DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran is bracing for a retaliatory strike from Israel and has urged its Arab neighbors not to allow Israel to use their airspace, two Gulf diplomats told NBC News on Friday.

Israel has pledged to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack last week, prompting Tehran to warn countries that helping Israel in any way could escalate into war, one of the diplomats said. Both asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive issue.

“The Gulf Cooperation Council is not interested in being caught in the crossfire,” one diplomat said. “Our focus was on de-escalation.”

Many Arab countries such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are home to US bases and oil facilities that are vital to the global economy, and Iran’s warning to help Israel is raising fears in the region that these locations could become targets.

But the second diplomat added that it is unlikely that any Arab country would agree to its airspace being used by the Israelis for an attack on Iran.

Both diplomats spoke after intense diplomatic pressure from Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abbas Araghchi, his foreign minister, to shore up support among their Gulf neighbors and convince them to use their influence in Washington to counter an Israeli attack. temper.

Araghchi traveled to Qatar and his country’s main regional rival, Saudi Arabia, where he held talks with the kingdom’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Pezeshkian also met with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of an international forum in Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat to discuss the situation in the Middle East, the Kremlin said on Friday. It added that he formally accepted Putin’s invitation for a state visit.

Before their meeting, Pezeshkian, who is widely seen as relatively moderate, told Russian state television that Israel “must stop killing innocent people” and that such actions were supported by the United States and the European Union.

Israel has vowed that Iran will bear the consequences for launching a barrage of about 200 rockets last week, even though the Israeli military says it shot down most of them and there is only one known fatality – Sameh Khadr Hassan Al-Asali, a 38 year old. year-old Palestinian man struck by shrapnel in the occupied West Bank.

Tehran said it targeted Israel in retaliation for the killings of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as an April attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the Syrian capital, that killed two of its generals .

Haniyeh was killed in Tehran after attending Pezeshkian’s inauguration ceremony in July, while Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike. His death came days after several Hezbollah leaders were killed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, an attack widely blamed on Israel.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Tehran, and Pezeshkian has portrayed Iran as “being reluctant” for waiting two months after Haniyeh’s death before attacking Israel.

The timing and nature of the Israeli response remain unclear. On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel’s response would be “deadly, precise and, above all, surprising.”

President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke this week and “agreed to remain in close contact in the coming days,” according to a White House readout of the call.

While some in Israel and beyond are encouraging the country to take this opportunity to launch an ambitious and unprecedented attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Biden has said he would not support such a move.

Brig. General Rasoul Sanaei-Rad, a senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was also quoted by the state-run Fars news agency on Wednesday as saying that attacking nuclear sites would “cross regional and global red lines.” ”

Biden has also warned Israel against attacking oil facilities in Iran, and Gulf states, concerned about their own oil sites being attacked, have lobbied Washington to prevent such a move.

Fueling these fears, Abu al-Askari, the military spokesman for Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite paramilitary group based in Iraq, said in a statement on Telegram that “the world will lose 12 million barrels of oil a day” if Iran does not do. focused. He also threatened to attack “US bases, camps and interests in Iraq and the region” in retaliation.

The Iran-backed militia was suspected of being behind a drone strike on a US base in northeastern Jordan, known as Tower 22, in January that killed three US troops and injured more than 30.

However, Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said he “would not be surprised” if Israel “ignored the Syrian and Iraqi protests and flew through” their airspace. The alternative would be “a very long route, along the Red Sea and up,” he added.

“It is difficult to gauge how much they are trying to get the Iranians to question themselves and get caught in the counterintelligence knots,” he said, adding that it was widely believed that an attack on Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities would have “major weapons that can only be dropped by American bombers.”

In Gaza and Lebanon, people passed on the costs of Israeli attacks. At least 22 people were killed and 117 injured in overnight attacks on Beirut, the Lebanese capital, according to the country’s health ministry. NBC News has contacted the Israeli military for comment.

In Gaza, Palestinian authorities said at least 28 people were killed and dozens of others injured in an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter in the city of Deir el-Balah. The IDF said it was used as a terrorism command center.