An editorial in the Jerusalem Post has summed up what Israel achieved in its 12-day war against the Islamic Republic. It’s quite a record, about which more can be found here: “Iran is not finished but Israel has bought itself crucial time – editorial,” Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2025:
After 627 exhausting days in Gaza, the “total victory” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a traumatized Israeli nation may have arrived from a different direction: Iran.
Consider the scale of the threat. As Yonah Jeremy Bob observed, Iran amassed a staggering arsenal of 2,000 to 3,000 ballistic missiles, many of which were capable of striking deep into Israeli territory and inflicting catastrophic damage on civilian centers.
These missiles were deliberately dispersed across Iran’s vast terrain, making any preemptive strike fraught with the risk of a devastating second wave. This was a classic deterrent posture.
And yet, in just 12 days, Israel shattered that deterrent.
Operation Rising Lion represents one of the most audacious and strategically coherent military campaigns in Israeli history. Through a fusion of precision airstrikes, Mossad-led sabotage, and targeted assassinations – coordinated closely with the US and its President, Donald Trump – Israel delivered a sweeping, near-total degradation of Tehran’s nuclear and military infrastructure.
The regional and geopolitical consequences are nothing short of seismic.
Launched on June 13, the campaign struck key nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. The US joined the one-two punch soon after with bunker-busting munitions to finish the job. Satellite imagery and intelligence reports confirm widespread destruction: Critical power systems were disrupted, centrifuges were destroyed, and underground facilities at Fordow sustained what the IAEA called “very significant damage.” While the full extent of the damage remains classified, experts estimate that Iran’s enrichment timeline has been pushed back by months, if not years.
A silent but equally devastating campaign eliminating Iran’s nuclear scientists
Alongside these strikes came a silent but equally devastating campaign: The elimination of at least 14 key Iranian nuclear scientists. The loss of this intellectual core not only hampers immediate technical capability but also instills psychological fear, deterring others from taking their place. This was warfare not just of steel and flame, but of memory and morale.
How many young Iranian scientists have now chosen, prudently, not to devote themselves to nuclear studies but to teach high school physics instead? Who wants, after all, to make himself into a target for Israeli bombs and airstrikes?
Even if Iran’s nuclear program has not been obliterated, but instead has been set back by a few months, as some suggest, in those few months a lot can happen. The Mossad agents still inside Iran in such impressive profusion can work to locate the 900 pounds of enriched uranium that has gone missing. Israeli commandos are prepared to swoop down on whatever hidden sites they discover and make off with that enriched uranium the same way that, in 2018, they made off with Iran’s entire nuclear archive.
After October 7, the IDF, having been made aware of how ill-prepared it had been for such at attack, appointed new generals, and began a ferocious campaign, of airstrikes, drones, and bombs, targeting every part of Hamas’ military. It killed all of the Hamas’ leaders and senior commanders. Among them was Hamas’ political head, Ismail Haniyeh, while he slept in a guest house in Tehran, and Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attack. Dozens of senior Hamas commanders have been killed. Hamas has lost 22,000 men, half of its antebellum operatives, and has been trying frantically to recruit young men, without any combat experience nor any places to safely train in combat skills.
Iran has suffered the loss of thousands of ballistic missiles, great damage to six of its airbases, the destruction of its entire fleet of F-4s, F-14s, and AH-1s, “extreme damage” to its three nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, the assassination of 14 of its most senior nuclear scientists- and of 20 generals in both the Iranian army and the IRGC. At any time it wants, Israel can send more fighter jets and bombers into the skies over Iran, for that country is now defenseless to attacks from the skies.
Will Iran try to rebuild its nuclear program? Probably, unless there is regime change in Tehran. But it will do so under scrutiny, constraint, and constant risk. And in that interval, there lies an opening for Israel, the US, and the world to reshape the arc of this long-burning conflict.
In time, the world — or that part of it that is not hopelessly mired in anti-Israel animus — will recognize the significance of what Israel has accomplished during its 12 days of war with Iran, and retrospectively, many will breathe a sigh of relief at what, because of the IDF, did not, and will not, happen.
Tim gallagher says
Fantastic work by Israel’s armed forces. I hope that that horrendous regime unravels completely soon and Iran comes up with a reasonably sane type of government instead of the scum who run the country now.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Too bad that the islamic regime has mustered the forces needed to go after their own people agian
Tim gallagher says
You are usually more knowledgeable than I am, infidel. The stinking, totally inhumane regime probably will survive. I am just hoping that somehow it is overthrown. Then again, in that country, maybe they would come up something equally bad, though it is hard to imagine anything as bad as that mob in charge there now.
Taffy says
When the enemy is on the run like this, the strategy is to keep pounding them until surrender and not to cease fire, which lets them rearm and regroup.