“We will give an unimaginable response to the enemy,” Gen. Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Thursday after days of bellicose statements by senior Iranian officials.

The Israeli strikes on Iranian military and missile-production sites Saturday came after U.S. pressure to avoid hitting the country’s nuclear and oil facilities, which could be targets in further rounds of escalation. Oil prices rose nearly 2% in trading early Friday after the threatening Iranian statements, with concerns growing over a Middle East war that would interrupt supply.

Should Iran fail to respond to Israel’s attack it would lose face both among allies fighting Israel and among its supporters at home, according to Mohanad Hage Ali, a deputy director at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, a research institute in Beirut. That is creating increasingly tough rhetoric among Iranian officials over a response.

“The number of casualties—four soldiers—and the destruction caused by the strike probably was too big for them to swallow,” he said. The regime would rather respond than stop, but “given their vulnerabilities, that’s a massive risk,” he added.

Israel’s attack exposed the vulnerability of Iran’s air defenses and the Israeli military now claims to be able to fly freely in Iranian airspace. Israeli officials believe Iran is seriously considering a response and have warned they are willing to mount a far more aggressive attack in return.

In a sign that Iran might temper its response, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has refrained from promising harsh retaliation, as he has done after other attacks in the past.

Escalatory strikes from either side would put further demands on Israel’s military as it fights a multifront conflict against Iranian allies in the Middle East and would risk a far more damaging war.

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