Times publishes column by Israeli wanted by ICC urging Trump to bomb Iran

Middle East Eye

3 hours ago

A former Israeli defence minister with an international warrant out for his arrest has co-written a column with prominent British-American historian Niall Ferguson for The Times of London newspaper urging the US to enter Israel's conflict against Iran.
Ferguson and Yoav Gallant, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Gaza, write in the column - which was published on Friday morning - that only the US air force "has the power to finish off Fordow", the site that holds the core of Iran's remaining nuclear enrichment capability.
"Israel has done most of the job - now Trump can finish it," reads the piece's headline.
The Times is one of Britain's oldest and most prestigious newspapers.
Since Friday, when Israel launched its assault on Iran, Israel has repeatedly targeted the country's military and nuclear facilities, as well as assassinated high-profile security, intelligence and military commanders, along with prominent scientists.
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The attacks, which have also targeted residential areas, have killed more 500 people and wounded at least 1,300, many of them civilians.
In response, Iran has fired barrages of missiles towards Haifa, Tel Aviv and other major Israeli cities, killing dozens.
"We both salute the extraordinary skill with which the Israel Defence Forces and Mossad have executed Israel's war plan," Ferguson and Gallant write.
"Much of Iran's nuclear weapons programme now lies in ruins, and many of the scientists who ran it are dead. But one key site remains, at Fordow."
'Only America can do this'
The column stresses that it is not realistic for Israel to "finish off Fordow".
"Only America can do this. Only President Trump can order it."
Ferguson and Gallant point to the title of Primo Levi's 1982 novel If Not Now, When?, which is "about a group of Jewish resistance fighters who desperately defy the might of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the Second World War".
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On 5 November 2024, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also wanted by the ICC, fired Gallant from his post as defence minister, citing a lack of mutual trust between them.
Gallant was the defence chief at the time of the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel.
He led the military's response, which began as an indiscriminate aerial bombardment campaign that eventually led to a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza.
At the beginning of the war, Gallant described Palestinians as "human animals" and announced the imposition of a complete siege on Gaza, cutting off all electricity, fuel and food to the enclave.
Ferguson is a historian and the author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) and Civilisation: the West and the Rest (2011).
He was a strong supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"A nuclear-armed Iran would pose more than a threat to the Israeli people and their state," he and Gallant say in their column on Friday.
"Its missiles could reach Gulf capitals and Europe."
They conclude that "with a single exertion of its unmatched military strength, the US can shorten the war, prevent wider escalation and end the principal threat to Middle Eastern stability".
The White House said on Thursday that US President Donald Trump would decide within the next two weeks whether the US would get directly involved in the conflict.