BEIRUT — Since Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination, Israel, Washington and the wider Middle East have nervously waited — and waited — for Iran’s promised retaliation. Nearly two weeks later, the response has yet to come, as Tehran wrestles with how to calibrate its counterattack.

In public, Iranian officials are continuing to warn of a “tough” reprisal to “punish” Israel. But in private meetings with the leaders of its armed proxies, according to those familiar with the conversations, Iran has called for caution — seeking to balance any show of force with the desire to avoid an all-out war in the region.

Striking that balance will be difficult. Iran’s first direct attack on Israel — when it unleashed more than 300 drones and missiles in April in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria — erased red lines that had long contained the countries’ shadow war. The two sides avoided a wider confrontation, as Israel and a U.S.-backed alliance intercepted most of the incoming fire. This time, Iran is more politically unsettled at home, and less certain of Israeli restraint.

An Israeli official, citing conversations with security officials, said Monday that Israel’s latest assessment was that Iran was planning another direct attack and that it could come imminently. Like others interviewed for this article, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Similar warnings have come and gone, and the region is still holding its breath.

“The Iranians and their allies are treading cautiously,” said a Lebanese individual with close ties to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group who has been briefed on communications with Tehran. A similar account was provided by a member of parliament in Iraq who is closely linked with Iranian-backed militias in the country: “We were told [by Iran] that it’s going to be a limited response,” he said, because Tehran “doesn’t want to expand the war.”

In recent meetings, according to the Lebanese individual with ties to Hezbollah, Iran has expressed concern that Israel and the United States could strike its nuclear program, using a full-scale conflict as a pretext for “essentially neutralizing Iran’s nuclear deterrence.”

Aliasghar Shafieian, campaign media adviser to newly elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, suggested Tehran’s retaliation was unlikely to be a repeat of April’s hours-long volley. The killing of Haniyeh “was an intelligence-based mission,” he told The Washington Post, and “Iran’s response will be of a similar nature and at a similar level.”

The United States has been tight-lipped about how it would respond to another Iranian attack on Israel, stressing that its focus was on advocating for de-escalation and fortifying its ally’s defenses. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said late Sunday that he had ordered the USS Georgia, a guided-missile submarine, to the Middle East and told the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to hasten its journey to the region.

On Monday, after President Joe Biden discussed the situation with European leaders, the White House released a joint statement calling on Iran to “stand down its ongoing threats of a military attack against Israel.”

Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, was killed July 31 in a guesthouse in Tehran, where he was attending Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the assassination, but it told U.S. officials immediately afterward that it was responsible.

In May, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that he would seek arrest warrants for Haniyeh over war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. Yet Haniyeh was the lead negotiator for the group in talks aimed at securing a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages, and White House officials were surprised and outraged by the timing of his assassination, fearing it would derail its diplomatic efforts.

The day before the Haniyeh operation, an Israeli drone killed a senior Hezbollah commander and at least six other people, including children, in a southern Beirut suburb — Israel’s response to an attack that killed 12 children in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Hezbollah has denied it was behind the strike.

The back-to-back killings were widely interpreted in the region as an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stoke a broader conflict, said Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former intelligence chief.

“It shows Netanyahu has no interest in stopping the war,” Ibrahim said of the decision to assassinate Haniyeh in Iran, “and it shows now he wants to drag the United States in.”

Iran will respond after it takes time for “contemplation and patience,” Shafieian said. He acknowledged that the fallout from the Haniyeh assassination is “a significant challenge” for Pezeshkian but said the government was capable of “managing the situation.”

“Maybe 40 years ago, some of Iran’s actions were out of excitement and emotional,” he said. Now, he added, the country will respond in a “mature” way.

A response from Iranian intelligence could take the form of attacks on soft Israeli targets overseas, such as embassies, said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA senior operations officer who served in counterterrorism roles in the Middle East.

“I don’t believe the Iranians have the reach to hit Israeli security officials, for example, on Israeli soil,” he said.

Tehran’s allies in Iraq and Syria are planning to attack U.S. bases in those countries as Iran launches its expected attack on Israel, according to an Iraqi official with close ties to Iranian-backed forces in the region. The groups have been told to be on “high alert” but have not yet been informed of a timeline for an attack, he said.

State-run media has been awash in coverage about Iran’s military readiness. More than 2,000 domestically made missile systems, drones and “other sophisticated equipment” were handed over to Iran’s navy during a ceremony on Friday, outlets reported, and new air defenses were deployed in the east. The commander of the Iranian army’s air defense force, Brig. Gen. Alireza Sabahifard, said the systems allow Iran to “respond decisively to any kind of threat.”

At Friday prayers in Tehran, Ahmad Khatami, an imam allied with hard-liners, suggested that Iran’s delay in responding to the Haniyeh killing was strategic: “We keep the authorities of the Zionist regime in a state of anxiety,” he said.

But analysts say it also highlights Iran’s own anxieties at a delicate moment of political transition. Pezeshkian is Iran’s first reformist president in nearly two decades, and he had campaigned on greater engagement with the West, hoping to ease the burden of sanctions imposed by Washington and its allies.

A regional war would further isolate Iran and deepen its economic crisis. Over the past 10 months, the value of the Iranian rial has repeatedly hit record lows. Pezeshkian also ran on moderating the enforcement of the country’s mandatory dress code for women. Now many Iranians are calling on him to act.

But Pezeshkian’s first weeks have been dominated by phone calls to foreign counterparts and fears of regional escalation.

Iran “supports peace and security for all countries across the globe,” Pezeshkian said in a call Sunday with the president of the European Council, according to a summary published on state media.

But, Pezeshkian added, “any move threatening peace in any part of the world should be halted.”

Salim reported from London. Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.

previous coverage

• Israel repelled Iran’s first direct attack; is it ready for the next one?

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