In the quiet of our bomb shelter after the siren faded and the bickering died down, I asked my children something I had been avoiding: why they thought we were fighting.

Alon, seven, answered first. “To stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb and then destroying us with it.”

Noam, thirteen, said, “To attack them before they attack us. And to free the people of Iran.”

After thinking for a moment, Yael, fifteen, said, “To destroy Iran’s government and put one in place that isn’t a danger to us.”

All three answers were serious. All three were coherent. And all described important goals. But the difference between them struck me, because each also described a fundamentally different war.

Nuclear prevention. Preemption. Regime change. Liberation. Deterrence. Regional realignment. These are not variations of a single strategy. They point toward different outcomes and different end dates. They are different conflicts. Different wars.

In June last year, in the first week of the previous war with Iran, I wrote that even a justified war can become strategically dangerous if it is fought without direction, and that the most basic question a country must ask at the outset is what the war is meant to achieve.

A year later, the question has not become less urgent.

After the 2025 war, we were told that deterrence had been restored and the nuclear program set back decisively. The threat was described as degraded. Yet within a year we are again in direct conflict. If that campaign neutralized the core danger, we should be told why war is required again. If it did not, we should be told what it actually achieved.

The dramatic killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sharpens the question rather than answering it. If removing the Supreme Leader was a central aim of this campaign, what strategic objective has been achieved? Nuclear infrastructure does not disappear with one death. Military doctrine does not dissolve overnight. If the war ended tomorrow, what permanent threat would have been removed? If killing Khamenei was meant to bring the conflict to its decisive moment, then we deserve to know whether that moment has arrived or why the war must continue beyond it.

President Trump has described the campaign as necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and to eliminate immediate threats to the United States and its allies. Yet at other moments he has demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and urged the Iranian people to seize the moment to overthrow their rulers. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been more explicit about encouraging regime change, calling on Iranians to rise against the Islamic Republic and suggesting the war could open a path to replacing it altogether. But he has also said that Israel’s objective is to remove the nuclear threat posed by the regime, not to impose a new leadership on Iran.

These are not small differences. They point toward different strategic outcomes: nuclear containment, coercive surrender, sustained deterrence, or the collapse of the regime itself. Each path implies a different horizon, for Iran and for the wider region.

No serious Israeli doubts the hostility of the Iranian regime. Its intentions have been explicit for decades. It has carried out heinous terror attacks on Israelis and Jews around the world. The groups it funds and arms have attacked us from Lebanon, from Gaza, from Syria and from Yemen. Rockets, drones and cross-border raids have torn through daily life here. Its nuclear program has advanced steadily. Confronting that threat is part of governing this country.

But confronting danger is not the same as setting a strategic goal. And we have already paid for failing to distinguish between those two things.

For years before October 7, Gaza was governed through periodic rounds of war. Each escalation was framed as necessary maintenance: strike hard, degrade capacity, restore deterrence. There was no clearly articulated political end state, only the assumption that repeated wars would keep Hamas contained.

October 7 showed that we had confused repeated blows with a solution. We thought we were containing the threat. We weren’t, tragically.

The war that followed in Gaza was based on three declared goals: dismantle Hamas militarily, remove it from governance, and return the hostages. It lasted more than two years. The ceasefire came in October 2025. The final hostage’s remains were returned in January 2026. Hamas was not clearly removed from governing authority, and the outcome of the war is still debated.

Yet nearly two and a half years after October 7, there has still been no formal process in which evidence is taken under oath, decisions examined and responsibility clarified. No authoritative account of how October 7 unfolded, how assumptions hardened, how warnings were handled, or, indeed, how the Gaza war was directed and measured.

Iran is not Gaza. The stakes are broader and the consequences harder to contain. That alone requires a level of candor we have not yet been given.

In the bomb shelter, my children described different wars. Not because they are confused, but because the objective has not been defined in a way that is clear, coherent and singular.

Until that happens, the war remains not only dangerous, but directionless.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)