In the middle of the night on April 13, Iran launched a massive attack on Israel. Israel and Iran have had been fighting an undeclared war since long through proxies, assassinations and strikes outside Israel. With this first attack targeting Israel directly, the hostility has finally spilled into the open.
Iran’s attack on Israel
Iran launched this attack with the help of 170 armed drones, 110 ballistic missiles and 30 cruise missiles fired from various locations in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran said that the ballistic missiles were fired almost an hour after the slower-moving drones, so that they would strike Israel at roughly the same time.
How the attack was foiled
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said that 99% of the incoming barrage was intercepted either outside Israeli airspace or over the country itself. Only one military facility, the Nevatim air force base took some infrastructural damage but remained functional. A seven-year-old girl from a Bedouin Arab community was injured after a drone was intercepted overhead.
Since most of the projectiles came from relatively far away, Israel was able to deploy its F-35 stealth fighters (USA’s latest) to intercept them. This time, Israel very effectively used its three-tiered air defence umbrella in place since the Hamas attack.
- The highest tier is Arrow, used to physically intercept long-range projectiles. It is thought that Arrow dealt with most of the ballistic missiles aimed at Israel including the first intercept outside the atmosphere.
- The second tier, David’s Sling, is for intercepting up to 300 km away.
- Finally, there is the Iron Dome system, which is designed to intercept unguided rockets heading for residential areas.
Earlier in the week, apprehending the attack, the US had sent the head of US Central Command, Gen Erik Kurilla, to Israel to help coordinate defences against the attack. Biden said US forces helped Israel by deploying two aircrafts operating from undisclosed bases in the region, and the Aegis missile defence system aboard two destroyers. In all, they shot down 80 drones and six ballistic missiles. UK RAF Typhoon jets also shot down a number of Iranian attack drones. Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel, deployed its F-16s and France helped to patrol airspace
The Damascus Attack that precipitated it all
On 1 April 2024, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the Iranian consulate annexe building adjacent to the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including a senior Quds Force commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Brigadier Mohammad Reza Zahedi and seven other IRGC officers. We can ignore the formal denials.
Israel’s Damascus attack was not an act of wanton military adventurism. Since 2013, Iran has kept its troops in Syria in response to the Syrian Civil War, as Syria is a crucial ally of Iran. It is well-known that Iran has been involved in training and funding Hezbollah, along with foreign militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, not only in Syria but also in neighbouring Lebanon. Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on its citizens, Israel has been attacking targets in Syria. This includes at least three attacks on airports in Syria. Israel has also managed the assassination of Razi Mousavi, a senior Iranian general, in Damascus in December 2023, and Brigadier Sadegh Omidzadeh, an intelligence officer with the IRGC Quds Force, in January 2024.
Impact on domestic and international public opinion
From a professional military perspective and the relative ease with which the massive attack could be neutralized, it would appear that the real purpose of orchestrating the much-publicized attack was to strengthen the position of the oppressive regime, satisfy domestic public opinion, and boost the morale of its terrorist cronies like Hamas and Hezbollah. The suspicion is strengthened by the fact that Iran’s mission to the UN said that following the launch of the drones toward Israel, Tehran now considered that its retaliation for an attack on its diplomatic compound in Damascus to be ended and the matter could be deemed concluded.
Why is the US playing a scared nanny?
The US also, in view of the limited damage and no loss of life in the attack, sort of warned Israel that the US will not take part in any Israeli retaliatory action against Iran. This is plainly stupid as it is a question of Israel’s self-respect as a race and a beleaguered nation. Israel cannot take the Iranian attack as a sort of ‘punishment’ for its Damascus attack. They will lose face if they don’t retaliate in some way.
The hypocrisy of the US can be understood. Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats and global allies over US support for Israel’s Gaza campaign. The main concern of the US is that it does not want to get drawn into a direct war in the Middle East, which would require great preparation, both military and diplomatic. Hence, it is invoking the pretext of humanitarian concerns in Gaza, as if they had bothered about it in the two Gulf Wars and the 20 year-long campaign in Afghanistan.
An argument that the USA was frustrated by lack of notice from Israel in the Damascus strike is plain bullshit and chicanery. Had they bothered to inform anybody when they had killed the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani four years ago in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car near the Baghdad airport? That was also on foreign soil. How can the American justification for the attack, that is, ‘to protect US personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks…and to end Iran’s strategic escalation of attacks’ be morally and legally superior to similar justification by Israel?
The ‘Axis of Evil’ and the ‘Axis of Terror’
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush had branded Iran and its ‘terrorist allies’ as part of an ‘Axis of Evil’, arming to threaten the peace of the world. The US continues to charge Iran with sponsoring terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, exerting a destabilizing influence in western Afghanistan, and harbouring Al Qaeda fugitives.
In January 2006, following a suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv, the Israeli defence minister first used the word ‘Axis of Terror’. In April 2006, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN used it in the UN and explained it to mean Iran, Syria and the Hamas-run Palestinian government.
In response, Iran formed a political alliance that it called the ‘Axis of Resistance’ comprising Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias, and the Houthi rebels.
Why is Iran a threat to the World and needs to be targetted?
Iran is a serious existential threat to Israel, the last outpost of Western democracy in the Middle East. By extension, it also threatens the entire world. Iran is sponsoring terrorism against Western and Israeli targets around the world and is destabilizing the region.
As Vahid Beheshti, a prominent Iranian opposition leader based in London, and a former political prisoner in Iran says, it’s time to cut off the head of the octopus that is Iran. Let the world not waste time and energy on the octopus’s tentacles. If the head is not destroyed, it will continue to grow more tentacles, even if one is eliminated, in the Middle East and all over the world. If we give up and appease Iran and Qatar, like Chamberlain tried to appease Nazi Germany, we could be dragged into the Third World War.
He adds, “Most Iranians share this dream, some openly, most in secret, including those who work for the regime. There are many among them whose support is fake, a mask worn out of a necessity to survive. In the past, the Iranians have tried several times to overthrow the government themselves but failed due to the murderous brutality of the regime.”
“They have an ideology, patience, determination, orderly plan and large budget. Those who have the impression that the country or its people are poor should understand that it isn’t because the regime has no money. It simply does not share the country’s wealth with the people. The regime invests all the money in developing its power, in weapons, in violence, because that’s the only way it can survive and realize its fanatic ideology.”
In my opinion, Israel can no longer be secure fighting just Iran’s proxies but rather must target Iran itself. Israel must now strike directly within Iran and hit them hard.
The World must act before Iran becomes a nuclear power
If, by any chance, the world fails to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, it would render the strategic equations in the Middle East permanently unsolvable the way Pakistan and North Korea have done it in their respective regions.
With its 170 nuclear weapons, Pakistan has ensured that even if India spends trillions of dollars on acquiring the best of the best conventional weapon systems like fighters, aircraft carriers and submarines, we cannot make Pakistan surrender as we could in 1971, without suffering perhaps unacceptable damage from their nukes. Similarly, even if the USA wipes off North Korea from the face of the earth with massive nuclear strikes, it cannot do so without its ally and glorified protectorate South Korea getting obliterated from the nuclear weapons of North Korea (estimated anywhere from 40 to 116).
So will be the case with Iran. Last year February, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) monitors in Iran had found uranium particles enriched to up to 83.7% purity at Fordow, a site dug into a mountain and the second place where Iran is continuously enriching uranium. Weapons grade uranium is around 90% purity. It happened in two interconnected cascades, or clusters, of centrifuges that the IAEA found Iran had made substantial changes to without notifying it beforehand as it should have. Fordow is a heavily fortified facility that was originally built covertly—all the more reason to be alarmed.
The day they acquire even ten nuclear weapons, it would mean that Israel will be staring in the face of ‘sudden extinction’ on a short notice. Israel has an area of just 22,145 sq km; whereas Iran is 1.648 million sq km. Tel Aviv is just 52 sq km with a population of less than half a million.
Also Read: Why is Israel perpetually at war?
Israel is believed to have 90 nuclear weapons according to the Arms Control Association and some 200 according to former US secretary of state and four-star general Colin Powell. Yes, they can take out Tehran and other important cities of Iran for sure but, even as Iran might survive as a crippled country, Israel will cease to exist as a functioning nation after Iranian nuclear strikes.
Given the fact that destruction of the Jewish state is an avowed objective of Israel’s enemies and also that now it is the single-most important country sponsoring terrorism, the world must do everything it takes to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Whether it is done by another Stuxnet virus, assassinations of their nuclear scientists, bombing their nuclear facilities, fomenting large-scale civil unrest, engineering regime change, strangulating them by harsher economic sanctions, a full-scale ‘shock and awe’ war like the two Gulf Wars against Iraq, or even nuclear strikes, Iran has to be stopped from becoming a nuclear power at any cost.
The world simply cannot afford nuclear weapons in the hands of these religious fanatics. The word cannot afford soft-peddling either. Last February after the IAEA report about 83.7% enrichment, USA, Britain, France and Germany refrained from pushing for a resolution condemning Iran at this board meeting but they said they could act at a future session. This sort of attitude won’t do. Mark my words, if we do not bring down Iran to its knees today for whatever reason, we will be condemned to regret it forever.
