At three o’clock on Friday morning, sirens blared across Israel, and my family in Tel Aviv sprang awake. As I shuffled my groggy children to the stairwell of our apartment building, I noticed that a garbage truck outside was carrying on as usual: loading a bin, unloading an empty one, beeping in reverse. Sirens have become so frequent in the past eighteen months that some Israelis have become inured to the threat.
The Lede
“Brother!” someone shouted from a nearby window. “It’s Iran!”
The truck driver reconsidered. He stopped in the middle of the street, got out, and ducked inside our building to wait it out.
Across the Persian Gulf, Israel was carrying out a sophisticated attack against Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon. Warplanes struck the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed Iran’s top military general, the leader of its Revolutionary Guards, the head of its Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News images showed apartment buildings in Tehran with smoke billowing from specific rooms, indicating precisely targeted attacks (though Iran said that eighty civilians were also killed). An unnamed security source told Channel 12 that the Mossad intelligence services had recently established bases inside Iran,
where they kept precision missiles and suicide drones. The news aired grainy black-and-white footage of masked Mossad agents on the ground there, delicately setting down what were reportedly explosive drones, aimed at destroying the country’s air defenses. For twenty years, Israel had threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Seemingly within minutes, it suddenly had. On Israeli television, military reporters warned of “complicated days ahead.” Yonit Levi, the anchorwoman of the leading news network on Channel 12, declared, “We are entering an entirely new situation.”
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