A US official said Iran was “preparing for an imminent missile attack” on Israel

A senior White House official told CBS News on Tuesday that the U.S. has “indications that Iran is preparing to launch an imminent ballistic missile attack against Israel.” The warning, which the Israeli military said was conveyed from Washington, came hours after Israel announced the start of “limited, localized and… targeted ground attacks“against the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“We are actively supporting defense preparations to defend Israel against this attack,” the White House official said, adding that any direct “attack by Iran on Israel will have serious consequences for Iran.”

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Tuesday that U.S. officials had informed the IDF that Iran may fire missiles “in the near future.”

“At this point, we still do not detect any air threat from Iran against Israel,” Hagari said, adding: “We have dealt with this threat in the past and will continue to deal with it now.”

The U.S. Embassy in Israel issued a security alert on Tuesday asking all U.S. government employees and their families to shelter in place “due to the current security situation.”

Iran last fired a volley of ballistic missiles at Israel in April in retaliation for an Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital that killed several senior Iranian military commanders.

Iran fired more than 300 missiles and drones into Israel in that attack in April, but Hagari said at the time that virtually all of the weapons were intercepted before they entered Israeli territory, and he reported that only one military base was hit by the few missiles that were fired did so, suffered minor damage to land within the country. A 10-year-old girl was “severely injured” by shrapnel from an intercepted rocket, but the IDF reported no further casualties.

The IDF spokesman said Tuesday that Israeli Air Force planes were patrolling the skies “and our defense systems are at the highest level.”

President Biden has repeatedly called for a ceasefire as fires between Israel and Hezbollah escalated for weeks on the southern Lebanon border. U.S. officials at the White House, State Department and Pentagon have all made clear the risks of an all-out war between Israel and the well-armed Iranian proxy group in Lebanon, warning that it could lead to a widespread regional conflict.

On September 30, Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters that the deployments of a number of American units already in the Middle East would be extended and that the forces replacing them would instead overlap. That includes F-16, F-15E, A-10 and F-22 fighter jets as well as the personnel who operate the planes, she said, adding “a few additional thousand” to U.S. troops in the region. would equal.

U.S. defense officials told CBS News on Tuesday that there is currently more U.S. military capacity in the region, including 40,000 American troops, than when Iran launched its direct missile attack on Israel in April.

Iran supports a range of groups across the regionincluding Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Tehran calls these groups a “resistance front” against Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, while Israel describes them as an axis of evil with the ideological goal of wiping the Jewish state from the map. Hezbollah calls its rocket and drone attacks on Israel legitimate support and defense of Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the Houthis have claimed the same justification for their months-long attacks on commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea.

One of the biggest risks to the US is that Iran's proxy groups – including smaller militias based in Iraq and Syria – will attack American forces in the region in retaliation for Washington's support of Israel. They have already done this since October 7, firing missiles and drones at US bases more than 165 times. Most attacks cause little or no damage, but a drone strike on a U.S. outpost in Jordan in January that was claimed by an Iranian-backed group in Iraq killed three US soldiers and dozens wounded.

Before the White House official told CBS News about Iran's alleged plans for a missile attack, the Israeli military tightened domestic security across much of the country on Tuesday. Among the new measures announced by the IDF's Homefront Command were limits on the number of people allowed to gather in public in much of northern Israel near the border with Lebanon.

Margaret Brennan and Charlie D'Agata contributed to this report.