The Iranian regime was increasingly convinced in recent months that
it would soon be able to destroy Israel. The “Destruction of Israel” clock
in Tehran’s Palestine Square was not an exercise in bravado. It was a
public countdown to what the ayatollahs believed was Israel’s imminent
demise, at their hands. Along with dismay that Yahya Sinwar had failed
to consult and coordinate with them before invading southern Israel on
October 7, 2023, the regime drew encouragement from the success of that
massacre, its apparent confirmation of Israel’s profound vulnerability,
and the ongoing instability it had caused.
Israel’s elimination, the regime delightedly, and rationally, assessed, was truly at hand.
And the truth is, apocalyptic as this certainly sounds, the assessment was reasonable.
That is the sober, honest judgment of the military and security
chiefs who told Israel’s political leaders in recent months that Israel had
to go to war against Iran, preferably in June and certainly not much
later. That the end of 2025 would be too late. That it was now or never.
That Iran was a decision and a few weeks away from nuclear weapons. And
that the regime’s fast-growing ballistic missile capability was rapidly
becoming an existential threat as well.
The political leadership listened. It was persuaded. It coordinated with the US administration.
And Israel indeed went to war. And saved itself.
On the way to Jerusalem
In Valiasr Square in October 2023, a giant banner was erected showing
Muslim masses — under the flags of their countries, of Palestine,
pre-rebel Syria, and of Iranian proxy terror groups — walking into the
distance toward the Dome of the Rock shrine in the Al-Aqsa Compound atop
Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a representation of the liberation of
Jerusalem from Zionist Jewish control, a liberation ostensibly now
imminent in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 invasion and massacre in
southern Israel.
A giant billboard depicting Muslim
peoples walking with their national flags toward the Dome of the Rock
shrine in Jerusalem is erected in Valiasr Square in the center of
Tehran, October 25, 2023.
In the aftermath of October 7, the Iranian regime accelerated its
clandestine nuclear weapons program. It accelerated its ballistic
missile production. It bolstered its air defenses. It directly attacked
Israel for the first time, in April 2024, and fired another massive
missile barrage in October.
While Israel publicly derided the potency of those attacks, it
privately recognized Iran’s emboldening and the dangers posed by its
missiles. And it watched with worried admiration as the regime’s
military planners internalized and began to learn from the relative
failure of the two sets of attacks, and from the nature of Israel’s
military responses to them.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi
speaks during a ceremony in tribute to slain Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah in Tehran on November 9, 2024.
By late 2024, however, Iran was also losing ground as regards its
proxies. Israel had eliminated its most important proxy leader,
Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and massively degraded Hezbollah’s
capabilities, both by detonating thousands of explosive-laced beepers on
their Hezbollah owners and by devastating the terrorist army’s missile
and rocket capabilities in much of Lebanon.
Hamas was still holding Israeli hostages in Gaza and resisting the
IDF’s efforts to destroy its entire military and civil-rule
capabilities, but it was a shadow of its 24-battalion former self.
Then came the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and a rapid Israeli
military response that prevented major military assets from falling into
the hands of the new rebel regime and ensured that Israel held air
supremacy there.
The regime in Tehran responded by further accelerating its efforts to
attain the bomb. It expanded its stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium. It
made significant progress on weaponization. Its key scientists were
conducting tests and simulations that underlined how close they were to
completing the program. In breach of international treaties, in breach
of an ostensible fatwa against nuclear weapons, those scientists were
working to enable a rapid breakout to the bomb.
An Iranian security official in
protective clothing walks through a nuclear facility just outside the
Iranian city of Isfahan, March 30, 2005.
At the same time, Iran drastically bolstered its missile production
capabilities. As Israel has publicly stated, Iran had built an arsenal
of some 2,500 highly potent missiles, many with 1-ton warheads capable
of immense devastation, and was on track to have 4,000 by March 2026.
And 8,000 by 2027. A conventional missile threat was becoming an
existential danger, capable of overwhelming Israel’s defenses, wreaking
untenable death and destruction across Israel, and, if Israel was caught
unawares, preventing the Israeli military from mustering an effective
response.
Together with its thousands of drones, Iran was aiming, for instance,
to target Israel’s air bases, ensuring that the air force simply
couldn’t take off to fight back.
Despite the massive setback to Hezbollah, which it had relied upon to
launch as many as 1,000-3,000 daily rockets and missiles at Israel come
the hour, the regime was also confident that its ground invasion plans
for Israel remained viable, with the potential for its proxies and their
supporters to mirror Hamas’s invasion on most every front, including
from Jordan. As National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has stated,
the regime believed that its long-planned “Destruction of Israel”
project via a multifront invasion, carried out amid a devastating
missile and drone attack, was viable.
What was central to the realization of Iran’s goal, however, was that it strike first and take Israel by surprise.
The most dangerous man in Iran
Watching Iran with a far greater degree of intelligence penetration
than the regime had realized, Israel’s military and security planners
had in February 2025 received the green light from the political echelon
to preempt.
Israel had been preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear program for years,
but had not consistently prioritized the potential imperative or
allocated the necessary budget, especially after the Obama
administration reached its JCPOA agreement with the regime, a flawed attempt to prevent Iran from attaining the bomb, in 2015.
The IDF had carried out an unprecedented drill
in May 2023, simulating a multifront attack on Israel triggered by an
Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. But it had only begun
preparing in earnest in October 2024 for an attack that would deal not
just with nuclear targets but also the ballistic missile enterprise,
Iran’s air defenses and more.
The IDF pilots who participated in the
Operation Opera bombing of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in
1981.
Twice before — in Iraq in 1981, and Syria in 2007 — Israel had blown
up its enemies’ nuclear weapons programs. But comparisons are
inappropriate. Those were bold strikes on single nuclear reactors; this
would be an assault of an entirely different order, against an enemy
that thought it knew what was coming.
In April, the planners selected June as the ideal time for the
attack. They assessed that Israel’s intel on Iran would likely start to
decline after that, especially as regards the nuclear program —
presumably because the final stages of weaponization could be carried
out in locations less obvious than the major known nuclear sites. The
IDF would be at peak readiness. Iran would not yet have restored air
defenses targeted by the Israeli Air Force in October. Iran’s proxies
were weak. Iran’s missile capabilities would only get stronger.
Not incidentally, Trump had given Iran a 60-day window for diplomacy. It expired on June 12.
The military planners assessed that the Iranians were both preparing
their own assault and watching for Israeli preemption. And thus the
initial Israeli strikes had to be devastating.
Iranian ballistic missile launchers are
targeted in Israeli airstrikes, in footage released by the IDF on June
16, 2025.
In the very first hours, key regime commanders would have to be
eliminated. So, too, the Iranian military’s command and control
structures. Air defenses would need to be disabled. Everything possible
would need to be done to minimize the number of missiles Iran could fire
in an immediate response — and therefore vast numbers of missile
launchers, launch sites, missile stores, fuel supplies and key personnel
would have to be put out of action, everywhere from western Iran to the
Tehran area and beyond.
Major nuclear facilities would have to be targeted to the full extent
of Israeli capabilities. Also, key installations crucial to the bomb
program. And so, too, those expert scientists working to move the rogue
program through the final stages to a deliverable bomb.
Surprise was essential. But so too was establishing air supremacy all
the way to Tehran, to ensure that the waves of Israeli attacks could
keep coming, enabling the ongoing assault on essential targets.
But how can you achieve absolute surprise when you are flying 1,800 kilometers (1,200 miles) to carry out an attack?
For one thing, by minimizing the number of people who know that the
attack is about to unfold; even many high-ranking army and security
personnel were not told what was happening until it was actually
underway. Only the most intimate forum of political leaders was fully
informed.
For another, by instituting decoy operations and movements. The US has detailed
how it very publicly sent several B-2 bombers to Guam even as it
secretly deployed other B-2s to drop bunker busters on Fordo early on
June 22; Israel’s decoy activities when launching the war on June 13
were more extensive, and thus far largely unpublicized.
This graphic image compares Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility before and after the US bombed the site on June 20, 2025.
How the air force essentially telescoped its 1,800-kilometer flights
to the point where Iran simply did not know it was coming is a story yet
to be told. But the fact is that Iran was caught unawares and thrown
off-kilter in the first vital hours.
All of Israel was awoken by screeching alarms on every cellphone as
the attack began in the early hours of June 13, and Home Front Command
spokespeople popped up on national television
to tell the country that something was about to happen, including a
potential “significant attack from the east.” Trained to remain calm and
focused in even the most horrifying circumstances, the spokespeople
indeed seemed relatively calm, but it was evident that they had no real
idea of what was unfolding in Iran and what could happen in Israel.
The IDF had assessed that Iran would try to fire 300-500 missiles in
its initial response to an Israeli attack, and that it was possible it
could launch as many as 300 in the first 15 minutes. That’s why the
order was given to alert the entire country. Israelis had to be warned,
without being told precisely what about. No wonder the Home Front
spokespeople exuded a certain bafflement.
In the event, Iran managed to fire precisely no missiles in the first 18 hours
after Israel’s strike. It had known Israel was coming, but it did not
know Israel was coming that night. Israel attacked just before 3 a.m.;
Iran fired its first two missile barrages, of some 50 missiles each,
shortly after 9 p.m.
Screen capture from video of Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali
Hajizadeh, July 1, 2024.
Only one leading Iranian figure sensed just ahead of time that
something was up: Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the aerospace chief of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, a US-designated terrorist organization.
Responsible for Iran’s missiles and drones, Hajizadeh was perceived by
Israeli security chiefs as the most dangerous man in Iran, no less, and
was most certainly on the initial target list.
Israel feared it had lost sight of him as it precision-targeted the
key Iranian figures in those first minutes and hours, including in areas
as precise as individual rooms in apartments on high floors of
residential buildings. But Hajizadeh had dashed to a military bunker he
believed was secure, and convened key colleagues. And it was there that
Israel found and eliminated him and five other top officers in the IRGC
air force.
Unloading like never before
Israel’s military planners and operational chiefs consider the
initial attack to have been an incredible success, and so too the 12
days of concerted assaults that followed. Avoiding hyperbole, the IDF
Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir publicly assessed that Iran’s nuclear program
and its missile capabilities were “significantly damaged.”
Every pre-designated target was indeed attacked, and destroyed or
damaged to the extent the planners had believed possible or more so. The
end stages of the war, including the initial hours after Trump
announced the ceasefire but before it had gone into effect, saw hundreds
of key targets destroyed — including what the publicly fuming US
president called the unloading on Iran of “a load of bombs the likes of which I’ve never seen before.”
Mourners gather around the flag-draped
coffins of the Iranian armed forces generals, nuclear scientists and
their family members on the trucks, who were killed in Israeli strikes,
during their funeral ceremony in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025.
The top-level nuclear scientists are gone, and not easily
replaceable. Natanz is believed destroyed, along with its centrifuges.
Isfahan — possibly the only Iranian facility capable of converting
uranium into the necessary form for enrichment, and of converting
enriched uranium into solid metal form en route to a warhead — is likely destroyed.
Fordo, where the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency had in 2023
reported evidence of enrichment to 83.7% — just short of weapons grade —
is not operational, thanks in overwhelming part to the US bombing.
Iran’s uranium conversion facility near
Isfahan, which reprocesses uranium ore concentrate into uranium
hexafluoride gas, which is then taken to Natanz and fed into the
centrifuges for enrichment, March 30, 2005.
Iran’s ballistic missile program is greatly degraded. It is believed
to still have some 700-1,000 missiles and fewer than 200 of its original
400 launchers. But the IDF targeted not only missiles and launchers,
but the tunnels from which they emerge to fire, and the factories that
make them and their components. Indeed, the IDF targeted innumerable
elements of Iran’s entire military manufacturing array.
An IDF graphic of the senior Iranian
military and nuclear officials who were killed in the Israeli strike on
Iran on June 13, 2025.
The regime’s drones proved a nuisance but not a profound danger. It
fired 1,000, expecting to wreak considerable harm, and scored one direct
hit, wrecking a home in Beit She’an.
I wrote 12 days ago
that Iran had been “a matter of no more than two months, and possibly
as little as a week,” from being able to build a deliverable bomb.
Today, Zamir has been quoted telling colleagues, Iran is no longer a nuclear threshold state, and its plans to eliminate Israel have been set back years.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir
(right) and IAF chief Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar are seen at the IAF’s
underground command center, June 15, 2025.
‘Only’ 14% of Iran’s missiles impacted
There is, however, absolutely no room or reason for hubris. Israel
allowed itself to slip into existential peril, and the astounding
success of the 12-day war is a temporary accomplishment.
Iran is not going anywhere. And so long as the ayatollahs retain
power, they can be relied upon to recommit to their efforts to wipe out
Israel. As former prime minister Naftali Bennett remarked
in a Saturday night interview, “it’s clear that they will now start to
renew” the nuclear program. “The key is to prevent them from doing that,
too.”
Along with delight and profound relief at the achievements of the
war, the military and security top brass are resolved not to
underestimate the regime and its single-minded determination to destroy
Israel. This was a knockout blow in a life-or-death fight. But it is not
the end of the existential struggle.
Even this time, despite those stunning initial strikes, Iran did gradually recover its balance.
The IDF fired over 4,000 precision projectiles of one kind or another
at specific targets, including symbols of the regime such as the
headquarters of the state broadcaster,
sending a TV anchor rushing to safety mid-show. The regime is
emphatically still standing, and its leader, Ali Khamenei, has emerged
from his bunker to proclaim not only that Iran will never surrender, but
also that it had won the war.
It did not. Israel maintained air supremacy over Tehran, and was
selecting targets at will, with the capacity to continue to do so.
Tehran had not been attacked since the Iran-Iraq War 30 years ago.
Somewhere in the regime’s psyche, there may have been a refusal to
countenance that Israel could do so, and would dare to do so.
A medical staffer walks along a damaged
area at the Soroka hospital complex in Beersheba, after it was hit by a
missile fired from Iran, June 19, 2025.
But while “only” 14% of the missiles fired by Iran impacted populated
areas and strategic infrastructure — with the US playing a very
significant part in the defense — they caused heavy devastation.
Twenty-eight people were killed,
all but one of them civilians. Over 3,000 people were hospitalized, 23
with serious injuries. Over 2,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, with
apartment buildings and office towers smashed, and some 13,000 people
displaced. Beersheba’s Soroka hospital, the Ben-Gurion University
medical school at the hospital and a daycare center in the city; a life
sciences research building at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot; the
Bazan oil refinery in Haifa, and a rehab facility for disabled kids in
Bnei Brak — all these and more took direct, destructive hits.
Prof. Eldad Tzahor from the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Rehovot visits the site where his lab used to
stand after it suffered a direct hit from an Iranian missile on June 15,
2025.
The Iranian regime, dissembling, is doing its best to shrug off the
harm of an entirely different order that has been done to its nuclear
and military facilities and personnel. Israel’s political and military
leadership knows that the relatively minor damage it sustained is far
too much.
Knowing when to stop
The military and political leadership agreed ahead of time to set
achievable goals for the war — which were defined as “Creating
conditions to prevent Iran’s nuclearization over time, and improving
Israel’s strategic balance.” Twelve days in, the IDF reported that those
goals had been attained, and that Israel’s position would weaken, and
Iran’s strengthen, if the war continued.
The IDF had assessed that several of its planes could go down and
pilots could be captured. That didn’t happen. It had estimated that 400
people would be killed on the home front if the war went to 30 days. The
death toll was rising.
An Israeli Air Force pilot is seen
heading to an F-16 fighter jet before taking off for strikes in Iran, in
a handout photo published June 22, 2025.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whom the IDF deeply credits with
creating the conditions for the US to join the attack — agreed that a
war of attrition had to be avoided, and that Iran should not be given
time to alter the balance of the conflict. With US President Donald
Trump very publicly brokering a ceasefire, the war was brought to an
end.
Unlike in Gaza, where the war goes on because the goals of
eliminating the Hamas threat and returning all the hostages have not
been met, in Iran the specified job was done. The IDF was prepared to
put uniformed and civilian lives at risk to face down an existential
threat, but not when that threat had been eliminated for at least the
near future, and when there was a high probability that further
incremental gains would be offset by greater losses.
The 28 victims of Iranian missiles in
June 2025, from top left: Yevgenia Blinder, Eti Cohen Angel, Yisrael
Aloni, Manar Khatib, Shada Khatib, Hala Khatib, Manar Khatib, Miki
Nahum, Belina Ashkenazi, Efrat Saranga, Meir Vaknin, Mariia Pieshkurova,
Daisy Yitzkahi, Hadassah Belo, Kostiantyn Tutevich, Illia Pieshkurov,
Anastasia Buryk; Cpl. Eitan Zacks, Noa Boguslavsky, Uri Levy, Igor
Fradkin, Daniel Avraham, Avraham Cohen, Naomi Shaanan, Ivette
Shmilovitz, Yaakov Belo and Michal Zacks. No image of Olena Sokolova is
available.
Israel would like to see a “good deal” finalized by the US with Iran,
and would hope to provide input on such an agreement’s necessary
provisions. But it does not doubt that Iran will do whatever it can to
evade even the most stringent barriers to reviving its bomb-making
program. If the IDF has to strike again, it believes it can do so within
a matter of days.
No surrender
A new painting has been erected in Valiasr Square in recent days.
Rather than a scene, depicted from behind, of the march to Jerusalem,
this installation shows Iranians from various walks of life — slain
recognizable military chiefs, but also soccer stars, engineers, women —
looking out into the streets of Tehran.
This is not a portrait of surrender. The depicted Iranians, civilians
and military men, are saluting. Rockets are leaving smoke trails behind
them. The accompanying slogan proclaims, “We are all soldiers of Iran.”
But this time, only Iranian flags are shown. And the backdrop is not
Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock but Iran’s highest peak, Mount Damavand.
This is the regime attempting to convey a message of national unity and,
perhaps, even domestic focus.
A banner bearing a painting that
represents various categories of the Iranian society is deployed against
the facade of a building in Tehran’s Valiasr Square, with a message
that reads in Farsi: “We are all soldiers of Iran,” on June 22, 2025.
And yet, it is more than possible that Iran spirited away some, maybe
even most, of its 60% enriched uranium far from the major sites
targeted in this war, and plenty of centrifuges too. Iran is about 75
times larger than Israel — plenty of room to construct smaller nuclear
sites, and enrich and weaponize there, while trying to avoid attention.
New scientists will replace the departed. It is not impossible that
Pakistan or North Korea could be tempted to try to provide Iran with
nuclear weapons.
Fresh, quite possibly more radical, leaders will replace the old for
so long as the regime can retain power. And that regime, humiliated over
12 days in June, may be more motivated than ever to either scramble for
the bomb or, more akin to its approach thus far, to lick its wounds and
patiently rebuild the entire program.
On Saturday, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi predicted
that Iran could resume uranium enrichment “in a matter of months.”
Israel expects the regime to try to start resurrecting its program far
more quickly than that.
‘If we hadn’t acted now…’
Israel has had a narrow escape.
It was only in a position to save itself, moreover, because Yahya
Sinwar, fearing leaks, chose not to coordinate Hamas’s October 7, 2023,
with Iran and its other proxies, incorrectly gauging that the rest of
the axis would pile in when recognizing his “success,” and join the
triumphal, Israel-eliminating march to Al-Aqsa. (Israel is not certain,
to this day, why Iran held back.)
Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed last week
that the Air Force had struck the “Destruction of Israel” clock in
Tehran’s Palestine Square, counting down to Israel’s predicted demise in
2040. It’s not clear that the clock was smashed. If it was, Iran will
doubtless fix it. And, we know full well, it was aiming to achieve the
goal of rubbing out Israel a lot earlier than 2040.
Was. And is.
An IAF F-15 takes off to carry out strikes in Iran in an image published on June 18, 2025.
Netanyahu on Tuesday accurately described the war
as a “historic” victory, and has said it opens the door to potential
new normalization agreements. He also asserted that it would abide for
generations and that Israel had sent the Iranian nuclear program “down
the drain” — assessments that the security establishment would not,
should not, dare not, complacently endorse.
The prime minister also declared that Israel would have faced
destruction in the near future “if we hadn’t acted now.” On that, there
is no disagreement.
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