On June 22, in the early morning local time, the United States inflicted “severe damage” – confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Association – on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear installations at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. This marked a turning point in Iran’s war against Israel, the United States, and the West. One day later Iran and Israel agreed to a ceasefire following a 12-day battle in which Iran incurred extensive military setbacks and Israel – while suffering 28 civilian deaths and more than 3,000 civilians wounded, and incurring more than a billion dollars in property damage – did not lose an aircraft or a fighter.

Many critics of Israel and the Trump administration remain unwilling or unable to grasp that Iran is the aggressor. This contributes to the critics’ failure to appreciate the lawfulness of Israel’s and the United States’ strikes on Iran. And it renders the critics oblivious to how Israel and the United States have advanced the free world’s interest in thwarting the pursuit of nuclear weapons by the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism, and the world’s leading state-sponsor of anti-American terror.

On June 21, more than a week after the expiration of President Donald Trump’s 60-day deadline for reaching a negotiated settlement, Iran reiterated its rejection of talks with the United States unless Israel agreed to a ceasefire. By the time the sun rose the next day on Tehran, Iran found the third of its three key bargaining chips, like the other two, greatly diminished.

Building on Israel’s Operation Rising Lion – which since June 13 had eliminated most of Iran’s air-defense systems, damaged its nuclear installations, hit command and control centers belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and killed top nuclear scientists and military commanders – America’s Operation Midnight Hammer inflicted devastating blows on three key Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. Over the previous nine days, Israel also had substantially degraded Iran’s capacity to produce ballistic missiles and had blown up more than half of Tehran’s missile launchers and a sizeable portion of its missile stockpile. And since Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Israel had significantly diminished the “ring of fire” that Tehran had built over decades to destroy the Jewish state.........

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