On 5 June 1967, Israel destroyed three Arab air forces with a devastating pre-emptive strike at the start of what became the Six-Day War. Overnight, Israel has undertaken what appears to be a similarly devastating pre-emptive attack, this time on Iranian nuclear, military and terror facilities.
Israel has undertaken what appears to be a devastating pre-emptive attack
But there is a key difference between the two strikes. In 1967, Israel was fighting to defend only itself. It had no allies in the region and little concern with what happened outside its own borders. Today, Israel is not only acting as a proxy for the West itself; it is acting against a tyrannical, terrorist regime. Iran has held its own people – as well as Lebanon and Syria – captive; it has spread poison across the rest of the region, funded and directed Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis to bring war and destruction across the region – not least in Gaza, where Iran’s sponsorship of Hamas has led to the current devastation – and led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the region over the decades since the regime took power in Iran. The UK has also been a target of its terror – spying on prominent British Jews and Iranian dissidents for assassination.
Until last night it stood on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, which would have made the past decades of Iranian terror seem paltry. There has been near-unanimous agreement that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon; the only issue was how to stop it. Plainly, the original Barack Obama deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not work, and Iran has been stepping up its preparations.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared yesterday for the first time that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Tehran was refusing to answer questions on uranium particles found in undeclared sites in the country and the stockpiling of uranium enriched to nearly weapons grade. Iran responded by revealing it has already built, and is operating, a previously secret new uranium enrichment centre.
Israel’s overnight strikes, in which over 200 planes attacked over 100 sites, were necessary and targeted. Iranian air defences have been crippled since October when Israel destroyed the air defence batteries protecting Iran’s long-range ballistic missiles – crucially leaving its nuclear facilities vulnerable to future attacks.
Reports suggest that last night Israel took out targets in Qeytarieh, Niavaran, Chitgar, Mehrabad, Narmaq, Saadat Abad, Andarzgoo, Sattarkhan, Shahrak-e Mahallati, Shahrak-e Chamran, Kamraniyeh, Farahzadi, Ozgol, Marzdaran and the Armed Forces HQ as well as individuals such as Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ali Shamkhani, a key adviser to President Khamenei. There were multiple strikes on the Arak heavy water reactor, the Parchin military complex, the Khondab reactor and the underground Natanz nuclear site, the so-called ‘heart’ of its weapons programme.
Obviously what happens next is key. Iran will retaliate, but its capacity for a devastating response has almost certainly been destroyed. It is likely, too, that the US would intervene should the Iranian response necessitate it. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sought to make clear that Israel was acting on its own – which to the extent that only Israeli forces were involved is true. But the US knew what was coming – and if it was not prepared to see Iran attacked it would have stopped it.
The people of Iran have been enslaved by the regime for decades, and the rest of the region has been destabilised by it. Iran has been responsible for terror and chaos for decades, and now for the first time the potential exists to bring stability to the region. Those who campaign for a Palestinian state should be relieved: it is a basic fact of the Middle East that there can never be a safe, stable Palestinian state while the Islamic Republic of Iran is able to export its terror. History may well record that 13 June 2025 was the beginning of a new era for the Middle East.
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