Israel has been preparing for this for years. It opposed the 2015 nuclear deal. It carried out several clandestine attacks inside Iran, including the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of Iranian nuclear programme. It took the war directly to Iran in April 2014, by bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus. All while, Israel argued that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes were “an existential threat” to itself. And on June 13, Israel carried out a massive attack in Iran, targeting the country’s nuclear facilities, ballistic missile sites, the residences of its top Generals and more than two dozen nuclear scientists. The Israeli attack, which lasted for hours, is the heaviest military blow to the Islamic Republic since the revolution.
While Israel has long wanted to carry out a direct attack in Iran, both international pressure and Iran’s regional deterrence stopped it from doing so. Past American Presidents, who supported Israel’s militarism against Hamas or Hezbollah, vetoed Israeli plans to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. But both the regional and international scenes are different now.
