European diplomats travelled to Israel on Wednesday to make one more plea for restraint in response to the aerial attack that Iran launched this weekend, but Britain’s foreign secretary acknowledged that an Israeli reprisal seemed inevitable.

“It is clear that the Israelis are making a decision to act,” the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, told the BBC, just before he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We hope that they do so in a way that does as little to escalate this as possible.”