Israel launched an attack on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base in Iran and also carried out the assassination of a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, as revealed by former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday.
Bennett, who served as Israeli prime minister from June 13, 2021 to June 30, 2022, made this admission in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.
In his op-ed, Bennett wrote, “I directed Israel’s security forces to make Tehran pay for its decision to sponsor terror. Enough impunity. After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran.”
Israel rarely publicly admits to attacking Iran directly, but the Islamic Republic has been a long-time target of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his various tenures in power.
Iran’s Middle Eastern Proxies
Bennett’s op-ed, titled “The US and Israel Need to Take Iran On Directly,” urges the two allies to hold Iran’s ayatollahs accountable for supporting chaos through their proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthi rebels.
Iran has been widely seen as the main destabilizing force in the Middle East, providing millions of dollars, weapons, military expertise, and training to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Last week, a senior IRGC commander, Sayyed Reza Mousavi, was killed in an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria, leading Iranian officials to warn that Israel would pay for the killing.
The Islamic Republic is also believed to be behind Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, where 1,200 people were killed and over 240 were taken hostage by the terrorist group and returned to Gaza. “The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror,” wrote the former prime minister. “Yet inexplicably, almost nobody is touching it.”
Bennett’s piece concludes with the statement that “The US and Israel must set the clear goal of bringing down Iran’s evil regime. Not only is this possible, it is vital for the safety and security of the Middle East—and the entire civilized world.”