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Israel’s ongoing military campaign on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could mark not just a military escalation but a strategic shift, according to retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin.
The former head of Israeli military intelligence and one of the architects behind the legendary 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor said Israel should expand its sights not just military targets, but political ones.
“Israel took the decision that, on one hand, it’s time to end the leadership of the Axis of Evil — the head of the snake,” Yadlin told Fox News Digital. “At the same time, deal with the main problems there. Which is the nuclear.”
Yadlin didn’t say how long he thought the conflict would drag on. While he didn’t openly call for regime change, Yadlin suggested the IDF take out regime targets “beyond the military level.”
“It’s not a one-day operation. It seems more like a week, two weeks. But when you start a war, even if you start it very successfully, you never know when it is finished.”
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“I hope that the achievements of the IDF, which are degrading the Iranian air defense, degrading the Iranian missile, ballistic missile capabilities, drones capabilities, and maybe even some regime targets beyond the military level that Israel started with, will convince the Iranians that it is time to stop. And then they will come to negotiation with the Trump administration much weaker.”
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially insisted it was not involved in the initial strikes on Tehran, President Donald Trump seemed to suggest he hoped Israel’s strikes would pressure a weaker Iran to acquiesce at the negotiating table.
The two sides are at loggerheads over the U.S.’s insistence that Iran cannot have any capacity to enrich uranium and Iran’s insistence that it must have uranium for a civil nuclear program.
“The military operation is aimed, in my view, to a political end, and the political end is an agreement with Iran that will block a possibility to go to the border,” Yadlin said.
“We need a stronger agreement” than the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, he said.
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Yadlin, who in 1981 flew one of the F-16s that destroyed Iraq’s nuclear facility in a single-night operation, made clear that Israel’s latest campaign is far more complex.
“This is not 1981,” he said. “Iran has learned. Their facilities are dispersed, buried in mountains, and protected by advanced air defenses. It’s not a one-night operation.”
He added, “There are sites that I’m not sure can be destroyed.”
He said the recent attack was the result of years of intelligence gathering – and brave Mossad agents on the ground in Iran. Israel lured top Iranian commanders into a bunker, where they coordinated a response to Israel’s attacks, then blew up the bunker.
“All of the intelligence that Israel collected, from the time I was chief of intelligence 2005 to 2010, enabled this operation against the Iranian nuclear program to be very efficient, very much like the good intelligence enabled Israel to destroy Hezbollah. Unfortunately, the same intelligence agencies missed the seventh of October, 2023.”
Indeed, Israel’s past preventive strikes — 1981’s Operation Opera and the 2007 airstrike on Syria’s suspected reactor — were rapid, surgical and designed to neutralize a singular target. In contrast, Yadlin suggested the current campaign could last weeks and involve broader goals.
“It’s not a one-day operation. It seems more like a week, two weeks. But when you start a war, even if you start it very successfully, you never know when it is finished.”
The operation is being framed by Israeli defense officials as a continuation of the Begin Doctrine, established after the 1981 Osirak strike, which declared that Israel would never allow a hostile regime in the region to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Yadlin himself is a symbol of that doctrine. As one of the eight pilots who flew into Iraq over four decades ago, he helped define Israel’s policy of preemptive action — a legacy that is now being tested again under radically different circumstances.
“This campaign,” Yadlin emphasized, “is unlike anything the country has done before.”
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