Only one thing matters now for Israel

Telegraph

17 hours ago

The storm was predicted for so long that many believed it would never break.
Now, at last, Israel has launched an all-out attack on Iran – designed, above all, to destroy the Islamic Republic's ability to build a nuclear weapon.
So do not be distracted by the killing of generals or the bombing of missile factories.
In normal times, Israel decapitating Iran's entire high command in one night, which appears to have happened, would be an astonishing development. But these are not normal times.
Now all that matters is how much damage Israel can inflict on three vital plants at the core of Iran's nuclear industry – Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan.
The first two are where Iran enriches uranium, potentially to weapons grade. In Isfahan, raw uranium is converted into gas prior to being fed into centrifuges for enrichment.
If Israel can wreck all three of these installations, it will tear out the 'heart of Iran's nuclear programme', to use Benjamin Netanyahu's phrase, and block its enemy's path to the ultimate weapon.
So far, Israel appears to have struck Natanz but not Isfahan or Fordow.
The latter is by far the toughest target – an enrichment facility dug into a mountain, beneath hundreds of feet of rock and earth, where centrifuges are already producing uranium at 60 per cent purity, barely a hair's breadth from weapons grade.
Conventional wisdom holds that only the heaviest bunker-busting bombs of the US Air Force could destroy Fordow, while Israel's weapons would only cause superficial damage.
The great risk for Mr Netanyahu is that when the smoke clears and Operation Rising Lion, the codename of this campaign, is over, Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan will be reparable in a matter of months or even weeks.
If so, he will have achieved nothing but a short delay in Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. And you can be sure that Iran's leaders – if they are still in power when this ends – will immediately dash for a bomb.
But Israel has been preparing for this operation for 20 years, and it does not lack military ingenuity.
Few believed that Mossad and the Israeli air force could cripple Hezbollah by wiping out the Lebanese terror group's entire leadership and thousands of rank and file personnel in the space of a few weeks – yet exactly that happened last year.
It never pays to underestimate Israel's capabilities or assume that its air force, which specialises in destroying underground targets, could only knock dents in Fordow.
The enrichment halls of the much larger facility at Natanz are also found in subterranean bunkers, but at least they do not sit beneath a mountain. Meanwhile, the uranium conversion facility outside Isfahan is partially below ground level, though not as deeply buried as Fordow.
Whether Israel can utterly destroy – or merely damage – all three of these plants will determine whether Mr Netanyahu achieves anything more than briefly delaying Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Do not underestimate the stakes of his monumental gamble. He is doing something that no previous Israeli prime minister, including himself at earlier stages of his career, would have seriously considered.
He is launching an all-out strike on Iran without American backing and against the open opposition of Israel's new friends in the Gulf and its old ones in Europe.
The cautious Mr Netanyahu of earlier years – a master of delivering incendiary rhetoric and of pulling back from the brink – would never have dared take such a colossal risk.
The new, bolder Mr Netanyahu of today is clearly contemptuous of his allies, even of the US under Donald Trump.
He is supremely confident of Israel's military prowess, and believes the destruction of Hezbollah and of much of Iran's missile arsenal last year gravely weakened his enemy's ability to retaliate.
Now he is determined to go for broke, as if acting on the verse of the first Duke of Montrose: 'Like Alexander I will reign, and I will reign alone. My thoughts shall evermore disdain a rival on my throne. He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small, that puts it not unto the touch, to win or lose it all.'