The recent massive Israeli air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, ballistic missile batteries, and military leadership represent a significant escalation beyond the direct military confrontations witnessed last year by both countries.
While last year’s tit-for-tat attacks certainly marked a notable shift from proxy to direct strikes and both sides decided to keep them limited in scope, the new wave of large-scale Israeli attacks demonstrates a deliberate Israeli escalation and determination to keep degrading Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities.
These Israeli attacks, which could last for several days according to the Israelis, are not just merely tactical or retaliatory; they are tantamount to a pre-emptive major strike aimed at causing high strategic costs for Iran and putting Tehran’s military resilience to a real test.
The Iranian targets in what Israel called Operation Rising Lion included the chiefs of staff of the Iranian army, air force and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as well as the commander of the expeditionary Quds Force, according to Israeli press reports.
Iranian media already carried the news that one of the six Israeli military airwaves killed Hossein Salami, the head of the IRGC, Iran’s most high-profile military official. There are unconfirmed reports that the attacks also targeted officials running Iran’s nuclear programme and Ali Shamkhani, a national security adviser to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. This is a strategic shift toward high-value decapitation strikes aimed at disrupting Iran’s command and control capabilities.
The reports about targeting residential areas in Tehran to assassinate the head of the commanders of Al Quds Force, in particular, are aimed at undermining this military wing, which plays a central role in projecting Iranian influence and managing its badly weakened proxy groups across the region.
Aim to degrade
Such operations underscore Israel’s intent to degrade Iran’s operational effectiveness and limit its capacity for coordinated military responses. It’s quite evident now that the incumbent Israeli right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu decided to take such action despite indirect talks between the Trump administration and Iran over a potential deal on Tehran’s nuclear programme and despite reports in the American press, including The Wall Street Journal, that President Donald Trump personally phoned Netanyahu days before the Israeli operation to ask him not to attack Iran.
This demonstrates that Israel wants to take its strategic military mission in the region to another level after the conventional level represented in dealing a severe blow to Iran’s biggest military proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
It’s hellbent on disrupting Iran’s nuclear-related activities and decision-making structures to stop the accelerating uranium enrichment, which has exceeded civilian needs with mounting concerns in Israel and the West that it could be on the path toward weaponisation, despite Tehran’s fatwa or religious edict forbidding nuclear weapons use and repeated assertions that its nuclear programme is only for civilian purposes.
Risk of broader escalation
Now, with the bulk of Iran’s network of allied non-state actors degraded, the primary conflict is likely to remain focused between Israel and Iran directly, altering the traditional proxy dynamics and limiting, but not entirely eliminating, the risk of broader regional escalation.
