Just days after the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militants, the Israeli press, amplified by the mainstream international media, was publishing horrific stories of the “mass” and “systematic” rape and sexual abuse of Israeli women.

There were even claims that the Palestinians had been given explicit orders to carry out rape. This was alongside lurid and mendacious claims about the slaughter, beheading, and, in one instance, cooking in an oven of babies.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utilised the claims to denounce Hamas’ “savagery” and justify Israel’s war of annihilation against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians look for survivors following Israeli airstrike in Nusseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. [AP Photo/Doaa AlBaz]

Now after 14 months of appeals for witnesses and evidence, Israeli prosecutor Moran Gaz has admitted her department has no evidence of any rapes or sexual assaults and is not filing any such cases for prosecution against the Palestinian attackers held in Israeli jails. Until recently, Gaz headed Israel’s Southern Prosecutor’s Office and was a member of the team investigating the militants arrested during the attack.

Speaking in an interview at the end of last month with the Israeli online daily Ynet, Gaz said that despite all their investigations, “In the end, we have no complainants.” No one came forward to give evidence. “We contacted women’s rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they [those allegedly abused] simply did not contact them.” Apparently, no one came forward to give evidence, even confidentially.

Gaz said that in such circumstances, it would be very difficult to obtain justice, particularly for sexual offenses, and asked the public to lower their expectations. She said that “the vast majority of them will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court, and the criticism will ultimately come to the prosecutor’s office—unjustly.”

Coming from someone like Gaz who believes that the Palestinians detained by Israel during the October 7 attack “have no right to live,” this can only mean that Israel does not have one iota of evidence to substantiate the rape or sexual abuse claims.

Once again, Israel’s propaganda about Hamas savagery, rape, mutilations and beheaded babies that it put out to justify the slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians has been revealed as a tissue of lies. But there has been little or no mention of Gaz’s admission in the mainstream media.

There was no forensic examination of the October 7 victims by the Israeli authorities. They were buried immediately, making it impossible to determine whether they had been subjected to abuse, how they had died or at whose hands.

The United Nations panel, led by Pramila Patten, that looked into the rape allegations last March stated explicitly that as far as the first day of the raid was concerned (the raid and the Israeli response lasted from early Saturday morning till Monday evening), they had been unable to verify any sexual violence.

Three of Israel’s claims were positively disproved and the rest were unverified, with many based on the “inaccurate” and “unreliable” claims of a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Furthermore, without forensic evidence and survivor testimony, it was impossible to determine the scope and veracity of other claims of sexual violence.

There were lurid claims of rape and sexual violence at the Nova rave and on the way back to Gaza. These had earlier been shown to be nonsensical given the timing of events, the known movements of the victims and the constant firing by Israeli helicopter gunships. Such was the firepower that around 360 of the Israeli victims were felled by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), not Palestinian fighters. Furthermore, the original Israeli death toll was reduced to around 1,140 when more than 200 burned corpses were found to be Palestinian not Israeli.

The site of a music festival near the border with the Gaza Strip is seen on Thursday, October 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Erik Marmor]

The UN’s report, cited by the international media as evidence of Hamas’ rape and sexual abuse, was the outcome of a fact-finding mission to “verify information.” But without a mandate or resources to carry out a full and legal investigation, it was unable to substantiate the allegations beyond reasonable doubt.

It is telling that just last week Israel blocked a request from the UN panel to carry out a further probe of the October 7 rape allegations, reportedly to avoid any scrutiny of rape and other abuse committed by Israeli forces against Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails, typically without charge. It prompted Israeli women’s rights groups to warn that this could lead to Israel, instead of Hamas, being added to the UN’s sexual violence blacklist.

According to a report in Ha’aretz, in addition to investigating alleged sexual violence by Hamas, Patten had demanded—and was refused—access to Israeli prisons to investigate sex crimes allegations against the IDF. The report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “Welcome to Hell”: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps, has documented in great detail Israel’s systemic policy of abusing and torturing thousands of Palestinians in its custody.

The Israeli prosecutor’s acknowledgement that there is no evidence of rape and sexual abuse comes after Al Jazeera demonstrated that the lengthy report in December 2023 by the New York Times and similar media outlets of sexual abuse that garnered massive publicity was based on false or unreliable sources. But the lack of evidence did not stop Netanyahu and his fascistic cabinet colleagues parroting the claims, or the media continuing to give them ample coverage.

Israel’s entire narrative surrounding the events of October 7 has been shown to be a pack of lies. First of all, far from being unprovoked and “coming out of the blue”, the attack by Hamas militants was itself the product of countless deliberate provocations aimed at inciting retaliation, as then occurred on October 7. Al-Aqsa Flood provided the casus belli for a pre-planned campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians beginning with Gaza and then moving on to the West Bank and including Israel’s two million Arab citizens.

Palestinians bury people murdered in the Israeli bombardment who were brought from the Shifa hospital, in a mass grave in the town of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. [AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman]

Secondly, there is mounting evidence that Netanyahu’s government and Israel’s army and security services knew a military incursion was about to happen—Egypt and Israeli soldiers have stated so quite explicitly—and that these warnings were ignored and the security forces stood down.

Once the attack took place, large numbers of Israeli casualties—at least 360—resulted from a massive military operation carried out by the IDF that lasted several days, using its infamous and secretive Hannibal Directive. But the exact number can only be confirmed by releasing the results of autopsies that would show the type of bullets used.

The Directive, formulated during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1986, aims to prevent the capture of Israelis by enemy forces, even at the cost of their lives. It implies the IDF should kill Israelis rather than allow them to fall into the hands of Hamas. The IDF’s massive deployment of firepower—that included helicopter gunships, tanks, heavy weaponry, hand grenades and armed troops—killed Palestinians, Israeli civilians, hostages and security personnel alike, and caused massive destruction of buildings in towns and villages in southern Israel.

Another lie, soon exposed, was that Hamas had planned to attack the Nova music festival, where the largest number of deaths occurred—364 people, including 17 police officers—and where 40 people were taken hostage. This was impossible as the festival organisers switched sites just two days earlier after the original location fell through. Palestinian fighters only found out about it by accident after the festival was then extended by a day at short notice, even though Israel had received warnings that an attack was imminent.

US President Joe Biden had famously to walk back his claim, featured on the front pages of Western newspapers, that he had seen pictures of beheaded children following Hamas’s attack. White House officials said, “The president based his comments about the alleged atrocities on the claims from Netanyahu’s spokesman and media reports from Israel.”

Washington, London, Paris and Berlin have regurgitated Israel’s lies and propaganda aimed at legitimising its mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to further their own plans to control the resource-rich Middle East, as part of a global war against Iran, Russia and ultimately China.

Netanyahu has reluctantly agreed to a ceasefire and a hostage and prisoner exchange as a result of pressure from incoming President Donald Trump—amid increasing unease among Washington’s Arab allies whose restive populations are seething over the scale of the death and destruction engulfing Gaza. But there is no reason to believe that such a ceasefire will hold.

Lebanon has witnessed hundreds of Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreement between those two countries since the end of November: including incursions, artillery and tank shelling, the demolition of homes and the flying of drones and warplanes. Furthermore, the IDF has failed to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon as required by the terms of the agreement.

There is enormous worldwide opposition both to Netanyahu and his fascist allies’ horrific war in Gaza and to workers’ own rotten governments internationally over their collusion with the Zionist butchers. But it needs a political perspective. An end to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians requires the repudiation of Zionism and the Jewish apartheid state and the establishment of a multinational state with full equality for its Palestinian and Jewish citizens as part of a United Socialist States of the Middle East.

President Joe Biden’s administration warned Israel to take greater care to limit harm to civilians in the war in Gaza. But Israel did not heed the admonishments, critics said. For instance, at least 21 people were killed on May 28, 2024 in an Israeli shelling of a refugee tent encampment outside Rafah that was supposed to be a safe zone.

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Reporting Highlights Empty Threats: Since Oct. 7, 2023, Biden has repeatedly issued threats that Israel ignored. U.S. officials tried to enforce consequences — but they couldn’t.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Biden has repeatedly issued threats that Israel ignored. U.S. officials tried to enforce consequences — but they couldn’t. Internal Dissent: The State Department disregarded its own experts and cracked down on leaks. Some human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of Israeli abuses.

The State Department disregarded its own experts and cracked down on leaks. Some human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of Israeli abuses. Costs of Inaction: Experts say Biden’s failure to follow through led to impunity for widespread human rights abuses, including blocking aid deliveries, even after explicit U.S. warnings. These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

President Joe Biden Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in the White House last July. By then, Biden’s administration had issued multiple public warnings to the Israeli but did not follow through. During his visit, Netanyahu gave a fiery defense of Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. Credit: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

There were numerous civilian casualties during the Israeli military’s attack on the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration had said invading the city would cross a “red line.” Credit: Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

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Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Humanitarian aid trucks wait on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip last year. Credit: Ali Moustafa/Xinhua via Getty Images

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Palestinians rush out of their home after Jewish settlers set it on fire in the town of Turmusaya in the West Bank last June. About 400 Jewish settlers launched an attack on the town and burned homes, cars and property. Officials within the State Department said it was difficult to get permission to publicly condemn instances of settlers destroying Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank. Credit: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

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Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department’s conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

Israeli security forces beat protesters and pallbearers at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank in 2022. Neither her killing, nor the clashes at her funeral, resulted in discipline from the State Department under the Leahy Law, despite the recommendations from an internal panel of experts. Credit: Muammar Awad/Xinhua/Getty Images

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica Read More Blinken Is Sitting on Staff Recommendations to Sanction Israeli Military Units Linked to Killings or Rapes

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, who died while in custody of the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion. The State Department was set to disqualify the unit from future military assistance but ultimately decided not to after Israeli leaders pressured the secretary of state to change course. Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

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United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday placed Israel “on notice” for possible inclusion in the UN’s “blacklist” of countries and groups credibly suspected of committing patterns of sexual violence in armed conflict. Alongside the formal warning to Israel, Guterres placed Hamas on the list for the first time.

The “blacklist” refers to the formal annex naming such parties in the UN’s annual Report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. In the current draft of the 2025 report — seen by The Times of Israel and set to be published in the coming days — Israel is not listed in the annex, but Guterres cited “grave concern” in the main body of the document over allegations of sexual violence by Israeli security forces against Palestinians in multiple prisons, a detention facility, and a military base.

In a letter sent Monday to Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, Guterres warned that Israel is on watch and could be included in next year’s annex. He wrote that refusal to grant UN inspectors access has made verification difficult, but says there is “significant concern” over documented patterns of abuse.

The draft also placed Hamas in the annex for the first time. The terror group was not blacklisted last year, with the UN citing insufficient evidence directly linking it to reported assaults and calling for further investigation.

Hamas’s inclusion follows recently published reports documenting systematic sexual violence both during the October 7, 2023, massacre and against hostages in captivity.

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In the letter to Danon, Guterres listed steps Israel must take to avoid being blacklisted, including issuing directives against sexual violence, creating enforcement and disciplinary systems, investigating every credible complaint, securing commanders’ personal commitments, and granting the UN free access for monitoring and humanitarian aid.

Among the allegations cited by the UN — which included multiple accounts of the rape of Palestinian male detainees — is the reported assault of a detainee during his transfer last year to the Sde Teiman facility, which was established after October 7 as a preliminary holding site for captured Hamas members and other suspected terrorists.

In June 2024, military police arrested nine soldiers in connection with the incident, on charges including aggravated sodomy. Military prosecutors later filed an indictment against five reserve soldiers on charges of causing severe injury and assault under aggravated circumstances, but stopped short of charging them with aggravated sodomy (a charge equivalent to rape), which investigators initially suspected.

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In a response to Guterres’s warning shared by his office, Danon rejected the allegations as “unfounded” and based on “biased publications,” demanding Israel’s removal from any consideration for listing, calling for sanctions on Hamas for systematic sexual violence, and seeking an amendment to the report to further reflect Hamas’s October 7 atrocities and what he called the absence of evidence of a pattern of such crimes by Israeli forces.

A spokesperson for Danon told The Times of Israel that blacklisting could prompt sanctions or other punitive measures, noting that other listed parties, which include ISIS and al-Qaeda, have a years-long record of systematic sexual violence — a record they said was in no way comparable to Israel’s, making Guterres’s consideration “absurd” and “grave.”

The Iranian regime was increasingly convinced in recent months that it would soon be able to destroy Israel. The “Destruction of Israel” clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square was not an exercise in bravado. It was a public countdown to what the ayatollahs believed was Israel’s imminent demise, at their hands. Along with dismay that Yahya Sinwar had failed to consult and coordinate with them before invading southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the regime drew encouragement from the success of that massacre, its apparent confirmation of Israel’s vulnerability, and the ongoing instability it had caused.

Israel’s elimination, the regime delightedly, and rationally, assessed, was truly at hand.

And the fact is, apocalyptic as this certainly sounds, the assessment was reasonable.

That is the sober, honest judgment of the military and security chiefs who told Israel’s political leaders in recent months that Israel had to go to war against Iran, preferably in June and certainly not much later. That the end of 2025 would be too late. That it was now or never. That Iran was a decision and a few weeks away from nuclear weapons. And that the regime’s fast-growing ballistic missile capability was rapidly becoming an existential threat as well.

The political leadership listened. It was persuaded. It coordinated with the US administration.

And Israel indeed went to war. And saved itself.

On the way to Jerusalem

In Valiasr Square in October 2023, a giant banner was erected showing Muslim masses — under the flags of their countries, of Palestine, pre-rebel Syria, and of Iranian proxy terror groups — walking into the distance toward the Dome of the Rock shrine in the Al-Aqsa Compound atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a representation of the liberation of Jerusalem from Zionist Jewish control, a liberation ostensibly now imminent in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

In the aftermath of October 7, the Iranian regime accelerated its clandestine nuclear weapons program. It accelerated its ballistic missile production. It bolstered its air defenses. It directly attacked Israel for the first time, in April 2024, and fired another huge missile barrage in October.

While Israel publicly derided the potency of those attacks, it privately recognized Iran’s emboldening and the dangers posed by its missiles. And it watched with worried admiration as the regime’s military planners internalized and began to learn from the relative failure of the two sets of attacks, and from the nature of Israel’s military responses to them.

By late 2024, however, Iran was also losing ground as regards its proxies. Israel had eliminated its most important proxy leader, Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and massively degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities, both by detonating thousands of explosive-laced beepers on their Hezbollah owners and by devastating the terrorist army’s missile and rocket capabilities in much of Lebanon.

Hamas was still holding Israeli hostages in Gaza and resisting the IDF’s efforts to destroy its entire military and civil-rule capabilities, but it was a shadow of its 24-battalion former self.

Then came the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and a rapid Israeli military response that prevented major military assets from falling into the hands of the new rebel regime and ensured that Israel held air supremacy there.

The regime in Tehran responded by further accelerating its efforts to attain the bomb. It expanded its stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium. It made significant progress on weaponization. Its key scientists were conducting tests and simulations that underlined how close they were to completing the program. In breach of international treaties, in breach of an ostensible fatwa against nuclear weapons, those scientists were working to enable a rapid breakout to the bomb.

At the same time, Iran stepped up its missile production capabilities. As Israel has publicly stated, Iran had built an arsenal of some 2,500 highly potent missiles, many with 1-ton warheads capable of immense devastation, and was on track to have 4,000 by March 2026. And 8,000 by 2027. A conventional missile threat was becoming an existential danger, capable of overwhelming Israel’s defenses, wreaking untenable death and destruction across Israel, and, if Israel was caught unawares, preventing the Israeli military from mustering an effective response.

Together with its thousands of drones, Iran was aiming, for instance, to target Israel’s air bases, ensuring that the air force simply couldn’t take off to fight back.

Despite the tremendous setback to Hezbollah, which it had relied upon to launch as many as 1,000-3,000 daily rockets and missiles at Israel come the hour, the regime was also confident that its ground invasion plans for Israel remained viable, with the potential for its proxies and their supporters to mirror Hamas’s invasion on most every front, including from Jordan. As National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi has stated, the regime believed that its long-planned “Destruction of Israel” project via a multifront invasion, carried out amid a devastating missile and drone attack, was viable.

What was central to the realization of Iran’s goal, however, was that it strike first and take Israel by surprise.

The most dangerous man in Iran

Watching Iran with a far greater degree of intelligence penetration than the regime had realized, Israel’s military and security planners had in February 2025 received the green light from the political echelon to preempt.

Israel had been preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear program for years, but had not consistently prioritized the potential imperative or allocated the necessary budget, especially after the Obama administration reached its JCPOA agreement with the regime, a flawed attempt to prevent Iran from attaining the bomb, in 2015.

The IDF had carried out an unprecedented drill in May 2023, simulating a multifront attack on Israel triggered by an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. But it had only begun preparing in earnest in October 2024 for an attack that would deal not just with nuclear targets but also the ballistic missile enterprise, Iran’s air defenses and more.

Twice before — in Iraq in 1981, and Syria in 2007 — Israel had blown up its enemies’ nuclear weapons programs. But comparisons are inappropriate. Those were bold strikes on single nuclear reactors; this would be an assault of an entirely different order, against an enemy that thought it knew what was coming.

Twice before — in Iraq in 1981, and Syria in 2007 — Israel had blown up its enemies’ nuclear weapons programs. But comparisons are inappropriate

In April, the planners selected June as the ideal time for the attack. They assessed that Israel’s intel on Iran would likely start to decline after that, especially as regards the nuclear program — presumably because the final stages of weaponization could be carried out in locations less obvious than the major known nuclear sites. The IDF would be at peak readiness. Iran would not yet have restored air defenses targeted by the Israeli Air Force in October. Iran’s proxies were weak. Iran’s missile capabilities would only get stronger.

Not incidentally, Trump had given Iran a 60-day window for diplomacy. It expired on June 12.

The military planners assessed that the Iranians were both preparing their own assault and watching for Israeli preemption. And thus the initial Israeli strikes had to be devastating.

In the very first hours, key regime commanders would have to be eliminated. So, too, the Iranian military’s command and control structures. Air defenses would need to be disabled. Everything possible would need to be done to minimize the number of missiles Iran could fire in an immediate response — and therefore vast numbers of missile launchers, launch sites, missile stores, fuel supplies and key personnel would have to be put out of action, everywhere from western Iran to the Tehran area and beyond.

Major nuclear facilities would have to be targeted to the full extent of Israeli capabilities. Also, key installations crucial to the bomb program. And so, too, those expert scientists working to move the rogue program through the final stages to a deliverable bomb.

How can you achieve absolute surprise when you are flying 1,800 kilometers to carry out an attack?

Surprise was essential. But so too was establishing air supremacy all the way to Tehran, to ensure that the waves of Israeli attacks could keep coming, enabling the ongoing assault on essential targets.

But how can you achieve absolute surprise when you are flying 1,800 kilometers (1,200 miles) to carry out an attack?

For one thing, by minimizing the number of people who know that the attack is about to unfold; even many high-ranking army and security personnel were not told what was happening until it was actually underway. Only the most intimate forum of political leaders was fully informed.

For another, by instituting decoy operations and movements. The US has detailed how it very publicly sent several B-2 bombers to Guam even as it secretly deployed other B-2s to drop bunker busters on Fordo early on June 22; Israel’s decoy activities when launching the war on June 13 were more extensive, and thus far largely unpublicized.

How the air force essentially telescoped its 1,800-kilometer flights to the point where Iran simply did not know it was coming is a story yet to be told. But the fact is that Iran was caught unawares and thrown off-kilter in the first vital hours.

All of Israel was awoken by screeching alarms on every cellphone as the attack began in the early hours of June 13, and Home Front Command spokespeople popped up on national television to tell the country that something was about to happen, including a potential “significant attack from the east.” Trained to remain calm and focused in even the most horrifying circumstances, the spokespeople indeed seemed relatively calm, but it was evident that they had no real idea of what was unfolding in Iran and what could happen in Israel.

The IDF had assessed that Iran would try to fire 300-500 missiles in its initial response to an Israeli attack, and that it was possible it could launch as many as 300 in the first 15 minutes. In the event, it fired none for 18 hours

The IDF had assessed that Iran would try to fire 300-500 missiles in its initial response to an Israeli attack, and that it was possible it could launch as many as 300 in the first 15 minutes. That’s why the order was given to alert the entire country. Israelis had to be warned, without being told precisely what about. No wonder the Home Front spokespeople exuded a certain bafflement.

In the event, Iran managed to fire precisely no missiles in the first 18 hours after Israel’s strike. It had known Israel was coming, but it did not know Israel was coming that night. Israel attacked just before 3 a.m.; Iran fired its first two missile barrages, of some 50 missiles each, shortly after 9 p.m.

Only one leading Iranian figure sensed just ahead of time that something was up: Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the aerospace chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a US-designated terrorist organization. Responsible for Iran’s missiles and drones, Hajizadeh was perceived by Israeli security chiefs as the most dangerous man in Iran, no less, and was most certainly on the initial target list.

Israel feared it had lost sight of him as it precision-targeted the key Iranian figures in those first minutes and hours, including in areas as precise as individual rooms in apartments on high floors of residential buildings. But Hajizadeh had dashed to a military bunker he believed was secure, and convened key colleagues. And it was there that Israel found and eliminated him and five other top officers in the IRGC air force.

Unloading like never before

Israel’s military planners and operational chiefs consider the initial attack to have been an incredible success, and so too the 12 days of concerted assaults that followed. Avoiding hyperbole, the IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir publicly assessed that Iran’s nuclear program and its missile capabilities were “significantly damaged.”

Related — ‘The stars aligned’: Why Israel set out for a war against Iran, and what it achieved

Every pre-designated target was indeed attacked, and destroyed or damaged to the extent the planners had believed possible or more so. The end stages of the war, including the initial hours after Trump announced the ceasefire but before it had gone into effect, saw hundreds of key targets destroyed — including what the publicly fuming US president called the unloading on Iran of “a load of bombs the likes of which I’ve never seen before.”

The top-level nuclear scientists are gone, and not easily replaceable. Natanz is believed destroyed, along with its centrifuges. Isfahan — possibly the only Iranian facility capable of converting uranium into the necessary form for enrichment, and of converting enriched uranium into solid metal form en route to a warhead — is likely destroyed. Fordo, where the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency had in 2023 reported evidence of enrichment to 83.7% — just short of weapons grade — is not operational, thanks in overwhelming part to the US bombing.

Iran’s ballistic missile program is greatly degraded. It is believed to still have some 700-1,000 missiles and fewer than 200 of its original 400 launchers. But the IDF targeted not only missiles and launchers, but the tunnels from which they emerge to fire, and the factories that make them and their components. Indeed, the IDF targeted innumerable elements of Iran’s entire military manufacturing array.

The regime’s drones proved a nuisance but not a profound danger. It fired 1,000, expecting to wreak considerable harm, and scored one direct hit, wrecking a home in Beit She’an.

I wrote 12 days ago that Iran had been “a matter of no more than two months, and possibly as little as a week,” from being able to build a deliverable bomb.

Today, Zamir has been quoted telling colleagues, Iran is no longer a nuclear threshold state, and its plans to eliminate Israel have been set back years.

‘Only’ 14% of Iran’s missiles impacted

There is, however, absolutely no room or reason for hubris. Israel allowed itself to slip into existential peril, and the astounding success of the 12-day war is a temporary accomplishment.

Iran is not going anywhere. And so long as the ayatollahs retain power, they can be relied upon to recommit to their efforts to wipe out Israel. As former prime minister Naftali Bennett remarked in a Saturday night interview, “it’s clear that they will now start to renew” the nuclear program. “The key is to prevent them from doing that, too.”

Along with delight and profound relief at the achievements of the war, the military and security top brass are resolved not to underestimate the regime and its single-minded determination to destroy Israel. This was a knockout blow in a life-or-death fight. But it is not the end of the existential struggle.

Even this time, despite those stunning initial strikes, Iran did gradually recover its balance.

The IDF fired over 4,000 precision projectiles of one kind or another at specific targets, including symbols of the regime such as the headquarters of the state broadcaster, sending a TV anchor rushing to safety mid-show. The regime is emphatically still standing, and its leader, Ali Khamenei, has emerged from his bunker to proclaim not only that Iran will never surrender, but also that it won the war.

It did not. Israel maintained air supremacy over Tehran, and was selecting targets at will, with the capacity to continue to do so. Tehran had not been attacked since the Iran-Iraq War 30 years ago. Somewhere in the regime’s psyche, there may have been a refusal to countenance that Israel could do so, and would dare to do so.

But while “only” 14% of the missiles fired by Iran impacted populated areas and strategic infrastructure — with the US playing a very significant part in the defense — they caused heavy devastation.

Twenty-eight people were killed, all but one of them civilians. Over 3,000 people were hospitalized, 23 with serious injuries. Over 2,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, with apartment buildings and office towers smashed, and some 13,000 people displaced.

Beersheba’s Soroka hospital, the Ben-Gurion University medical school at the hospital and a daycare center in the city; a life sciences research building at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot; the Bazan oil refinery in Haifa, and a rehab facility for disabled kids in Bnei Brak — all these and more took direct, destructive hits.

The Iranian regime, dissembling, is doing its best to shrug off the harm of an entirely different order that has been done to its nuclear and military facilities and personnel. Israel’s political and military leadership knows that the relatively minor damage it sustained is far too much.

Knowing when to stop

The military and political leadership agreed ahead of time to set achievable goals for the war — which were defined as “Creating conditions to prevent Iran’s nuclearization over time, and improving Israel’s strategic balance.” Twelve days in, the IDF reported that those goals had been attained, and that Israel’s position would weaken, and Iran’s strengthen, if the war continued.

The IDF had assessed that several of its planes could go down and pilots could be captured. That didn’t happen. It had estimated that 400 people would be killed on the home front if the war went to 30 days. The death toll was rising.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whom the IDF deeply credits with creating the conditions for the US to join the attack — agreed that a war of attrition had to be avoided, and that Iran should not be given time to alter the balance of the conflict. With US President Donald Trump very publicly brokering a ceasefire, the war was brought to an end.

Unlike in Gaza, where the war goes on because the goals of eliminating the Hamas threat and returning all the hostages have not been met, in Iran the specified job was done. The IDF was prepared to put uniformed and civilian lives at risk to face down an existential threat, but not when that threat had been eliminated for at least the near future, and when there was a high probability that further incremental gains would be offset by greater losses.

Israel would like to see a “good deal” finalized by the US with Iran, and would hope to provide input on such an agreement’s necessary provisions. But it does not doubt that Iran will do whatever it can to evade even the most stringent barriers to reviving its bomb-making program. If the IDF has to strike again, it believes it can do so within a matter of days.

No surrender

A new painting has been erected in Valiasr Square in recent days. Rather than a scene, depicted from behind, of the march to Jerusalem, this installation shows Iranians from various walks of life — slain recognizable military chiefs, but also soccer stars, engineers, women — looking out into the streets of Tehran.

This is not a portrait of surrender. The depicted Iranians, civilians and military men, are saluting. Rockets are leaving smoke trails behind them. The accompanying slogan proclaims, “We are all soldiers of Iran.”

But this time, only Iranian flags are shown. And the backdrop is not Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock but Iran’s highest peak, Mount Damavand. This is the regime attempting to convey a message of national unity and, perhaps, even domestic focus.

And yet, it is more than possible that Iran spirited away some, maybe even most, of its 60% enriched uranium far from the major sites targeted in this war, and plenty of centrifuges too. Iran is about 75 times larger than Israel — plenty of room to construct smaller nuclear sites, and enrich and weaponize there, while trying to avoid attention. New scientists will replace the departed. It is not impossible that Pakistan or North Korea could be tempted to try to provide Iran with nuclear weapons.

Fresh, quite possibly more radical, leaders will replace the old for so long as the regime can retain power. And that regime, humiliated over 12 days in June, may be more motivated than ever to either scramble for the bomb or, more akin to its approach thus far, to lick its wounds and patiently rebuild the entire program.

On Saturday, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi predicted that Iran could resume uranium enrichment “in a matter of months.” Israel expects the regime to try to start resurrecting its program far more quickly than that.

‘If we hadn’t acted now…’

Israel has had a narrow escape.

It was only in a position to save itself, moreover, because Yahya Sinwar, fearing leaks, chose not to coordinate Hamas’s October 7, 2023, with Iran and its other proxies, incorrectly gauging that the rest of the axis would pile in when recognizing his “success,” and join the triumphal, Israel-eliminating march to Al-Aqsa. (Israel is not certain, to this day, why Iran held back.)

Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed last week that the Air Force had struck the “Destruction of Israel” clock in Tehran’s Palestine Square, counting down to Israel’s predicted demise in 2040. It’s not clear that the clock was smashed. If it was, Iran will doubtless fix it. And, we know full well, it was aiming to achieve the goal of rubbing out Israel a lot earlier than 2040.

Was. And is.

Netanyahu on Tuesday accurately described the war as a “historic” victory, and has said it opens the door to potential new normalization agreements. He also asserted that it would abide for generations and that Israel had sent the Iranian nuclear program “down the drain” — assessments that the security establishment would not, should not, dare not, complacently endorse.

The prime minister also declared that Israel would have faced destruction in the near future “if we hadn’t acted now.” On that, there is no disagreement.

Guterres said Israel’s refusal to grant UN inspectors access has hampered verification, but urged immediate steps to avoid blacklisting, including directives against sexual violence, enforcement mechanisms, independent investigations, and open access for UN monitoring and aid agencies.

The draft report also blacklists Hamas for the first time, citing new evidence of systematic sexual violence during the October 7, 2023, massacre and against hostages held in Gaza. Hamas was left off last year due to what the UN called insufficient direct evidence.

Among the allegations against Israel is the reported rape of a Palestinian detainee during transfer to the Sde Teiman facility, a post–October 7 holding site for captured Hamas members and other suspects. Nine soldiers were later arrested in connection with the case.