This Is The Beginning For Israel….. US helps Israel shoot down Iranian missiles
In the wee hours of Friday morning, Israel launched not merely a string of attacks on Iran, as had been the case with recent incursions, but the start of an all-out war, whose goal seems to be the destruction of not just the country’s nuclear facilities but also its military command and, possibly, the Islamic regime itself. The question now is what happens next. Iran has pledged to inflict “severe punishment” against Israel, but its first retaliatory strike, involving 100 drones, did little if any damage. Will Iran soon launch hundreds of ballistic missiles, as it has in the past? Will this trigger a wider war in the region? Will the U.S. get pulled into the fight, despite President Donald Trump’s deep reluctance to get directly involved in a war? And how will Israel’s campaign—by far the largest and most ambitious it has ever mounted against Iran—reshape the dynamics of the entire Middle East?
US helps Israel shoot down Iranian missiles amid growing conflict
Clearly the attack, which began in the early hours Friday, had been in the works for months. It involved more than 200 fighter planes dropping ordnance on 100 targets, wiping out command and control centers, killing several Iranian military commanders as well as top nuclear scientists, and damaging the vital uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Soon after the air raids began, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that this was only the first phase of attacks that could go on for days or weeks, for as long as it takes to destroy Iran’s ability to threaten Israel’s survival. He called the campaign Operation Rising Lion—a symbol of victory and divine protection in Hebrew mythology. Later in the day Friday, Israel’s attacks on Iran had reportedly resumed.
President Trump had urged Netanyahu not to launch this attack as long as his chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, was engaged in talks to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program through diplomacy. Witkoff and his Iranian counterparts were scheduled to hold their sixth round of talks in Oman this Sunday. Just hours before the attack began, Trump still publicly held out the possibility that the talks would succeed—though he also allowed that the prospects seemed dimmer than he’d thought a couple of weeks earlier. On Wednesday, he ordered the evacuation of nonessential U.S. personnel from Iraq as well as American military families from bases throughout the Middle East. He did this in anticipation of a possible Iranian attack, which would presumably be launched in retaliation to an Israeli attack on Iran. Some took Trump’s order as a bluff—part of a ploy to frighten Iran into accepting stiff demands, which it had previously rejected, in the talks. It turned out not to be a bluff. More than that, Israel launched the attack two days before the talks were set to resume. It is not yet known whether Israel took this step without Trump’s consent—which would have been all but unprecedented in the history of U.S.–Israel relations. Soon after the attack, Marco Rubio, who holds the dual hats of secretary of state and national security adviser, issued a statement calling the attack “unilateral,” claiming that the U.S. had no involvement in it, and urging Iran not to attack American targets as part of its very likely retaliation—as firm a distancing from Israel’s actions as one could imagine.