Israel launched an unprecedented offensive against arch foe Iran overnight, battering its nuclear and missile launch facilities, decapitating its military command and leaving the region teetering on the brink of all-out war.
Operation Rising Lion, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dubbed it, is the culmination of years of research and planning by Israel's military and Mossad intelligence agency to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
It also constitutes the greatest military threat Iran has faced since its full-scale war with Iraq in the 1980s, with Mossad agents having built a secret base of attack drones on Iranian soil.
Netanyahu styled the shocking attacks as a 'pre-emptive strike' on Iran's fledgling nuclear programme, warning that intelligence suggested Tehran was 'approaching the point of no return' in its decades-long pursuit of a nuclear deterrence.
But not only did the strikes target dozens of military and nuclear installations, including Iran's prized Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (NEP), they crippled the upper echelon of the Islamic Republic's military command structure.
