It was kind of inevitable really , just a matter of when and on what scale. Apparently 200 fighter jets dropped 300 munitions on 100 targets , so they weren’t holding back. Who knows what retaliation will look like or how far this now escalates.
Trump’s recent statements prevued what was about to happen , even though he publicly asked for no attack before the talks on Sunday. The question is did Netanyahu just ignore him and go for it anyway , or did Trump secretly green light it ? I’m not entirely sure which would be worse tbh.
Honestly, this news is just the usual shite coming out of Israel’s and the USA’s warmongers’ arse. I can understand people becoming indifferent to this. It’s one more attack after a huge number of other attacks on other countries in the region, and it was predictable, given the Iranian’s sustained efforts to get the nuclear bomb. Israel would never let them reach that goal without doing something about it.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is far more concerning for the time being, at least for me.
I suspect this is sort of an amber light. Didn’t have the US blessing, but it was made clear to Israel they would be acting alone, and the US would simply say that. For now, US attempts to secure plausible deniability, while waiting in the background in case escalation becomes problematic.
i) Gaza is limited in scope to a very small (though very densely populated) area. This conflagration could spark a whole wave of conflict, destabilizing life for many more millions. Syria alone is incredibily fragile and contains a far greater population than Gaza
ii) This is in no way good news for Gaza. This pushes any sort of efforts to reach peace far down the agenda, if not outright suspending talks. The conflict takes any domestic pressure off Netanyahu regarding Gaza, and the usual concerns of the Gulf states vis-a-vis Iran will take prominence over any of their concerns about Gaza. The net effect is likely a month or two of the status quo before anyone pays attention again.
Meanwhile Hezbollah has declined the invitation and (in other words) said that they would rather watch and drink tea instead of participating, this time around (which I mention only because it is so notable that Hezbollah, Iran’s main detterant in the region, declines to come to iran’s aid after having been disappointed with Iran in the past).
So far Iran has taken (and is going to continue to take now for a few days) grievious pain as it has lost and will continue to lose the coming days, most of their most important human assets. And possible, it’s nuclear program will be bombed enough to close it down.
So the question is, what is Iran willing to do now ? Just launching 4-500 missiles at Israel, with no particular purpose, won’t cut it. But they may do that anyway. Or they may escalate and close the Strait of Hormuz and more. It depends if Iran thinks it is in a war for its survival (of the Islamic Republic) or not.
I very much doubt the types of weapons in use are going to make an appreciable dent in whatever Iran is doing. Maybe throw some schedules off, but Iran’s important facilities have been very difficult to even see for over 20 years.
Jordan has the radar capacity, but what exactly would you expect them to do? Note also that the route was far more likely to have been over Syria, so that the first third of the distance covered would have been taken for yet another wave of Israeli strikes there. Iraq’s capability is patchwork at best now. All of the strikes were in the Tehran or Tabriz areas, so the path would have gone over the heavily Kurdish areas where Iraqi systems are very thin indeed. Turkish forces probably were tracking it though
My feeling is that this attack was to provoke Iran into a significant response which would have been used for a greater (or long-term) attack comprising not just Israel, but US, and other Western countries too.
I read this as an attempt to trigger a massive Iranian retaliation, big enough so that US is forced to join and then target Fordow with adequate munitions.
Israel can do a lot of damage itself, but so far it has concentrated (but has bombed many other targets) on assassinating high ranking officers and scientists. The pain for Iran is tremendous, it has to choose between risking perhaps the regime with a formidable attack and launching a retaliatory attack in too small a scale to truly inflict grievious harm on Israel; in which case it is left with no deterrent.
