Over the past 18 months, since the beginning of the regional war in the Middle East on October 7, 2023, we Israelis have become used to sirens warning of incoming rockets—in recent months, mainly ballistic missiles provided by Iran and fired by Iran’s proxy, the Houthi militia in Yemen. The sirens wake us up at night and send millions of people into bomb shelters as the military fires interceptors that work most of the time. This happens several times a week.
Tonight, here in Jerusalem, we woke up to a siren that sounded the same but turned out to mean something completely different.
After waking up my children, hustling them blearily into the safe room, and checking my phone, I saw that the siren indicated not that we were being attacked—but that we were attacking. The army’s Home Front Command warned us to stay close to shelter. After a decade and a half of news reports that Israel was about to attack the Iranian nuclear program, after years of Iranian obfuscation, Israeli indecisiveness, and American fecklessness, the Israeli air force was actually striking in Natanz and Tehran. Among the pilots, I assume, are a few people I know.
An hour or two later, from my roof, I saw a long line of blinking lights heading west in the night sky over the city—one of the first waves of returning planes. It will be some time before we know the results of the first strikes, but it seems that important members of Iran’s military leadership have already been killed and multiple military facilities damaged or destroyed.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the theocracy in Iran has made it its business to wage war against Israel, a country that is more than a thousand miles away, and which has never posed a threat to Iran. For decades the war was fought in the shadows and by proxies—like Hezbollah in Lebanon, against whom I fought as a low-ranking infantry soldier in the 1990s, and which spent a year after October 7, 2023, rocketing my parents’ town and many others in northern Israel. Hezbollah has since been decapitated, while in Gaza, Iran’s allies in Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been crippled. The Assad regime in Syria has fallen. Israel’s society has been strained to the limit by the war, and the Israeli government is distrusted, even hated, by many of its citizens—including many of the pilots now active in the sky over the Iranian capital. It’s very hard to predict where things will stand a year from now, or even a few months.
It’s a cliché to say that the Middle East is at a turning point. But sometimes it’s true, and today—Friday, June 13, 2025—is one of those times.
