• Israel launched attacks on Iran over the weekend.
• Observers feared Israel would hit Iranian energy infrastructure.
• Instead, it hit those sites’ defenses — making it easier to launch more attacks later.

Israel’s latest attack on Iran’s air defense network was limited in scope, but still left a significant opening.

While Israel did not pull off a major attack as some feared, its attack over the weekend leaves Iran more vulnerable to follow-up attacks should they come, according to experts on the region.

The long awaited attack was retaliation, almost a month later, for Iran launch ballistic missiles at Israel.

It’s an unprecedented back-and-forth between two nations that used to fight at arm’s length.

Unnamed officials said New York Times that the strikes were specifically aimed at air defense systems around key energy sites, though not the sites themselves.

They are said to include the Bandar Imam Khomeini petrochemical complex and the Abadan oil refinery.

In one Sunday Update, The Institute for the Study of War said Israel Defense Forces struck and disabled parts of three or four sites guarded by the Russian-made S-300 air defense systems.

The loss, it said, undermined Iran’s ability to deter future attacks.

The IDF strike also appeared to hit drone and missile production facilities across Iran, according to satellite images published by The Guardian shows damage near Parchin military base, a site previously linked by suspects the International Atomic Energy Agency to Iran’s nuclear explosive development.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday had “severely damaged Iran’s defense capabilities and its ability to produce missiles.”

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In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian authorities tried to downplay the attacks, which killed four Iranian soldiers. Iran’s Military Joint Staff claimed in a statement that aircraft were intercepted and the attack caused only “limited damage”.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered an unusually measured response on Sunday, says that the strikes should neither be “devalued nor exaggerated”.

At the same time, Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian said in a cabinet meeting that Iran would respond “appropriately” and say Tehran was not seeking war.

On Monday, a senior adviser close to Khamenei told the Financial Times that the Israeli attacks were “much ado about nothing”.

Ali Akbar Velayati, who told the paper he was “open” to closer ties with the West, accused Israel of further destabilizing the region and having the potential to “create the spark that would ignite the regional powder keg.”

Oil prices fell on Sunday and continued to drop on Monday after it became clear that Israel was not directly targeting oil and gas sites.

Ori Wertman, a researcher at the University of South Wales specializing in Israeli national security, told Business Insider that Israel “absolutely” made Iran more vulnerable with its attack.

“This is something really significant because it now made Iran vulnerable to any Israeli attack from the air,” he said, suggesting that Israel now has an opportunity, should it choose, to directly target Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Alex Vatanka, founder of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute, told BI that the strikes gave Iranian officials “something to think about”.

He said: “If they had any illusions that the Russian S-300 will protect them, that is clearly not the case.”

Vatanka said the attack was a demonstration of Israel’s capacity, and also avoided pushing Iran into a position where it would have to “fight back harder”.