Timeline: Iran and Israel's open warfare after decades of shadow war

Israel launched a strike on Iranian soil on April 19, sources said, in the latest of the tit-for-tat exchanges between the regional arch-foes whose long-running shadow war has broken into the open.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had vowed his country would respond after Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel on April 13. Tehran's action, its first strike on Israel, had been in retaliation for a suspected Israeli air strike on Tehran's embassy compound in Damascus on April 1.

The exchanges are part of a wider escalation since the war in Gaza began in 2023, but the two nations' enmity stretches back decades, through a history of shadow wars and clandestine attacks by land, sea, air and cyberspace.

1979 - Iran's pro-Western leader Mohammed Reza Shah, who regarded Israel as an ally, is swept from power in an Islamic Revolution that installs a new theocratic regime with opposition to Israel an ideological imperative.

1982 - As Israel invades Lebanon, Iran's Revolutionary Guards work with fellow Shi'ite Muslims there to set up Hezbollah. Israel will eventually see the armed group as the most dangerous adversary on its borders.

1983 - Iran-backed Hezbollah uses suicide bombings to expel Western and Israeli forces from Lebanon. In November, a car packed with explosives drives into the headquarters of the Israeli military. Israel later withdraws from much of Lebanon.