It took 25 days, but in the early hours of today, Israel responded to Iran’s volley of missiles earlier this month. The operation, dubbed “Days of Repentance”, was the most significant attack on Iran by any country since the 1980s. The Iranian regime’s years of waging a shadow war against Israel have finally brought home the violence, something the regime has repeatedly promised its people it would avoid.

The attacks were significant and are likely to cause significant damage. At least four officers of the Iranian army, who served in missile defense units, were killed. Nonetheless, Iran is relieved that its worst fears did not come true. A day before the attacks, Israel had used intermediaries to warn Iran about them, to ensure they would not cause massive casualties, said Mostafa Najafi, a security expert in Tehran with ties to the regime’s elites. He said the attacks were not “as extensive and painful as Israeli officials had claimed” they would be. Israel did not target Iran’s infrastructure, such as its oil and gas refineries, nor assassinate political or military leaders.

Because of this, Iran has an opportunity to tell the country off by giving a weak enough response that would not invite Israeli retaliation. Iran can stop the tit for tat, if it is willing to stand up to the hard-line voices that want the country to escalate and even widen the conflict.

Read: Iran is not ready for war with Israel

Life in Tehran has quickly returned to normal. The city’s streets were as usual clogged with traffic on Saturday, the first week in the country. Although all flights were initially suspended, Tehran’s two main airports are back in operation.

“I think Iran will respond to the attacks,” Afifeh Abedi, an Iranian security expert who supports the government, told me. “But I doubt there would be an escalation,” she said. “Countries in the region will stop this, and the United States will try to manage the situation.”

Abas Aslani of the Tehran-based Center for Middle East Strategic Studies agrees. “The evidence does not currently point to a wider war,” he told me. “But this does not necessarily mean that Iran will not respond.”

I also spoke to two senior Iranian politicians, one conservative and one reformist, who both requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. They said Iran was not looking to widen the conflict now. Iran and the United States had implicitly agreed to allow a limited Israeli strike followed by no significant Iranian response, said the conservative figure, who is close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.

The reformist politician, who has served in government roles in the past, said the diplomatic efforts of Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi helped ensure that the Israeli attacks were limited to military targets. Araghchi visited about a dozen neighboring countries in recent weeks, and he is believed to have asked them to put pressure on the United States and Israel to limit the attacks.

Across the region, there is broad opposition to widening the conflict. Saudi Arabia condemned the recent Israeli attacks on Iran as “a violation of its sovereignty and a violation of international law and norms” and reiterated its “firm position in rejecting further escalation.” Similar condemnations have been issued by Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, OmanQatar, Kuwait, JordanAlgeria, Mauritania and, further afield, Switzerland, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Maldives. Jordan, which is a neighbor of Israel and signed a peace treaty with it 30 years ago today, also confirmed that no Israeli strikers had been allowed to use Jordanian airspace. In an effort to maintain neutrality, Jordan had previously helped Israel defend itself against Iranian drone and missile attacks.

Read: Iran cannot be reconciled

Iran knows that its future prosperity and success depends on economic development, which is actively harmed by its isolation from the international economy and its current war footing. Yesterday, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a G7 initiative that helps enforce global anti-money laundering rules, declared it will keep Iran on its blacklist along with only two other countries, North Korea and Myanmar. On Saturday, the US dollar was sale for 680,000 Iranian Rials, a historic high. These are not problems you can solve by fighting Israel.

Yesterday, in a rare candid moment, Ghalibaf acknowledged the stakes: “Sadly, our economy is not doing as well as our missiles. But it should.”

And yet, Iran remains far from taking the necessary steps to drop its anti-Israel campaign, overcome its international isolation and focus on its domestic problems. Currently, any deviation from the anti-Israel orthodoxy leads to swift backlash from the hardliners. Last month, the assembly of scholars and instructors at Qom Seminary, a reform-oriented body of Shiite clerics, issued a statement which condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Lebanon while urging the country “to return to its legal borders before the 1967 aggression” and calling for “the formation of an independent Palestinian state.” This support for the two-state solution upset the hardliners, some of whom called for the seminary to be closed, but its position has been defended by the reformist press.

And some hardliners are calling for an all-out war with Israel.

“The Zionist regime is in decline, and Iran will not let this attack go without a response,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor-in-chief of the hardline daily Kayhantold me. “Our response will be increasingly decisive and crushing.”

Shariatmadari is known for outlandish statements. Najafi, who tends to be more level-headed, also believes that the Iranian-Israeli clashes will continue “in the medium term, especially after the US election.”

Some supporters of Israel also hope the conflict will escalate. Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said on X that Israel must now prepare for the “next phase” of its strategy: helping the Iranians overthrow their regime, followed by “decisive decapitation strikes.”

As long as Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is alive and in power, the country’s attitude toward Israel will not change decisively. But he is 85, and in preparation for a possible succession battle, the regime’s various factions are already squabbling over the country’s future direction. The hardliners are not as politically powerful as they once were. They lost the presidency recently and are marginalized in other institutions as well.

“The likes of Shariatmadari don’t matter to anyone,” the conservative politician told me. “Iran will change.”

If Iran wants to avoid a war, it cannot change fast enough.