The Iranian regime was increasingly convinced in recent months that it would soon be able to destroy Israel. The “Destruction of Israel” clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square was not an exercise in bravado. It was a public countdown to what the ayatollahs believed was Israel’s imminent demise, at their hands. Along with dismay that Yahya Sinwar had failed to consult and coordinate with them before invading southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the regime drew encouragement from the success of that massacre, its apparent confirmation of Israel’s vulnerability, and the ongoing instability it had caused.

Israel’s elimination, the regime delightedly, and rationally, assessed, was truly at hand.

And the fact is, apocalyptic as this certainly sounds, the assessment was reasonable.

That is the sober, honest judgment of the military and security chiefs who told Israel’s political leaders in recent months that Israel had to go to war against Iran, preferably in June and certainly not much later. That the end of 2025 would be too late. That it was now or never. That Iran was a decision and a few weeks away from nuclear weapons. And that the regime’s fast-growing ballistic missile capability was rapidly becoming an existential threat as well.

The political leadership listened. It was persuaded. It coordinated with the US administration.

And Israel indeed went to war. And saved itself.

In Valiasr Square in October 2023, a giant banner was erected showing Muslim masses — under the flags of their countries, of Palestine, pre-rebel Syria, and of Iranian proxy terror groups — walking into the distance toward the Dome of the Rock shrine in the Al-Aqsa Compound atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a representation of the liberation of Jerusalem from Zionist Jewish control, a liberation ostensibly now imminent in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

In the aftermath of October 7, the Iranian regime accelerated its clandestine nuclear weapons program. It accelerated its ballistic missile production. It bolstered its air defenses. It directly attacked Israel for the first time, in April 2024, and fired another huge missile barrage in October.

While Israel publicly derided the potency of those attacks, it privately recognized Iran’s emboldening and the dangers posed by its missiles. And it watched with worried admiration as the regime’s military planners internalized and began to learn from the relative failure of the two sets of attacks, and from the nature of Israel’s military responses to them.

By late 2024, however, Iran was also losing ground as regards its proxies. Israel had eliminated its most important proxy leader, Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and massively degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities, both by detonating thousands of explosive-laced beepers on their Hezbollah owners and by devastating the terrorist army’s missile and rocket capabilities in much of Lebanon.

Hamas was still holding Israeli hostages in Gaza and resisting the IDF’s efforts to destroy its entire military and civil-rule capabilities, but it was a shadow of its 24-battalion former self.

Then came the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and a rapid Israeli military response that prevented major military assets from falling into the hands of the new rebel regime and ensured that Israel held air supremacy there.

The regime in Tehran responded by further accelerating its efforts to attain the bomb. It expanded its stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium. It made significant progress on weaponization. Its key scientists were conducting tests and simulations that underlined how close they were to completing the program. In breach of international treaties, in breach of an ostensible fatwa against nuclear weapons, those scientists were working to enable a rapid breakout to the bomb.

At the same time, Iran stepped up its missile production capabilities. As Israel has publicly stated, Iran had built an arsenal of some 2,500 highly potent missiles, many with 1-ton warheads capable of immense devastation, and was on track to have 4,000 by March 2026. And 8,000 by 2027. A conventional missile threat was becoming an existential danger, capable of overwhelming Israel’s defenses, wreaking untenable death and destruction across Israel, and, if Israel was caught unawares, preventing the Israeli military from mustering an effective response.

Together with its thousands of drones, Iran was aiming, for instance, to target Israel’s air bases, ensuring that the air force simply couldn’t take off to fight back.

Despite the tremendous setback to Hezbollah, which it had relied upon to launch as many as 1,000-3,000 daily rockets and missiles at Israel come the hour, the regime was also confident that its ground invasion plans for Israel remained viable, with the potential for its proxies and their supporters to mirror Hamas’s invasion on most every front, including from Jordan. As National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has stated, the regime believed that its long-planned “Destruction of Israel” project via a multifront invasion, carried out amid a devastating missile and drone attack, was viable.

What was central to the realization of Iran’s goal, however, was that it strike first and take Israel by surprise.

Watching Iran with a far greater degree of intelligence penetration than the regime had realized, Israel’s military and security planners had in February 2025 received the green light from the political echelon to preempt.

Israel had been preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear program for years, but had not consistently prioritized the potential imperative or allocated the necessary budget, especially after the Obama administration reached its JCPOA agreement with the regime, a flawed attempt to prevent Iran from attaining the bomb, in 2015.

The IDF had........

© The Times of Israel