Iran confirms alleged Israel strike; no plan for immediate retaliation, senior official says

Iran has no plan for immediate retaliation against Israel, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Friday, hours after sources said Israel launched an attack on Iranian soil.

"The foreign source of the incident has not been confirmed. We have not received any external attack, and the discussion leans more towards infiltration than attack," the Iranian official said on condition of anonymity.

Israeli missiles have hit a site in Iran, ABC News reported late on Thursday, citing a US official, while Iranian state media reported an explosion in the center of the country, days after Iran launched a retaliatory drone strike on Israel.

Iran's Fars news agency said an explosion was heard at an airport in the central city of Isfahan but the cause was not immediately known. Iran suspended flights over the cities of Isfahan, Shiraz and Tehran, state media reported.

Several Iranian nuclear sites are located in Isfahan province, including Natanz, the centerpiece of Iran's uranium enrichment program.

According to a report from the New York Times, the Israeli military struck Iran early on Friday, according to two Israeli defense officials, in what appeared to be Israel's first military response to Iran's attack on Israel five days earlier.

The New York Times reported that three Iranian officials confirmed that a strike had hit a military air base near the city of Isfahan, in central Iran, early on Friday, but did not say which country had mounted the attack. Fars News, an Iranian news agency affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said that explosions were heard near Isfahan's civilian airport, adding that the cause of the blasts was not immediately clear. Several Iranian news agencies reported that nuclear facilities in the area had not been hit, according to the Times.

Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport was closed to all flights until 0700 GMT, according to a notice to airmen posted on a US Federal Aviation Administration database. Some Emirates and Flydubai flights that were flying over Iran early on Friday made sudden sharp turns away from the airspace, according to flight paths shown on the tracking website Flightradar24.

Israel had said it would retaliate against Iran's weekend attack, which involved hundreds of drones and missiles in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Syria. Most of the Iranian drones and missiles were downed before reaching Israeli territory.

Analysts and observers have been raising concerns about the risks of the Israel-Gaza war spreading into the rest of the region.

Iran told the United Nations Security Council on Thursday that Israel "must be compelled to stop any further military adventurism against our interests" as the UN secretary-general warned that the Middle East was in a "moment of maximum peril."

Oil prices and jumped on the reports of the Israeli strike. Brent crude futures LCOc1 rose 2% to $88.86 a barrel, the dollar gained broadly, gold XAU= rose 1% and S&P 500 futures ESc1 dropped 1%. MKTS/GLOB

Israel's assault on Gaza began after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200, according to Israeli tallies. Iran-backed groups have declared support for Palestinians, launching attacks from Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.