Israel strikes central and western Iran on war's 100th day

Israeli warplanes struck military targets in central and western Iran in the early hours of Monday, June 8, with explosions reported in Isfahan, Tabriz and the capital, Tehran. For Serbia, which tracks the whole conflict through the price of crude and the fragile balance of European energy supply, the strike is no distant episode. It is the continuation of a crisis that has kept world markets and foreign ministries on alert for a hundred days.

The attack came as Israel’s answer to Iranian missiles fired on Sunday, the first since the truce reached in April. The Israeli military said it had shot down every projectile Tehran sent toward its territory that morning, then turned its air power deep into the Iranian interior. With that, the most serious exchange of fire since the spring ceasefire hardened into an open risk that the region could slide back into full-scale conflict.

What exactly was hit inside Iran?

By Israel’s account, the targets were strictly military installations rather than city centers. Explosions were nonetheless recorded in three major cities: Isfahan on the central plateau, Tabriz in the northwest and Tehran itself. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said that, under an operation it named Nasr, it had struck two Israeli military bases, framing the move as a response to earlier Israeli hits on radar sites.

So two capitals are offering two versions of the same night. Tel Aviv speaks of a precision strike on military infrastructure; Tehran speaks of retaliation against Israeli bases. For an observer in Belgrade, who in recent days read of Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait and Bahrain and of Israel killing a Lebanese general, this Monday brings a qualitatively new step: for the first time since the truce, Israeli aircraft are flying deep into Iranian airspace.

Monday also marked a symbolic threshold. Exactly a hundred days earlier, on February 28, the war began, shifting its center of gravity from Lebanon to the Gulf and back, and now returning to the Israel-Iran axis. The hundredth day brought escalation rather than calm.

Why is Washington calling for restraint?

The most important political signal came not from Tel Aviv or Tehran but from Washington. Donald Trump spoke by phone with Benjamin Netanyahu and urged him to refrain from further retaliation. A senior US official said Trump believed he had convinced the prime minister to wait before ordering another wave of strikes, suggesting the Israeli operation did not have a full American green light.

That gap between allies is no mere detail. It shows Washington trying to keep a de-escalation process alive at the very moment the ground reality runs the other way. On Sunday, Israel also struck the southern suburbs of Beirut, and Lebanon’s health ministry reported two people killed and twenty wounded after Hezbollah rejected the truce. The front, in other words, is widening on several axes at once, while the one great power with leverage over both sides asks for a pause.

For Serbia and Europe, the question is as practical as it is geopolitical. Each new strike on Iranian soil lifts the risk premium on crude and revives the threat over the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. A hundred days of war have already taught markets to react to every blast in Isfahan or Tehran.

The question that will shadow every statement from Tel Aviv, Tehran and Washington in the coming days is this: will Trump’s call for restraint halt the spiral, or is the hundredth day merely the prelude to the war’s most dangerous phase? And do you believe there is still room for a ceasefire after this strike?