At three in the morning on Friday, the sirens erupted through Israel, and my family in Tel Aviv are awake. While I mixed my adjacent children to the stairs in our apartment building, I noticed that the garbage truck abroad was going as usual: loading a basket, and one empty emptying, making a sound in the opposite direction. The sirens have become so frequent in the past eighteen months that some Israelis have become a believer in the threat.
“brother!” Someone shouted from a close window. “It is Iran!”
Truck driver reconsidered. He stopped in the middle of the street, went out, and went out inside our building to wait for it.
Through the Persian Gulf, Israel was taking an advanced attack against Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. The warplanes hit the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed the major military general in Iran, the leader of its revolutionary guards, the head of the Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News photos showed residential buildings in Tehran with smoke rising from specific rooms, indicating accurate targeted attacks (although Iran said eighty civilians were also killed). A security source whose name did not be named Channel 12 has been told that the services of the Moss Intelligence conducted recently established bases inside Iran, where they retained accuracy and drone missiles. The news broadcast black and white shots from Mossad disabled agents on the ground there, and accurately placed explosive drones, aimed at destroying air defenses in the country. For twenty years, Israel threatened to attack the Iranian nuclear program. Apparently within minutes, it was suddenly. On Israeli television, the military reporters warned of the “next complex days.” “We are entering a completely new position,” said Unit Levy, anchoring of the leading news network on Channel 12.
The attack left many analysts asking: Why now? The previous days were full of events. A conflict over the possibility of extremist Orthodox men to subjugate the military draft to bring down the Israeli government, as the opposition tried to dissolve parliament. prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu She managed to overcome the attempt, but his alliance appeared lucky and lazy. The United Nations Control Authority also announced that Iran was violating nuclear protection. Israeli intelligence has long warned that Iran was about to have the abilities of “outbreak”-the ability to convert uranium at the level of weapons into a bomb-but the new announcement was seen as unusually cursed.
The negotiations between the United States and Iran on its nuclear program were under implementation in recent weeks and have been appointed to resume next week in Amman. Some speculated that the attacks were aimed at disrupting the talks. Raz Zimat, director of the Iran program at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies, admitted to reporters on Friday that Israel “does not want a bad deal with Iran.” But when I asked him if this explains the timing of the strikes, then he brought it out. “I certainly do not think that Israel will recover that it was able to stop negotiations between Iran and the United States,” he said, but added that the real goal of Israel is to break Iranian capabilities.
Nadav Eyal, a good source column in Israel Yediot Ahronot The newspaper went further, on the pretext that the attacks were planned between rounds of talks to deceive Iran’s leadership. It was written on X that the Israelis “planted the idea that nothing could happen” before negotiations in Amman resumed in order to calm the great Iranian leaders in the feeling of “wrong security” before targeting them.
Yakov Amidor, a retired brigade and former National Security Adviser to Netanyahu, insisted that Moussad-who said he had made three separate operations in Iran-worked on its schedule. “A military operation that you can postpone – tells the pilots to return home,” he said. “But when you have what the Mossad had inside Iran, you cannot postpone and renew it whenever you want. So the pressure came from the Mossad side. Whenever the long period is inside Iran, you are at risk of exposure.” It also indicated that it is a tactical logical strike while Iran was weak. The agents in Lebanon and Syria, which was once strong in the region, were subjected to tremendous damage to the last fighting. A secret Israeli operation in October had left its air defenses seriously. As Netanyahu was affected by the threat of response, Amidror said, “He did not” take into account one hundred thousand missiles from Lebanon. “
Israel continued the attacks on Friday, including the second strike on Natanz, uranium enrichment site; There were some evidence that it also had its attention on Iran’s most fortified website, in Fordo. An argument escapes if there is help from America. Elay, and Teeth “Without a green light from the United States, none of this happened,” said a column writer. He added: “A blow like this requires American coordination – the airspace in the Middle East, on joint intelligence, on ammunition supply chains.” Foreign Minister Marco Rubio claimed in a statement that the attacks were “unilaterally” by Israel and that the United States “did not participate in the strikes.” But the president Donald Trump They seemed to enjoy them almost, as they told ABC correspondent, “They were beaten as much as it would strike. There is more in the future. More more.”
It is possible that the full range of damage is not known for a long time, although Iran has recognized that “several parts” of its facility in Natanz have been damaged. The former general, the former general, said that the exact results of the strikes were next to this point. “Israel has shown its ability to deter.” “From a philosophical point of view, it does not matter how successful Israel is to postpone the actual plan.” He suggested that for Israel, scientists were more important targets than the leaders of the Military Guard and the revolutionaries.
In Israel, there was widespread pride that the country had succeeded in a complex intelligence, especially after its amazing failure to prevent Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Does this constitute a new war? Or an escalation for twenty months of conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza? Hezbollah has announced that it will not incite an attack against Israel. But even without the help of Hezbollah, Iran’s leaders felt very pressure to install an aggressive response.
On Friday, Iran threatened revenge, saying that “the end of the story will pay attention to Iran.” Israeli schools and workplaces are closed, along with all temples. The public was ordered not to gather and stay close to the bombs. Usually, when there are incoming missiles, Israelis are advised to search for cover and wait for ten minutes. This time, the head of the Israeli leadership, the internal front, said the sound of sirens, “We go to our protected spaces and we do not leave.”
Amos Harril, military correspondent for Haritz, He suspected that Iran would try to strike military assets, but also civilian targets inside Israel. Last April, when Iran launched more than three hundred drones across the border, an international coalition led by Israel destroyed ninety -nine percent of them. But Iran still has about two thousand ballistic missiles in its arsenal, with the ability to produce about fifty others every month. It was not clear how much this capacity that remained after Thursday night’s attack, but on Israeli television, the alarm was still clear. Will Iran be able to overcome Israel this time? And to what extent again an act Iran’s attack attack? Months? Years?
