The Israeli military needs US help to destroy a key nuclear site in Iran. Waiting for that help carries risks for Israel.
President Donald Trump's decision to postpone a US attack on Iran has left Israel in a strategic bind.
Israel's main remaining military objective is to destroy the Fordow nuclear enrichment site in northern Iran, which is buried so deep that Israeli bombs would have difficulty damaging it.
For days, Israeli officials had hoped Trump would send US warplanes armed with the only munitions in the world considered powerful enough to destroy Fordow.
Now, Trump says he will wait up to two weeks before deciding whether to carry out such an intervention, a delay that poses a dilemma for Israel.
The longer Israel waits for Trump, the greater the strain on its air defense system. To protect itself from Iran's barrages of ballistic missiles, Israel is depleting its stockpile of missile interceptors, forcing it to prioritize protecting some areas over others. As time passes, the risk of more missiles hitting both civilian neighborhoods and strategic security sites increases.
With Israel's airspace closed and much of its economic life suspended, the prolongation of the war will also have an economic cost. The sooner the war ends, the sooner commercial flights will resume and businesses will be able to fully resume operations.
Rather than wait for U.S. help, Israel could decide to attack Fordow alone, taking its chances with the aircraft and munitions it has. Some analysts say Israel could even send commandos to enter and sabotage the plant. On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at the possibility of acting alone, saying in a television interview that Israel “will hit all of our targets, all of its nuclear facilities. We have the power to do it.”
But experts say this path is fraught with risks and its impact may be limited. “It probably won’t be on the scale of what the United States can achieve,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “If we could do what the United States can do, we would have done it already.”
Another option is for Israel to end the war unilaterally, without attacking Fordow. But that approach would leave at least a significant portion of Iran's nuclear enrichment program intact, leaving open the possibility of Iran creating a nuclear bomb that could be used against Israel.
For now, Israel does not seem willing to take that path. Israel's political leadership has begun to speak explicitly of bringing about the collapse of the Iranian regime and assassinating its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. While Israel has no real way to overthrow its government, the tone of the comments suggests that, at the very least, Israel intends to continue its attacks for several days.
The tone of the Israeli media on Friday also indicated continued domestic support for the Israeli campaign, as did new opinion polls. Following Israel's attack on Iran, Netanyahu's party is in its strongest position in the polls since October 2023, when Hamas carried out the deadliest attack in Israel's history.
