For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran waged a calculated war against Israel from the shadows.

Rather than confronting the Jewish state directly, Tehran built a ring of fire around it. Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Militias in Syria and Iraq. The Houthis in Yemen. Each proxy was another tentacle of a strategy designed to exhaust Israel while allowing Iran to maintain plausible deniability.

This was never merely about regional influence. It was about ideology. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s ruling regime has openly defined the destruction of Israel as a central pillar of its worldview.

For years, much of the international community chose to treat these threats as rhetorical theater or distant strategic concerns. Israel did not have that luxury.

Israel understood that behind the slogans were tens of thousands of rockets pointed at its cities, advanced drone networks designed to overwhelm its defenses, and a nuclear program steadily inching closer to the point of no return.

Today, the long-running “shadow war” between........

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