Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel after vowing retaliation for a deadly strike on its consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus.

Israel has not said it carried out the consulate strike, but is widely believed to have been behind it.

It is the first time that Iran has attacked Israel directly.

Previously Israel and Iran had been engaged in a years-long shadow war - attacking each other's assets without admitting responsibility.

Those attacks have ratcheted up considerably during the current war in Gaza sparked by the Palestinian group Hamas's assault on nearby Israeli communities last October.

Why are Israel and Iran enemies?

The two countries were allies until the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, which brought in a regime that has used opposing Israel as a key part of its ideology.

Iran does not recognise Israel's right to exist and seeks its eradication.

The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has previously called Israel a "cancerous tumour" that "will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed".

Israel believes that Iran poses an existential threat as evidenced by Tehran's rhetoric, its build-up of proxy forces sworn to Israel's destruction, its funding and arming of Palestinian groups including Hamas and of the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, and what it believes is Iran's secret pursuit of nuclear weapons, though Iran denies seeking to build a nuclear bomb.