Israel's choice of targets lays groundwork for sustained war
Israeli jets struck at Iran's air defences, radars and missile systems to achieve air supremacy over Tehran, Israel has said.
Surgical strikes from advanced bombers 'improved our aerial superiority and our freedom of activity in Iran', according to the Israeli air force.
Satellite images emerging since the first wave of attacks supported some of Israel's account of the targets it hit. They showed key assets on the ground destroyed near major cities and around some Iranian nuclear sites, which were also targeted during the strikes.
Analysis by war monitors in Washington DC showed Israel was targeting a wall of defensive systems placed along Iran's western border.
With this layer of defence dismantled, Israeli fighter jets would have multiple windows through which to cross into Iranian air space and carry out sorties, with less risk of being shot down. It is a level of superiority in the air greater than Russia has been unable to achieve in three years of war in Ukraine.
'We have paved a path to Tehran,' Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday, adding, in a warning to the Iranian regime: 'In the very near future, you will see Israeli planes, the Israeli air force, our pilots, over the skies of Tehran.'
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Again, Iran launched another ineffective air offensive against Israel, which responded with airstrikes that wiped out much of Iran's air defence system, opening the way to Friday's wider attack. Equally consequentially, Hezbollah's sudden weakness meant it was unable to come to the defence of the al-Assad regime in Syria, another crucial Iranian ally, when rebels there launched an offensive. The fall of Assad in December ended decades of close relations between Tehran and Damascus. This further weakened the crumbling axis of resistance, exposed Iranian proxies in Syria and meant Israeli warplanes could reach vulnerable targets in Iran more easily. With Iran-backed militias in Syria and in Iraq convinced that turning rhetorical threats to attack Israel into action was a poor idea, the Houthis in Yemen were left as the only remaining member of the axis of resistance still engaged in hostilities with Israel. They harassed shipping in the Red Sea but the ballistic missiles they lobbed hopefully at Tel Aviv could cause no significant strategic harm. By early spring of this year, the decision of Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, to entrust Iran's security to its proxies looked a supreme miscalculation and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, keen to exploit what might be a transient window of opportunity, began preparing the major offensive he has long hoped to launch. A deadline of April was missed, but not one set inadvertently by President Trump who allowed just 60 days for talks with Tehran to come to a new agreement on Iran's nuclear programme, which Israel claims was close to producing a nuclear weapon. That limit expired last week. Netanyahu told Iranians on Friday that he hoped Israel's continuing military operation in Iran will 'clear the path for you to achieve your freedom'. Even if Israel is not seeking to turn back the clock to years before the 1979 Iranian revolution, when the country was a close ally of Israel and of the US too, the nature of the targets Israeli planners chose may have the effect of at least dismantling the regime that has ruled ever since that seismic event. This is partly a consequence of the central role still played in Iran by a generation of men who began their careers in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah or even earlier. The first casualties on Friday included many senior officers who were among the earliest recruits to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which was founded in 1980 to protect the new rule of the radical clerics and then evolved into the beating ideological activist heart of the revolutionary project. Several were also veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1981 and which many historians regard as the crucible in which the current regime was forged. At least one of the nuclear scientists killed in the first wave of strikes was a veteran of the IRGC too. Ali Shamkhani, a senior aide to Khamenei who was targeted, had been an underground Islamist activist in the 1970s before filling a series of increasingly important roles. Khamenei himself came to power as the successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 but began his activist Islamist career in the late 60s. It is extremely unlikely that, when the dust finally clears after this war, Iran reverts to a pro-Israeli or pro-US stance. But what does appear very probable is that the power of men who first overthrew the shah and then led the revolutionary regime over subsequent decades will be gravely, possibly fatally, weakened.
