Israel could launch a ‘symbolic’ attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, says Ehud Barak | Israel

Israel is likely to launch a large-scale airstrike against Iran’s oil industry and possibly a symbolic attack on a military target linked to its nuclear program, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak predicted.

Barak said there was no doubt that the Israeli military would respond to Iran’s attack on Tuesday with over 180 ballistic missiles, most of which were intercepted but some of which landed in and around densely populated areas and Israeli military bases.

“Israel has a compelling need, even an imperative, to respond. I think that no sovereign nation on earth could not respond,” Barak said in an interview.

The former prime minister, who also served as defense minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff, said the model for Israel’s response was Sunday’s retaliatory airstrikes against Houthi-controlled oil facilities, power plants and docks in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, a day after Houthi rockets fired at Israel’s international airport outside Tel Aviv.

“I think we could see something like that. “It could be a massive attack that could be repeated more than once,” he told the Guardian. Joe Biden said Thursday there had been discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s oil sector, but he did not provide details or make clear whether the U.S. would support such an attack.

Barak, now 82, said there had also been suggestions in Israel to use this opportunity in retaliation for the Iranian attack and to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, but he argued that this would not significantly set back the Iranian program.

When Barak was defense minister under Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu from 2007 to 2013, he was one of Israel’s most vocal supporters of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and tried – failed – to persuade Presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama to provide US military support could contribute to the campaign.

On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama in voicing his opposition to any Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. And Barak himself now recognizes that Iran’s nuclear program is too advanced to be significantly reduced by bombing attacks.

“There are some commentators and even some people within the defense establishment who have raised the question: Why the hell don’t you go to the nuclear weapons program?” Barak said. “A little over a decade ago, I was probably the most combative person in the Israeli leadership, arguing that it was worth serious consideration because there was actually a possibility of delaying it for several years.

“That is not the case at the moment because Iran is de facto an emerging country,” he argued. “They don’t have a weapon yet – it may take them a year to have one and even half a decade to have a small arsenal. Practically speaking, it’s not that easy to significantly delay it.”

Under a 2015 multilateral nuclear deal, Tehran accepted tough limits on its uranium enrichment and other elements of its program in return for sanctions relief. However, this agreement has increasingly fallen apart since the US withdrew under Donald Trump in 2018.

Iran now has a stockpile of enriched uranium 30 times higher than the agreed 2015 limit, and it is enriching uranium to up to 60% purity, which is very close to 90% in terms of the additional processing required % weapons-grade fissile material. Under the 2015 deal, Iran’s “breakout period” – the amount of time Iran would need to produce a nuclear bomb – was at least a year. It’s been a few weeks now.

Barak believes there is pressure within the Netanyahu government to make at least a symbolic strike against the Iranian program, even if the former prime minister sees such a gesture as futile.

“They may cause some damage, but even that might be seen by some planners as worth the risk because the alternative is to sit idly by and do nothing,” Barak said. “So there will probably even be an attempt to hit certain nuclear targets.”

While Barak is convinced that a significant military response by Israel to the Iranian military attack on Tuesday evening is now inevitable and justified, he argues that the slide into regional war could have been averted much earlier if Netanyahu had agreed to a US-sponsored plan Arab mobilization would have been open to support for a post-war Palestinian government in Gaza to replace Hamas. Instead, the incumbent Israeli prime minister rejected any political “overnight solution” that recognized Palestinian sovereignty.

“I think a strong reaction is inevitable. “That doesn’t mean it was written in heaven a year ago that it will happen,” Barak said. “There were probably several ways to contain this conflict before it became something like a full-scale conflict in the Middle East. For reasons that no strategic thought can explain, Netanyahu rejected any kind of discussion about what we call “the day after.”

“I don’t blame Netanyahu for what happened. “This is basically the fault of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iran behind it,” Barak said. “Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to take action according to a certain innate logic that understands the situation, the opportunities and the constraints. There is an old Roman saying: “If you don’t know which port you want to reach, no wind will take you there.”