Keir Starmer and Western leaders need to do all they can to help ensure restraint in the Middle East

Editorial: All the peoples of the region – including the citizens of Iran – want peace

When Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October, world leaders – including Sir Keir Starmer – urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to show restraint.

Mr Netanyahu could argue that he has done so. Israel did not respond for three weeks, and now that its forces have responded, it seems that the missile attacks on Iran have been limited. In particular, they seem to have avoided “sensitive” targets, which is code for Iran’s nuclear research programme, and, as far as we can tell, the number of casualties has been minimal.

Sir Keir has called on the Iranian regime to “not respond”. It may be that the limited nature of Friday night’s Israeli strikes allows Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to avoid further retaliation. Nomi Bar-Yaacov, associate fellow at Chatham House’s International Security Programme, said: “Israel’s strikes upon Iran have been carried out in a manner that would allow Iran to contain them and not respond directly. Israel has clearly heeded the US in that it deliberately did not target Iranian leaders or Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, it did not attack nuclear sites or oil refineries, and it avoided civilian infrastructure.”

It must be hoped that this analysis is correct, and that Mr Khamenei will feel that he can avoid escalation without losing face. There are reasons for thinking that the Iranian regime will refrain from further attacks – even if they are not particularly reassuring in the medium term.

The main reason Iran does not want to escalate a war with Israel is that Israel is better armed, including with better intelligence. Israel has assassinated Revolutionary Guard leaders and is capable of doing more damage to Iran than vice versa. Part of the significance of the Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel was how ineffective it was and how few casualties it caused.

The danger of this imbalance of military power, however, is that it may make the Iranian regime more determined to acquire nuclear weapons, as Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, has argued in The Independent.

So any attempt to de-escalate the conflict on Israel’s three fronts against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran must include an attempt to restore effective international supervision of Iran’s nuclear programme.

In every theatre of this conflict, the efforts of international peace-makers must be focused on trying to give the peoples of the region a say, because clear majorities of the populations of Iran, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, insofar as it is possible to determine, want peace.

As Mr Straw points out, the Iranian regime has “lost even the sullen consent of about 80 per cent of the Iranian people”. In Israel, which prides itself on being the region’s only true democracy, Mr Netanyahu has lost the confidence of his people and is trying to postpone their inevitable verdict on him.

The voices of international leaders, including Sir Keir, are repetitive: restraint; de-escalation; ceasefire; and return of the hostages. But they are repetitive because they are right – and because they reflect the will of all the peoples of the region for peace.