Israel has launched an opening wave of strikes against Iran, with the first wave targeting Tehran.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the attacks on Saturday, saying it was a “preemptive strike against Iran to remove threats to the State of Israel.” He warned of an “immediate state of emergency throughout the entire country.”
Israel’s Channel 12 said the attack was a joint attack from the U.S. and Israel, though there has been no confirmation from the U.S. as of yet.
Videos posted on social media showed plumes of smoke rising across Tehran.
Unlike the 12 Day War, which began with a predawn series of strikes, Saturday’s strikes occurred in broad daylight.
Sirens sounded across Israel, but a statement from the Israeli Air Force clarified that there was no immediate danger yet, and the sirens were a drill to prepare for expected retaliation.
The mission was the culmination of weeks of speculation, fueled mostly by President Donald Trump himself, as to whether he would approve a military operation targeting Iranian senior leaders after they killed thousands of protesters who took to the streets in December and January in opposition of the regime.
There is now the chance for an Iranian retaliatory response, which officials in Tehran have threatened if they were attacked by America. Israel has begun taking extensive precautions, including the closing of its airspace and restrictions on civilian movement.
Iran’s regime, which has been in place since the 1979 revolution, is likely at its weakest point amid the protests, which have gone on intermittently for nearly a decade, according to U.S. intelligence reports provided to the president and confirmed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The president ordered the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to sail from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East in order to give the president more options for how to carry out the operation and for how to defend possible U.S. assets that Iran could target in retaliation. The carrier group arrived in the region in late January.
It’s the second time since Trump returned to the White House that the president has green lit operations against Iran, the first time being when the Air Force bombed three of Tehran’s most hardened nuclear facilities. The long-range bombers that carried out that mission left from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and flew from there to Iran, carried out the operation, and came back to the base.
It’s unclear what will happen now when it comes to Iranian leadership, though the U.S. likely does not want to see the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fill the void left by the deaths of senior leaders across the countries.
The regime had spent decades building up and training proxy groups in other countries with the goal of carrying out operations against their shared targets — primarily Israel and the United States — without Tehran facing blowback themselves.
The region has been dramatically reshaped since Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel. That operation, in which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (another Gaza-based terrorist group) killed roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 individuals was the spark that instigated several connected wars as other Iranian proxies attacked Israel as well.
What’s left of Iran’s proxy groups are militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, both of whom are still standingbut were left battered after various U.S. strikes that occurred after they started carrying out attacks in the region, claiming they were doing so in support of the Palestinians amid the Israel-Gaza war.