"The revenge will come," wrote Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. "For the moment, the premise is that it will be very soon, in the next few days."
Israel did not claim responsibility for the airstrike on April 1 that killed Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' overseas Quds Force, and six other officers as they attended a meeting in the Damascus embassy compound.
But Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Israel "must be punished and shall be" for an operation he said was equivalent to an attack on Iranian soil.
"It's going to be very difficult for Iran not to retaliate," said Raz Zimmt, senior researcher at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies. "I still believe that Iran doesn't want to engage in full-scale, direct military confrontation against Israel, and certainly not with the United States. But it has to do something."
