What is Iran likely to hit back with after Israel's strikes?

Euronews

a day ago

Israel's strikes against the Iranian capital of Tehran and targets around the country on sites claimed to be linked to its nuclear programme reportedly killed several top military officials as well as nuclear scientists.
Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian warned in a televised address on Friday that a 'strong' response to Israel would be coming, in addition to the 100 drones already launched.
'The Islamic Republic of Iran will give a severe, wise, and strong answer to the occupier regime,' he said, referring to Israel.
Euronews Next takes a look at what options Iran could use to strike back against Israel in light of this most recent escalation in their shadow war.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, said this targeted military operation was launched against Iran to keep the country from producing a nuclear weapon.
Hours before Israel's attack, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that Iran was not complying with nonproliferation obligations.
According to experts, one of Iran's options in the wake of the strikes could be to continue developing nuclear weapons that Israel sees as an 'existential threat'.
'Israel has opened a Pandora's box: the worst Iranian response might also be the most likely, a decision to withdraw from its arms control commitments and build nuclear weapons in earnest,' according to an analysis from Kenneth Pollack, vice-president for policy at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
The outrage at the Israeli attack could mean that Iran can 'no longer sit on the proverbial nuclear fence and that it has to rush for a bomb or risk never having one,' according to an analysis from Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
'For many Iranian leaders, an Iran without a nuclear weapon (or the potential to have one) is an existential threat to the survival of the regime itself,' Panikoff continued.
A recent IAEA report found that Iran enriched uranium up to 60 per cent, which is a short technical step away from weapons-grade levels (which is often considered by the IAEA to be 90 per cent uranium).
The agency said it couldn't verify the country's total uranium supply since 2021 but estimates it would be around 9,247 kg as of May 17, 2025. The amount of enriched uranium to 60 per cent is 408.6 kg the report continued.
However, estimates from Washington's Institute for Science and International Safety in 2022 believed that it's 'well with Iran's capabilities' to modify nuclear weapons to get them to work with 60 per cent uranium.
Israeli state officials claimed in the Times of Israel on Friday that Iran now has enough uranium for nine nuclear weapons and is taking steps to 'weaponisation' or build a nuclear bomb.
According to reporting by The Associated Press, Iranian officials have long insisted that their nuclear proliferation programme is peaceful.
A nuclear Iranian response would play out over the long term, Pollack added, with a possible Tehran withdrawal from the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and the country's 2015 nuclear agreement.
The best strategy, according to Pollack, is an 'aggressive pursuit' of a new nuclear deal with Tehran, but it's unlikely any deal will happen now, 'when Iran's leadership will be least interested in one, given their likely outrage at the Israeli attack'.
Without a new deal, Pollack argues Israel has inflicted a short-term setback to Iran's nuclear programme, but to ensure a nuclear threat 'not long thereafter'.
American and Iranian negotiators were due to meet in Oman for a sixth round of talks regarding Iran's nuclear programme on Sunday, according to the Associated Press.
Any future deal with Iran should also include missile restrictions, according to an analysis by Farzin Nadimi from the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy.
There are other options that Iran could take to retaliate against Israel, including a drone or missile offensive, experts added, though the country could be outmatched by Israel's defence system, dubbed the 'Iron Dome'.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in 2024 that Iran possesses the Middle East's 'largest ballistic missile arsenal,' and continues to 'emphasize improving the accuracy, lethality, and reliability of these systems'.
A recent threat assessment from the US military found that Iran fields a 'large quantity' of ballistic, cruise missiles and drones that can strike throughout the region.
The country's defense industry has a 'robust development and manufacturing capacity,' for low-cost weapons like drones, the report continued.
US General Kenneth Mackenzie told a Senate committee hearing in 2022 that the Iranians have over 3,000 ballistic missiles of various types that could reach Tel Aviv.
Mackenzie also said the Iranians had made 'remarkable advances' on their ballistic missiles despite 'a very significant sanction regime'.
This arsenal includes medium-range systems that could reach Israel, the Arabian Peninsula, or southeastern Europe, Nadimi added. His analysis added that these missiles are believed to boast hypersonic velocities, manoeuvring warheads, decoys, and penetration aids.
For example, state media reports claim Iran has used the Fattah-1 hypersonic missile against Israel in the past.
It has been described by analysts to CNN as having a warhead with a manoeuverable reentry vehicle, which means it can avoid missile defenses by making small adjustments during its flight.
Last month, Iranian media reported that officials debuted a new domestically-produced solid-fuel missile called the Qasem Basir.
Aziz Nasirzadeh, Iran's defense minister brigadier general, claimed in local media that the missile had a range of at least 1,200 km and is designed to evade systems like the US-made Patriot system.
The missile can also identify specific targets among decoys and is immune to electronic warfare, he added.
Iran also has advanced in 'solid-propellant technology' which facilitates quicker rocket launches to dispatch satellites, something that could be adapted to intercontinental missiles, Nadimi added.
Israel's most recent attack also targeted ballistic missile and drone installations, making it more complicated for Iran to respond, according to Rachel Whitlark with the Atlantic Council.
Pollack said that Iran could also mount a cyber offensive against Israel, because there is a record of it doing so successfully in 2023, when it shut down electricity in some Israeli hospitals.
Still, Pollack wrote that there are 'uncertainties' about the cyber capabilities of both Israel and Iran.
'It's not entirely clear what cyber weapons Iran has up its sleeve or what vulnerabilities it may have discovered in Israel's infrastructure,' he said.
Meta is making a $14.3 billion (€12.4 billion) investment in artificial intelligence (AI) company Scale and recruiting its CEO Alexandr Wang to join a team developing "superintelligence" at the tech giant.
The deal announced Thursday reflects a push by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive AI efforts at the parent company of Facebook and Instagram as it faces tough competition from rivals such as Google and OpenAI.
Meta announced what it called a "strategic partnership and investment" with Scale late Thursday. Scale said the $14.3 billion investment puts its market value at over $29 billion (€25 billion).
Scale said it will remain an independent company, but the agreement will "substantially expand Scale and Meta's commercial relationship". Meta will hold a 49 per cent stake in the start-up.
Wang, though leaving for Meta with a small group of other Scale employees, will remain on Scale's board of directors.
Replacing him is a new interim Scale CEO Jason Droege, who was previously the company's chief strategy officer and had past executive roles at Uber Eats and Axon.
Zuckerberg's increasing focus on the abstract idea of "superintelligence" - which rival companies call artificial general intelligence, or AGI - is the latest pivot for a tech leader who in 2021 went all-in on the idea of the metaverse, changing the company's name and investing billions into advancing virtual reality and related technology.
It won't be the first time since ChatGPT's 2022 debut sparked an AI arms race that a big tech company has gobbled up talent and products at innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them.
Microsoft hired key staff from startup Inflection AI, including co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who now runs Microsoft's AI division.
Google pulled in the leaders of AI chatbot company Character.AI, while Amazon made a deal with San Francisco-based Adept that sent its CEO and key employees to the e-commerce giant. Amazon also got a license to Adept's AI systems and datasets.
Wang was a 19-year-old student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he and co-founder Lucy Guo started Scale in 2016.
They won influential backing that summer from the startup incubator Y Combinator, which was led at the time by Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI.
Wang dropped out of MIT, following a trajectory similar to that of Zuckerberg, who quit Harvard University to start Facebook more than a decade earlier.
Scale's pitch was to supply the human labour needed to improve AI systems, hiring workers to draw boxes around a pedestrian or a dog in a street photo so that self-driving cars could better predict what's in front of them.
General Motors and Toyota have been among Scale's customers.
What Scale offered to AI developers was a more tailored version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which had long been a go-to service for matching freelance workers with temporary online jobs.
More recently, the growing commercialisation of AI large language models - the technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Llama - brought a new market for Scale's annotation teams.
The company claims to service "every leading large language model," including those from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft, by helping to fine-tune their training data and test their performance.
It's not clear what the Meta deal will mean for Scale's other customers.
Wang has also sought to build close relationships with the U.S. government, winning military contracts to supply AI tools to the Pentagon and attending President Donald Trump's inauguration.
The head of Trump's science and technology office, Michael Kratsios, was an executive at Scale for the four years between Trump's first and second terms. Meta has also begun providing AI services to the federal government.
Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as an open weight product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components.
Meta says more than a billion people use its AI products each month, but it's also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of large language models, also known as LLMs.
It hasn't yet released its purportedly most advanced model, Llama 4 Behemoth, despite previewing it in April as "one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet".
Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, who in 2019 was a winner of computer science's top prize for his pioneering AI work, has expressed scepticism about the tech industry's current focus on LLMs.
"How do we build AI systems that understand the physical world, that have persistent memory, that can reason and can plan?" LeCun asked at a French tech conference last year.
These are all characteristics of intelligent behaviour that large language models "basically cannot do, or they can only do them in a very superficial, approximate way," LeCun said.
Instead, he emphasised Meta's interest in "tracing a path towards human-level AI systems, or perhaps even superhuman".
When he returned to France's annual VivaTech conference again on Wednesday, LeCun dodged a question about the pending Scale deal but said his AI research team's plan has "always been to reach human intelligence and go beyond it".
"It's just that now we have a clearer vision for how to accomplish this," he said.
LeCun co-founded Meta's AI research division more than a decade ago with Rob Fergus, a fellow professor at New York University. Fergus later left for Google but returned to Meta last month after a 5-year absence to run the research lab, replacing longtime director Joelle Pineau.
Fergus wrote on LinkedIn last month that Meta's commitment to long-term AI research "remains unwavering" and described the work as "building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology".