Of all the occasions my family and I have had to run to bomb shelters over the last few weeks, the most disconcerting was Iran’s Oct. 1 attack on Israel.
Even before the air raid siren sounded, our phones blared with a new Israeli alert system, deployed for the first time, directing us to take shelter until further notice. We gathered up our four kids and ran to our in-home safe room, where only days earlier we had taken cover during a rocket attack from Houthis in Yemen.
For the better part of an hour, we huddled in the shelter as air raid sirens blared every few minutes and the walls shook from booms. I figured the source was nearby launches of Israel’s missile interceptors, but later I learned there also had been explosions from Iran’s ballistic missiles striking the air force base a couple of miles down the road from my daughter’s middle school.
Looking around the room at my frightened children, I realized how helpless I was to defend them against Iran’s onslaught. Our fate was in the hands of those shooting down those missiles — Israel’s interceptors as well as defensive actions by the American, British and French militaries.
In the end, Iran’s 180 ballistic missiles were fired mainly at Israeli military sites and other security installations, not civilian targets — the attack apparently constrained to avoid provoking a devastating Israeli reprisal. There was only one casualty, a Palestinian in the West Bank.
But Iran has been killing Israelis indirectly for all of the last year, through proxy militias in Lebanon and Yemen, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria and, most brutally, by way of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group funded and armed by Iran.
Together, these Iran-backed groups have killed more than 1,700 Israelis over the 12 months. Iran is also reportedly smuggling weapons from Jordan into the West Bank in a bid to fuel another Palestinian front against Israel.
The Iranian government doesn’t just harbor a dream to see Israel destroyed; it’s actively trying to achieve that vision by attacking Israel on all the fronts at its disposal.
That’s why preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is critical.
For years, the responsible nations of the world have tried myriad methods to thwart this doomsday scenario with sanctions, negotiated agreements and covert sabotage operations. Those measures delayed Iran’s march toward the bomb, but they have not stopped it. U.S. intelligence experts say Iran could produce bomb-grade uranium in a matter of weeks and a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.
The Iranian regime represents an existential threat not just to Israel. The ayatollahs who call Israel the Little Satan and America the Great Satan have bigger ambitions than just destroying the Jewish state.
Iran’s proxy militias already have swallowed up a host of countries in the region. In Lebanon, Hezbollah pushed a once-functional, quasi-democratic country into failed state status, crippling its politics, rendering the Lebanese army irrelevant, aggravating the collapse of the banking system and other basic services, and now dragging it into war with Israel. In Yemen, the Houthis overthrew the government and seized most of the country in a yearslong war that killed more than 150,000 Yemenis directly and led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 more through widespread hunger and disease. Over the last year the Houthis have been attacking global shipping vessels in the Red Sea.
In Syria, Iran stepped in to save the murderous regime of President Bashar Assad during the civil war; now Iran uses the country as conduit for arms transfers to Hezbollah. In Iraq, Iran increasingly wields political power and funds militias that attack Israel and threaten Iraqi sovereignty.
And then there are the crimes the Iranian government has perpetrated against its own people: arrest, torture and execution for such lawbreaking as protesting the government, asserting women’s rights or failing to adhere to various elements of Islamic Sharia law.
Americans in particular should be deeply alarmed. Tehran reportedly is trying to carry out political assassinations in America and, according to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, is getting assistance from Russia with nuclear technology. How fitting that the Islamic regime trying to take over the Middle East makes common cause with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is trying to take over Ukraine and possibly other parts of Europe.
Iran should be stopped, and Israel can’t do the job alone. In the past, the U.S. and Israel have successfully undertaken strategic bombing campaigns to push back against aggression in the Middle East.
With Iran’s belligerence in overdrive, the United States and its allies should seriously consider a military option to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. The danger is clear. If the world waits too long, it may be too late.
Uriel Heilman is a journalist living in Israel.
