The 12-day war that shook the world

Telegraph

6 hours ago

Benjamin Netanyahu knew full well he was about to embark on a legacy-defining operation.
He had anticipated this moment for more than three decades, ever since his days as a Knesset backbencher in 1992 – the first time he gave warning that Iran was just years away from building a nuclear bomb.
Over 17 years in office, Israel's longest-serving prime minister had repeatedly come close to ordering military action against Iran. But each time, he pulled back, under pressure from the United States, his generals, or perhaps even his own nerves.
This time would be different.
Military campaigns over the previous 18 months had severely degraded Tehran's regional proxies – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Even Mr Netanyahu's most cautious generals agreed: there would never be a better moment to strike.
Only one major obstacle remained – the White House. Donald Trump's re-election had sparked jubilation among Mr Netanyahu's supporters, who believed there was no greater friend of Israel. Yet Mr Trump was proving unexpectedly obdurate.
In April, Mr Netanyahu presented the president with a detailed plan for military action. Mr Trump vetoed it.
He wanted to give diplomacy another chance, and dispatched Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy and golfing buddy, to talk to the Iranians. Israeli officials held their counsel in public. In private, they were aghast.
Rumours of a rift began to swirl. Israel no longer appeared central to Washington's Middle East strategy as Mr Trump toured the Gulf but skipped Jerusalem.
Still, Mr Netanyahu kept working on the president, reminding him how Iran had plotted to assassinate him, building the case for war.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump's patience was wearing thin with Iran, which appeared to be stalling for time.
By late May, US intelligence agencies concluded that Mr Netanyahu had decided to seize the initiative. In a classified assessment shared with the White House, they warned that Israel was planning to strike Iran's nuclear programme imminently – with or without US support.
President Trump frantically called Mr Netanyahu to dissuade him, according to the New York Times. But this time, it was the once risk-averse Israeli leader who would not be moved.
As Mr Trump deliberated with his top military advisors, Mr Netanyahu gave the order. On Monday June 9, he told his military chiefs to proceed.
The following day, he phoned Mr Trump. The president did not endorse the operation – but, unlike in April, he said he would no longer stand in Israel's way.
The US began evacuating its embassies in the Gulf. Britain warned commercial shipping to exercise caution. Pentagon pizza orders soared.
Launch day
Late that night, nearly 200 aircraft – mostly F-35 stealth fighters and F-16s – took off from bases in southern Israel, flying through Jordanian and Syrian airspace. Just after midnight on Friday June 13, they struck more than 100 targets inside Iran.
'Operation Rising Lion', one of the most anticipated campaigns in the history of modern warfare, was underway.
Israeli jets hit Iranian missile factories, air defence systems, military bases, and the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, 135 miles south-east of Tehran.
But this was more than just an air campaign. A breathtaking covert intelligence operation was unfolding in tandem.
Months earlier, Mossad agents had infiltrated deep into Iran, establishing a concealed drone base near Tehran. For weeks, operatives had smuggled in explosives and commercial quadcopter drones hidden in false-bottomed suitcases and civilian vehicles.
As Israeli aircraft approached Iranian airspace, the teams launched their drones, targeting missile launchers and air defence batteries – an operation echoing Ukraine's recent 'Spider's Web' attack on Russia's strategic bomber fleet.
The combined assault devastated both Iran's ability to defend itself and to strike back.
Simultaneously, a mass-assassination campaign involving drones, airstrikes and sabotage, was underway, aiming to decapitate Iran's nuclear and military leadership.
Within hours, four of Iran's most senior generals were dead, including Hossein Salami, commander of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohammed Bagheri, the armed forces chief. So, too, were many top nuclear scientists.
Believing Israel would delay its strike until after another round of talks in Oman, they had remained in their homes, rather than retreating to designated underground bunkers. Most were killed in their beds – victims of a separate covert mission reportedly codenamed 'Operation Narnia'.
Within days, as many as 20 senior military officers and 14 nuclear scientists were confirmed dead.
Those who survived received chilling telephone calls from Persian-speaking Mossad agents.
'I can advise you now, you have 12 hours to escape with your wife and child. Otherwise you're on the list right now,' one spy told a senior general in a recording obtained by the Washington Post.
'We're closer to you than your own neck vein. Put this in your head. May God protect you.'
Back in Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu was jubilant.
'We are at a decisive moment in Israel's history,' he said in a national address. 'This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.'
Iran strikes back
Over the next few days, Israel hit further nuclear sites. Explosions rocked Tehran, a city of ten million people, killing more than 600 civilians, according to official figures.
One missile struck state television, shattering windows as the on-air anchor denounced Israeli aggression. She fled mid-broadcast.
As cars exploded mysteriously and attacks on energy infrastructure plunged parts of the capital into darkness, residents began to flee, choking motorways in hours-long traffic jams. With fuel rationed, many were stranded. Suitcase-clutching families stood on the roadside, pleading for taxis.
Meanwhile, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was in hiding, issuing defiant recorded statements from an undisclosed location. Mr Netanyahu had proposed assassinating him. Mr Trump vetoed the plan to kill him – but was otherwise deeply impressed by the scale and success of Israel's offensive.
He began to consider whether the US should help finish the job by targeting Fordow, Iran's most fortified uranium-enrichment facility, buried deep inside a mountain.
Iran, meanwhile, was fighting back – but in a more limited fashion than many had feared.
For years, military analysts had warned that any attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would trigger region-wide retaliation: attacks on Israel for sure, but also on US bases in the Middle East, energy infrastructure and cities in the Gulf, even shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
But Tehran, wary of bringing the US directly into the conflict, concentrated its fire on Israel. Ballistic missiles rained down on cities including Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Israel's multi-tiered air defences intercepted approximately 85 per cent of Iran's missiles. Some were always expected to get through, but the interception rate fell short of best-case projections, perhaps reflecting Iranian advances in countermeasures –ranging from more manoeuvrable re-entry vehicles and decoy warheads, to electronic jamming designed to confuse radar and disrupt missile tracking systems.
The warheads that did penetrate – including one that struck a tower block near the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv – landed with such force, and caused such extensive damage, that they sparked widespread consternation. Many Israelis had believed their air defences were so sophisticated they would fend off everything Iran had to throw at them.
The attacks killed 28 people, injured more than 1,300, levelled apartment blocks, knocked out an oil refinery, and damaged a major hospital in the southern city of Beersheba. Israelis rushed to bomb shelters every few hours.
Yet the damage fell far short of earlier projections. In 2011, Israeli generals estimated that war with Iran could kill more than 10,000 Israeli civilians. That toll never materialised.
With Hezbollah unwilling to join the fight and Hamas degraded, Iran was left to rely on its 2,000-3,000 stockpile of ballistic missiles. Iran reportedly planned to launch 1,000 on the first night of retaliation, hoping to overwhelm Israel's defences. But so many of its launchers had been destroyed that fewer than 200 were fired. In subsequent nights, barrages fell to around 30 a night.
The US joins the war
Back in Washington, Mr Trump faced a dilemma. Just weeks earlier, in Riyadh, he had condemned US military entanglements in the region. He would never intervene in a Middle Eastern war, he vowed, and pledged to work towards a diplomatic solution with Iran.
He even played his Saudi hosts a video of Ali Shamkhani, Khamenei's top nuclear advisor, proposing a new deal – evidence, he claimed, of Iran's sincerity.
Yet Mr Shamkhani was now fighting for his life in a Tehran hospital after Israel had tried to kill him, and president Trump's diplomatic outreach lay in ruins.
The case for US intervention was also growing. Israel had performed better on the battlefield than even the most optimistic assessments. Yet only America's 30,000 lb, bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator had a real chance of destroying Fordow.
At the G7 summit in Canada last week, Western leaders believed Mr Trump remained committed to diplomacy. But on Monday June 16, he abruptly left the summit and began issuing stark ultimatums, demanding the regime's 'unconditional surrender' and warning Khamenei that the US knew where he was hiding.
By then, the decision had already been made.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Mr Trump gave the final go-ahead. Operation Midnight Hammer was underway.
Concerned that the president's increasingly bellicose public pronouncements might alert Iran to an impending strike, US military strategists devised a ruse to try to throw Iran off the scent.
Two groups of B-2 stealth bombers departed simultaneously from the Whiteman Airbase in Missouri. One headed west over the Pacific with its transponders switched – allowing it to be tracked by commercial satellite services. It quickly garnered international attention. But it was a decoy.
The real strike force, a formation of seven B-2s, flew unnoticed across the Atlantic, their transponders off. Escorted by a fleet of fourth-and-fifth fighter jets, they crossed into Iranian airspace undetected.
Moments later, they dropped 12 bunker-busters on Fordow and another two on Natanz. A converted Ohio-class submarine in the Arabian Sea fired 30 Tomahawk missiles at Natanz and a nuclear complex near the ancient city of Isfahan.
Mr Trump quickly declared victory: Iran's nuclear programme had been ' completely and utterly obliterated '.
Satellite images of Fordow soon emerged, showing precise strike points at tunnel entrances and ventilation shafts – the site's most vulnerable spots struck by the bombs, whose reinforced steel alloy casings allowed them to burrow into the rock before detonating more than 100 feet below the surface.
Each B-2 dropped two bombs in succession on the same coordinates, a tactic designed to maximise damage and increase the likelihood of reaching Fordow's deeply buried centrifuge halls.
But while the imagery confirmed where the bombs had landed, it revealed little about the extent of the internal damage. Earlier satellite photos showing convoys of trucks leaving the site in the days before the attacks suggest that Iran may have removed stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and other sensitive equipment in anticipation.
Iran retaliates and path to peace
After the strikes, the region held its breath. Would Iran escalate or was it too damaged to continue.
For 36 hours there was silence. Then, on Monday evening, Western embassies in Qatar issued urgent warnings to their citizens to 'shelter in place'. The Gulf kingdom closed its airspace.
Iran's retaliation was on its way in the form of 14 missiles – one for each bunker-buster dropped – aimed at Al Udeid, the largest US airbase in the Middle East.
But the airbase had been evacuated. Iran had quietly passed warnings through intermediaries, giving the US time to pull personnel and Qatar to activate its air defences. All 14 missiles were intercepted.
Iran's retaliation, a show purely for domestic consumption, was over. Iran's promises to 'shock and awe' its enemies once again fell short.
Tehran's message was received and understood in the White House. Mr Trump wanted out, too, anxious to avoid entanglement in the kind of 'forever war' he had once campaigned against.
He announced a 'complete and total' ceasefire, congratulating both sides for their 'stamina, courage and intelligence' to end what he dubbed 'the 12-day war'.
Each side would remain 'peaceful' and 'respectful', he insisted, before boarding Air Force One bound for a Nato summit at The Hague.
Yet the ceasefire quickly came under strain. Hours later, Israel struck an Iranian radar after accusing Tehran of firing three missiles in breach of the truce.
There are reasons for both sides to stop fighting. Iran's military is reeling, its leadership tottering. It may well prefer to live to fight another day.
Israel, having reportedly struck most of the targets on its initial list, may well have been about to declare victory anyway. And Mr Netanyahu may prefer not to defy president Trump.
The ceasefire may therefore hold. Whether a long-term peace proves durable depends on a single question: how badly has Iran's nuclear programme been hurt? It is a question no-one can yet answer.
Humiliated and weakened, Iran may decide it needs a nuclear bomb more than ever. If it still has the capacity, it may now race to build one.
The first phase of Israel's confrontation with Iran may be over. But greater trouble could lie ahead.