Hostility between Israel and Iran has potentially reached a tipping point. They have been conducting covert operations against each other for years, but Israel’s recent drone attacks on Iranian military facilities in the province of Isfahan were the most daring move yet. Tehran has promised retaliation at a time of its choosing. The two protagonists are now closer than ever to a major confrontation, by design or by accident. A war would not be confined to them. It could easily set off a devastating regional inferno with implications far beyond the Middle East.
US sources have confirmed that Israel was responsible for a series of attacks by bomb-carrying drones on military sites in Isfahan, where Iran’s nuclear facilities are located, on 28 January. The two sides have been at loggerheads since the advent of the Islamic regime in Iran 43 years ago and its denunciation of Israel as an expansionist ‘Zionist state’. But Israel’s latest operation was its first direct air attack on Iranian soil.
Up to that point, the arch foes had largely contended with a shadowy war. Israel acted remotely to diminish Iranian military and intelligence capability. Its actions involved targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and killing several of them, including the father of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in 2020, and launching cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear plants, the biggest of which was the Stuxnet computer virus, in 2010, which damaged the Natanz facility. It also assassinated a few top officers of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, bombed Iranian targets in Syria and Lebanon on an ongoing basis, and hit or neutralised Iranian oil or cargo ships. This has all been part of an Israeli strategy to ensure that Iran is prevented from developing a military and nuclear capability that poses a threat to Israel.
Read the article by Amin Saikal in The Strategist.