Jerusalem
CNN
—
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to bask in the glow of Israel’s military success in Iran. The military’s surprise attack on the country, coordinated with the Mossad spy agency, hit nuclear facilities and eliminated Iranian officials with precision.
In the days that followed, Israel expanded its operation over Iran, declaring air superiority and going after Tehran’s ballistic missile arsenal.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu crowed in a government meeting that Israel has “a great victory in the campaign against an enemy who came to destroy us.” And for the first time in years, he had the popular support of the country behind him.
A survey from the Israel Democracy Institute showed 70% of the country supported the decision to attack Iran, which Israel has long viewed as its greatest existential threat. Among Jewish Israelis, the support was even higher, at 82%, the survey found.
But in the hours after a ceasefire ended the conflict, Israel was forced to turn its attention back to Gaza, a war in which the major strategic successes seen in Iran are far harder to find.
Instead, Gaza has long been a grueling fight against Hamas, which relies on guerrilla tactics to counter Israel’s military superiority.
Netanyahu was set to meet with a small circle of senior Israeli officials on Thursday to discuss the strategy in Gaza amid an internal government dispute about how to proceed – the far right continues to call for intensifying the war, while others say the success in Iran has created a new window of opportunity for a comprehensive end to the Gaza conflict.
Israel appears to have emerged from the 12 days of conflict with Iran as the undisputed military power in the Middle East, able to strike targets with impunity across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and now Iran. Dozens – and at times, hundreds – of Israeli fighter jets carried out missions against Iran, covering hundreds of miles of hostile airspace, to strike at targets ranging from nuclear facilities to ballistic missile launchers to regime symbols. It seemed the only limit on Israel’s operation from the military’s perspective was its own stockpile of weapons.
But if the fighting showed Israel’s military power, it also revealed its limits. The country’s vaunted aerial defense system intercepted the vast majority of Iran’s ballistic missiles – some 90%, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). But the missiles that did get past the Arrow and David’s Sling defense systems, designed to protect against longer-range projectiles than the better-known Iron Dome, unleashed unprecedented damage on some of Israel’s largest cities, including Haifa and Tel Aviv.
In the final hours before the ceasefire went into effect Tuesday, one ballistic missile struck a residential building in Beer Sheva, killing at least four people. The force of the blast tore through surrounding buildings and blasted away concrete walls. An initial IDF investigation found at least three of those killed were inside their safe room.
Not since Iraq’s former President Saddam Hussein fired dozens of Scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf War of 1990 have so many missiles rained down across the country from hundreds of miles away.
Virtually every day and night for nearly two weeks, millions in Israel scrambled to shelters with only a few minutes’ warning. Those without shelters in their homes ran to the nearest public shelters. But the Iranian ballistic missiles quickly proved far more powerful than their Iraqi counterparts three decades ago. Even as the barrages shrank in size after the first few days, a higher percentage of the missiles appeared to penetrate Israel’s defenses, often with devastating consequences, killing a total of 28 people and wounding hundreds more.
Yogev Kudady was in his bomb shelter in Beer Sheva with his wife and four young children when one of the final Iranian salvos before the ceasefire struck about 150 feet away from his home.
“Everything is broken and the roof fell down, and I looked back to the children and my wife and I’m speechless,” Kudady told CNN. “Until now, I’m in shock like I’ve never been in my life. Never, never, never.”
The compensation department in Israel’s Tax Authority estimated it would take more than $1.3 billion dollars to repair the damage caused during just 12 days of conflict. In a meeting Monday of the Knesset’s Finance Committee, the compensation department’s head, Amir Dahan, said the number could climb even higher. Some 25 buildings will need to be demolished, he said.
By contrast, the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent 20 months of war in Gaza have caused approximately $730 million in damage, Dahan said, underscoring the scale of the damage from Iran’s ballistic missiles in such a short timeframe.
For years, Israel grew accustomed to the shield of its Iron Dome short-range air defense system, which intercepted thousands of rockets from Gaza with a sterling record. But the threat of those rockets was largely limited to the communities around Gaza. Iran’s ballistic missile barrages set off red alert sirens across the entire country.
“I’ve been through a lot of wars here and nothing compares to this,” said Diana Blitz, a Beer Sheva resident whose childhood home was damaged in Tuesday’s missile strike. “The ceiling fell down, all the windows shattered in every room. Our front door is a strong metal door and it literally bent it. The lock was broken. Everything was just broken.”
While the conflict with Tehran raged, Gaza – and the fate of the hostages held there by Hamas – virtually disappeared from the news. Instead of counting days of the war in Gaza, which swept past 600 last month, Israel’s main news channels immediately switched to counting the days of fighting with Iran.
But the conflict in the strip continued, even as Israelis’ attention shifted elsewhere, particularly since the massive protests against the war that had packed the streets of Tel Aviv each week were prohibited under emergency rules.
On Tuesday – the same day the ceasefire between Israel and Iran came into effect, hours after it was announced by US President Donald Trump – seven Israeli soldiers were killed in Khan Younis by an improvised explosive device attached to their armored personnel carrier. It marked one of the single deadliest incidents for Israel in recent months.
“We needed someone like Trump, right here, to come forward and say, ‘Returning the hostages, stopping all those things, going back to a normal situation,’” said ultra-Orthodox lawmaker Moshe Gafni on Thursday in a rare show of dissent from within the government, “but it looks like so far we haven’t had that privilege.”
If the IDF’s operations in Iran showed off the military’s ability to strike with precision and intelligence, the ongoing war in Gaza has mired the country in the opposite type of conflict. In Israel, the war has been marked by little progress and growing public anger, while internationally, condemnation has soared over the disproportionate number of civilians killed.
A poll in late May for Israel’s Channel 12 News found that 55% of those surveyed believed Netanyahu was continuing the war in order to stay in power. Other surveys have repeatedly indicated that more than 60% of the country supports a deal to release the hostages even if it means ending the war.
“It is time to show courage and say loud and clear: returning the hostages, ceasing the fighting. That’s the appropriate solution, that’s the only way to complete an Israeli victory,” said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum on Wednesday.
Qatar, which has acted as a mediator during negotiations between Israel and Hamas, said the Iran ceasefire has created “momentum” to restart Gaza talks. Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said the country had been in touch with “all sides” to try to restart talks.
“There are a lot of details that I can’t discuss right now about the deal in place but I can tell you it’s the same parameters that keep going in and out of the talks,” he told CNN. Talks have been stuck on those parameters for months, stymying negotiators who have struggled to find a way to make progress.
Netanyahu now stands on firmer political footing. He survived an attempt to topple his government two weeks ago, and even his critics have given him credit for the successful campaign against Iran. At this critical inflection point, he faces his own decision: whether to take the glowing success of one conflict and use it to end the brutal reality of another.
