NYT: Israeli Defense Officials Doubt Israel Can Attack Iran

Deborah BrandDecember 20, 2021

Despite threats by its senior leadership to strike Iran, Israel isn’t capable of destroying or even significantly delaying Iran’s nuclear program, the New York Times reported Sunday, citing senior Israeli military officials.

According to one high-ranking security official, it would take at least two years of preparation to strike Iran’s nuclear program in any significant way.

The report said:

A smaller-scale strike, damaging parts of the program without ending it entirely, would be feasible sooner, experts and officials say. But a wider effort to destroy the dozens of nuclear sites in distant parts of Iran — the kind of attack Israeli officials have threatened — would be beyond the current resources of the Israeli armed forces.

“It’s very difficult — I would say even impossible — to launch a campaign that would take care of all these sites,” said Relik Shafir, a retired Israeli Air Force general who was a pilot in a 1981 strike on an Iraqi nuclear facility.

[…]
Iran has dozens of nuclear sites, some deep underground that would be hard for Israeli bombs to quickly penetrate and destroy, Mr. Shafir said. The Israeli Air Force does not have warplanes large enough to carry the latest bunker-busting bombs, so the more protected sites would have to be struck repeatedly with less effective missiles, a process that might take days or even weeks, Mr. Shafir added.

“In the world we live in, the only air force that can maintain a campaign is the U.S. Air Force,” he told the paper.

The report comes amid collapsing negotiations in Vienna in a bid to resuscitate the JCPOA nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018.

Last week, world power delegates said the 2015 accord is no longer relevant.

“As of this moment, we still have not been able to get down to real negotiations,” senior European diplomats told reporters.

“We are wasting precious time dealing with new Iranian positions inconsistent with the JCPOA or that go beyond it,” the diplomats said. “Time is running out. Without swift progress, in light of Iran’s fast-forwarding of its nuclear program, the JCPOA will very soon become an empty shell.”

Israel has repeatedly warned that it will strike at Iran’s nuclear program.

However, according to the officials cited by the NYT, the country would have a hard time fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.

“Any attack on Iran would also likely set off retaliatory attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, allies of Iran that would try to force Israel to fight a war on several fronts simultaneously,” the report said, and noted that Iran’s defense capabilities have only become stronger since 2012, when Israel last seriously considered attacking.