Hezbollah and Hamas. And when Hamas conducted the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people, Iranian officials praised it as a momentous achievement, shattering the Jewish state’s sense of security.

Now Iran faces a dilemma, weighing how it and its proxy militias — known as the axis of resistance — should respond to Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the killing of thousands of Palestinians, and whether to bolster its revolutionary credentials at the risk of igniting a broader regional war.

“There is no need for Iran to directly get involved in the war and attack Israel itself because it has the resistance axis militia who follow Iran’s policies and strategies and act on its behalf,” said Nasser Imani, an analyst close to the government, in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Right now Iran is in control mode — it is telling all of them, including Hezbollah, to keep things boiling but have restraint.”

For the time being, Iranian officials are publicly signaling they do not want a full-scale war.

“I want to reiterate that we are not pursuing the spreading of this war,” Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said in a recent interview at Iran’s mission to the United Nations. He was in New York to attend U.N. meetings related to the war. But, he added, “The region is at a boiling point and any moment it may explode and this may be unavoidable. If this happens, all sides will lose control.”

He warned that regional militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria could open multiple fronts against Israel, with a high potential “that the result will be that things will not go the way that Israel’s regime wants.” He did not elaborate on what would prompt the groups, which he said act independently.

Still, Iran does not want regional war, which carries risks for the nation and its religious rulers, according to three Iranians connected to the government who are familiar with internal deliberations and insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. The military capabilities of its allies could be significantly diminished by a protracted battle with Israel, and even more so if the U.S. military enters the fray.

The Islamic Republic views the militias as its extended arms of influence, able to strike while affording Tehran a measure of deniability. They give Iran leverage in international negotiations and a means of tilting the balance of power in the Middle East away from archenemies like Israel and the United States, and rivals like Saudi Arabia.

But if Iran does nothing, its fiery leaders risk losing credibility among constituents and allies. Some Iranian hard-line conservatives have questioned why Iran’s actions are not matching its rhetoric to “free Al Quds,” or Jerusalem, from Israel’s rule. Many supporters of Iran’s government have even symbolically signed up as volunteers to be deployed to Gaza and fight Israel.