Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Strategic Institute think-tank, has argued that penetrating Iran’s air defence is not the main challenge for Israel.

He told Reuters that the modern F-35 American-built stealth jets would be more than capable of evading Tehran’s surface-to-air missiles.

“The Iranian air defence network is certainly not impenetrable to these aircraft, but this raises the risk of losses and the Iranian capacity to, at least in theory, intercept some incoming standoff munitions increases,” Dr Kaushal said.

Fabian Hinz, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), added: “If there was a major conflict between the two countries, Iran would probably concentrate on occasional successes. They don’t have the comprehensive air defences that Israel has.”

Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.

IISS has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.