Reuters:
Iran once ridiculed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the boy who cried wolf for his constant public warnings about Tehran's nuclear programme, and his repeated threats to shut it down, one way or another.
"You can only fool some of the people so many times," Iran's then-foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said in 2018 after Netanyahu had once again accused Iran of planning to build nuclear weapons.
On Friday, after two decades of continually raising the alarm and urging other world leaders to act, Netanyahu finally decided to go it alone, authorising an Israeli air assault aimed, Israel says, at preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.
In an address to the nation, Netanyahu, as he has so often before, evoked the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in World War Two to explain his decision.
"Nearly a century ago, facing the Nazis, a generation of leaders failed to act in time," Netanyahu said, adding that a policy of appeasing Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had led to the deaths of 6 million Jews, "a third of my people".
"After that war, the Jewish people and the Jewish state vowed never again. Well, never again is now today. Israel has shown that we have learned the lessons of history."
Iran says its nuclear energy programme is only for peaceful purposes, although the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday declared the country in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in almost 20 years.
Netanyahu, a former member of an elite special forces unit responsible for some of Israel’s most daring hostage rescues, has dominated its politics for decades, becoming the longest-serving prime minister when he won an unprecedented sixth term in 2022.
Throughout his years in office, he rarely missed an opportunity to lecture foreign leaders about the dangers posed by Iran, displaying cartoons of an atomic bomb at the United Nations, while always hinting he was ready to strike.
In past premierships, military analysts said his room for manoeuvre with Iran was limited by fears an attack would trigger instant retaliation from Tehran's regional proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, that would be hard to contain.
But the past two years have upended the Middle East, with Israel hammering Hamas after it launched a massive surprise attack of its own against Israel in October 2023, and then dismantling much of Hezbollah in just a few days in 2024.
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Israel has also sparred openly with Tehran since 2024, firing rocket salvos deep into Iran last year that gave Netanyahu confidence in the power of his military reach.
Israeli military sources said the strikes disabled four of Iran's Russian-made air-defence systems, including one positioned near Natanz, a key Iranian nuclear site that was targeted, according to Iranian television.
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