Israel’s shadow campaign offers lessons for U.S. in standoff with Iran, report says

Israel’s unacknowledged military campaign against Iranian targets in Syria could provide a model for the United States as it struggles to contain Tehran’s network of armed proxies across the Middle East, according to a new report.

The undeclared “gray zone” campaign Israel has conducted in Syria in recent years, consisting of more than 200 airstrikes on Iranian-affiliated targets, has limited Iran’s military power without triggering a significant escalation, Middle East experts at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, say in an advance version of a report to be released this week.

A similar approach, the report asserts, would be more effective than the current U.S. strategy, which has alternated between avoiding kinetic action after Iranian attacks on U.S. and allied targets and launching highly publicized attacks on Iranian-linked targets, including a Jan. 3 drone strike that killed a senior military commander, Qasem Soleimani.

Read the full article and more in The Washington Post.