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Israel attacked a strategic city with conscientiously measured force, but argued that it could strike merely half of Iran’s nuclear program.
By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt
Report from Washington
For more than a decade, Israel has continuously repeated bombing and missile campaigns that damaged Iran’s nuclear production capability, much of which lies around the city of Isfahan and the Natanz nuclear enrichment complex, 120 kilometers to the north.
That’s not what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet decided to do at dawn on Friday, and in interviews, analysts and nuclear experts said the move was revealing.
Hence the silence that followed. Israel has said next to nothing about the limited attack, which appears to have caused little damage to Iran. The officials noted that Iran’s resolution to downplay the explosions in Isfahan (and advice from Iranian officials that Israel possibly would not have been guilty of them) is a transparent effort through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to prevent further escalation.
At the White House, officials have called on the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies to remain silent about the operation, hoping to curb Iran’s efforts to ease tensions in the region.
But in interviews, officials were quick to point out that they were involved in that relations between Israel and Iran were now in a very different scenario than they were just a week ago. The taboo prohibiting direct movement into the territory of others had now been lifted. In some other circular (a clash over Iran’s nuclear advances, or some other Israeli attack on Iranian military officers), the two sides might feel freer to free themselves directly opposed to each other.
Netanyahu under mixed pressures, with President Biden urging him to “achieve victory” after a largely futile airlift introduced through Iran last week, while hardliners in Israel suggested he retaliate harshly to repair deterrence after the attack. It is the first direct effort to attack Israel from Iranian territory in the forty-five years since the Iranian Revolution.
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