Iran has been Israel’s sworn enemy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and Israel has been wary of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons at least for just as long, if not longer. But before June 13, 2025, when Israel rained missiles on Iran’s key nuclear facilities, military installations, and energy infrastructure, Israel had not attacked Iran even though it had been dealing substantial blows to Iran’s nuclear ambitions through cyber attacks, sabotage, and targeted assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists. The attack came at a time when Iran and the United States were engaged in talks to rein in Iran’s nuclear goals in exchange for easing economic sanctions on Iran.
It’s hardly a secret that Israel wanted to scuttle any possibility of a nuclear deal between Iran and the US, for in Israel’s view, the restrictions under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) were insufficient to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and the sunset clauses in the deal that contemplated lifting of certain restriction after a set period of time allowed Iran to become at least an internationally recognized nuclear threshold state, if not a full fledged nuclear power. The deal, in due course, could make Iran even more of an existential threat to Israel, as a nuclear-capable Iran with its stated goal of annihilating Israel could only be harder to defend against.
The deal that Trump was trying to make with Iran since April 12, 2025, when the talks with Iran began, could only be slightly better than the previous one because Iran was unlikely to give up its right to explore the nuclear option completely and could only go so far as to agree to not enriching nuclear fuel to weapon-grade level and periodical inspections of its declared nuclear facilites by an international body.
This means that the things were nearly as they were back when Obama got Iran to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015 with P5+1 Group (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and Germany) and the European Union (EU). The deal was dealt a death blow when President Trump unilaterally withdrew from it during his first term and brought back the sanctions against Iran. The remaining signatories tried to keep the deal alive, but to no avail because Iran started rolling back on its commitments under the deal in response to the sanctions brought back and broadened by Trump.
So why did Israel choose to attack Iran now when Trump was trying to bring Iran around to a new nuclear deal, which could possibly be as good as the old one, if not — maybe — a little better? Because this was tactically the best time for Israel to attack Iran, the latter being the weakest it had ever been against Israel.
Iran’s weakened economy
After unilateral withdrawal of the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, Trump broadened economic sanctions against Iran, resulting in massive recession and contraction of Iran’s economy with its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) nearly halved with oil exports sinking from a peak of 2.7 million barrels per day in June 2018 to below 0.4 million barrels per day by 2020, which severely impacted Iran’s foreign exchange earnings, and that resulted in currency depreciation and inflation. Iranian banks stood disconnected from the global financial system, including SWIFT, which made international transactions extremely difficult, resulting in foreign companies turning wary of investing in Iran.
Economic sanctions were so broad that they affected every major sector of the Iranian economy. Shortage of essential goods and rising unemployment made life extremely difficult for the Iranians, with poverty and cost of living rising steeply. In short, US sanctions crippled Iran even though Iran tried reducing external dependence and strengthened economic ties with countries like China and Russia, which did cushion the blow a bit but did not prevent Iran from weakening.
However, even then, Iran did not let go of its nuclear ambitions and also did not stop supporting its Middle East proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Those three, along with Shia militias in Iraq and Syria under Bashar al-Assad, formed what Iran calls the “Axis of Resistance” (Meḥvar-e-Moqāwamah in Persian), an informal coalition opposed to the US and Israel. The expression emerged in response to the US President Bush collectively referring to Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussain, and North Korea as “Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002.
Long story short, even though Iran got economically weaker from arguably the most stringent economic sanctions ever imposed by the US on any country in modern history, Iran maintained its militant proxies around Israel, which made it difficult for Israel to attack Iran because the proxies would have also rushed to the defence of Iran in that situation and even if Israel could successfully push back the proxies, it would still have taken some doing to fight them together with Iran, which is militarily among the most powerful nations in the Middle East.
The threat of a massive, multi-front retaliation from well-armed proxies (especially Hezbollah in Lebanon, with its arsenal of rockets) continued to be a major deterrent against Israel’s mounting a large-scale, overt military strike on Iran. But the situation rapidly changed after Hamas, along with several Palestinian militant groups, launched a violent incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing a total of 1,195 people and taking about 250 Israeli civilians and soldiers hostage. Brutal rapes and sexual assaults were also reported.
Israel responded by coming down with all its military might on Gaza, determined to annihilate Hamas. It proved way more difficult to completely uproot Hamas from Gaza, and while even after well over a year and a half, the war on Hamas is yet to accomplish its stated objectives, Israel’s military offensive has devastated Gaza and left Hamas in tatters.
Weakened Hezbollah
Israel’s air strikes in Gaza commenced on October 7, 2023, within hours of the Hamas attack but a formal state of war was declared on October 8, with the ground invasion of Gaza starting on October 27, 2023. But Hezbollah began firing rockets and artillery into Israel on October 8, 2023, in its stated solidarity with the Palestinians. Israel retaliated with drone strikes and artillery fire the same day.
Even though it was Hezbollah that went to war with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians, Israel did not let up once it started retaliating, having prepared for such an eventuality for years.
On September 27 2024, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s long-standing Secretary-General. Hashem Safieddine was named his successor, and Safieddine was also assassinated by Israel a few days later on October 3, 2024 in southern Beirut in an airstrike. The two assassinations in quick succession were a monumental blow to the organization’s command structure.
One after the other, Israel systematically targeted and killed numerous other high-ranking Hezbollah commanders, including Fuad Shukr (Haj Mohsen), a top military planner, and others involved in specific units like rocket artillery and anti-tank operations. Reportedly, over 414 Hezbollah fighters, including 24 high-ranking Hezbollah commanders, have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023, disrupting the hierarchy, leadership, operational coordination, and strategic planning within the organization.
In addition to the “pager attacks” and “walkie-talkie attacks” that must have been years in the making, Israel also launched thousands of airstrikes and artillery bombardments throughout Lebanon and in Syria, targeting Hezbollah positions, military infrastructure, weapon depots, rocket launchers, drone workshops, and command centers, seriously degrading Hezbollah’s offensive capabilities.
A significant portion of Hezbollah’s arsenal was destroyed by Israel’s relentless bombing, which severely compromised Hezbollah’s ability to launch large-scale attacks on Israel.
Militarily Degraded Houthis
The Houthis brought the ire of multiple nations, including the IS and the UK, on themselves when they chose to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, much like the Hezbollah, after the October 7, 2023 attack and Israel’s response to it by letting lose drones and missiles at not only at Israel but also attacking international commercial shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade and forcing many shipping companies to reroute their vessels around Africa.
Reacting to the Houthi misadventure, the U.S. initiated Operation Prosperity Guardian in December 2023, a multinational naval coalition that actively intercepted hundreds of Houthi drones and missiles. Starting in January 2024, the US, the UK, and its allies followed up on the defensive move of December 2023 with offensive military operations, such as “Operation Poseidon Archer” (January 2024) and “Operation Rough Rider” (March 2025), against Houthi targets within Yemen and hit over 800 Houthi targets within Yemen. The objective of these strikes was to disrupt and degrade the Houthis’ military capabilities. The operations against the Houthis were jointly carried out by no fewer than eight sovereign nations — Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States — and they issued a joint statement on February 3, 2024 acknowledging that the “precision strikes” were “intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities that the Houthis use to threaten global trade, and the lives of innocent mariners.”
In addition to the coalition strikes, Israel also carried out a few strikes on the Houthi targets in Yemen. The battering left the Houthis severely damaged, though they were not completely damaged. Per some accounts, the damage to the offensive capabilities and organizational structure of Hezbollah and Hamas was more extensive than to that of the Houthis, but it did compromise the Houthis as much as to render them incapable of coming to the defence of Iran in any substantial way in case of a militrary strike against their master provider.
Iran’s Bettering Nuclear Capabilities?
Israel has been saying that Iran was a year or even months away from having a nuclear bomb, which has been touted as the reason for the urgency with which Israel has been bombing, and also pushing and lobbying for debilitating strikes by the US against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities (a wish eventually granted by the US). There has been a debate about whether or not Iran has the ability to arm itself with a nuclear bomb, or whether or not it was even gunning for a nuclear bomb, and there have been no definitive answers to those questions. However, Israel has been crying wolf in respect of that for a long time. So it’s safe to say that how close or far Iran was from acquiring an N-bomb could not have substantially informed Israel’s electing to mount an attack on Iranian soil after having refrained for as long as it had. Therefore, the answer to the question of timing has to be found in factors that did not exist before October 7, 2023.
So why now?
Economic sanctions have indeed weakened Iran over the years, and there might also be some truth to Iran’s advancing nuclear enrichment capabilities, but they do not adequately explain Israel’s attack on Iran because even with both those factors operating, Israel would not have attacked Iran, if it feared a multifront military retaliations from Iran and its militant proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
With the military capabilites of the proxies severely compromised, Iran was at its weakest against Israel, and there could not have been a better time for Israel to attempt setting back Iran’s nuclear programs by over a decade. I seriously doubt Israel thinks it can completely destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. The best it can — or, for that matter, even the US can — reasonably hope for is turning the clock as far back on it as possible. But the clock would continue ticking as long as Iran itself abandons the project or is persuaded to.
However, for Iran to see, as seems inevitable, a nuclear bomb and/or strong militant proxies in the region as an effective deterrent against Israel and the US can only augur ill for the Middle East.
Originally written and published as a Substack Post on June 23, 2025.
