With Its Aerial Attack, Iran Could Break Israel’s Isolation and Reframe the Gaza War

Ahnaf Kalam

It’s hard to imagine Iran’s much-anticipated attack on Israel going any worse for the Islamic Republic.

Tehran has been displaying weakness for months. On January 3, Islamic State terrorists killed at least 84 people in two explosions near the grave of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, as they marked the fourth anniversary of his death in a US drone strike in Iraq four years earlier.

The previous month, Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni terrorist group, killed 11 Iranian police officers.

Iran, desperate to show some muscle, launched missiles into Pakistan, saying it was targeting Jaish al-Adl. But nuclear-armed Pakistan wouldn’t back down, hitting back with missiles and fighter jets within Iran — the first bombing attack on Iranian soil since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

Read the full article at the Times of Israel.

Lazar Berman is the Times of Israel‘s diplomatic reporter and a Milstein Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Lazar Berman is the diplomatic correspondent at the Times of Israel, where he also covers Christian Affairs. He holds an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University and taught at Salahuddin University in Iraqi Kurdistan. Berman is a reserve captain in the IDF’s Commando Brigade and served in a Bedouin unit during his active service.
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I recently witnessed something I haven’t seen in a long time. On Friday, August 16, 2024, a group of pro-Hamas activists packed up their signs and went home in the face of spirited and non-violent opposition from a coalition of pro-American Iranians and American Jews. The last time I saw anything like that happen was in 2006 or 2007, when I led a crowd of Israel supporters in chants in order to silence a heckler standing on the sidewalk near the town common in Amherst, Massachusetts. The ridicule was enough to prompt him and his fellow anti-Israel activists to walk away, as we cheered their departure. It was glorious.