Iran was “dumbfounded” by Israel’s major retaliatory attack on the Islamic Republic in October and currently wishes to avoid conflict with the Jewish state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Friday.
The Iranians “were dumbfounded when we took out their critical air defenses,” Netanyahu told the Journal, “which means they now have to calculate how much ammo they have, because it’ll take them several years to resuscitate [their ballistic-missile production effort] — assuming we don’t hit it again.”
The wave of Israeli airstrikes on October 26 targeted Iranian air defenses as well as its ballistic missile program, striking factories, storage sites, launchers, and research facilities, and targeting one facility believed to be used for the regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
The attack came weeks after Iran fired some 200 ballistic missiles directly at Israel in early October, in what it said was retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran months earlier. (Israel was widely blamed for the latter’s assassination, though it did not claim responsibility.)
Israel’s air defenses intercepted the vast majority of the missiles in that attack. Some caused limited damage to airbases, but the Israel Defense Forces said operations were not compromised.
Israel’s counterattack did not include major strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities, apart from the one research center.
When asked about Iran’s alleged pursuit of a bomb — the country has surged its enrichment of uranium — and a possible Israeli strike, Netanyahu was reserved.
“I’m not going to talk about that,” the prime minister said, adding, “I’ve always said the jury’s out, still out on all of us [on the Iranian nuclear issue], and I don’t exclude myself.”
Meanwhile, Netanyahu said that as part of its conflicts with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel had also greatly damaged Iran’s activities around Israel.
“We knocked down Hezbollah, which was supposed to protect Iran. And Iran didn’t protect Hezbollah either. And neither of them protected [Syria’s Bashar al-] Assad.
“So, we just split that whole axis right down the middle,” he said. Iran “spent probably $30 billion in Syria, another $20 billion in Lebanon, God knows how much on Hamas. And it’s all gone down the tubes,” he said.
The Iranians now “have no supply line,” Netanyahu said, adding: “We warned Assad not to let Iran supply Hezbollah with weapons through Syria. He played dumb.”
The Syrian dictator fell to a lightning offensive by Islamist-led rebels earlier this month, in a development partly attributed to the weakness of his ally Hezbollah following its war against Israel.
Addressing the decision to kill Nasrallah in a massive September airstrike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, Netanyahu said he realized at the time that the long-time Hezbollah leader “was the axis of the axis,” explaining, “it’s not only that Iran was using him. He was using Iran.”
Hezbollah started attacking Israel last year, a day after its ally Hamas in the Gaza Strip launched a cross-border onslaught against Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, mostly civilians.
The prime minister said that following the Hamas onslaught, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant and some military chiefs had tried to encourage him to go after Hezbollah before Hamas, reasoning that the massively armed terror group in Lebanon was a far greater danger to Israel. Netanyahu said he refused, saying the perpetrators of the attack “couldn’t be left to stew” and Israel could not conduct a war on two fronts.
The prime minister addressed this past September’s pager operation which precipitated its major offensive against the Lebanon-based terror group, when thousands of pagers held by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded across Lebanon, disabling many key operatives.
Israel took credit for the action last month, having previously declined to comment on it.
“There were those who had misgivings about using it at all,” Netanyahu said. “But since it was time-sensitive, I pushed it through.” He called the result “a shock and awe of historic proportions” and “the greatest surgical targeting in history.”
Following the pager operation, Israel launched its air offensive against Hezbollah leadership and weapons sites, crippling the group.
Netanyahu feted the “improved plan, which was actually brilliant, because among other things [Israel] took over Lebanese television” to warn civilians to evacuate their homes. “In six hours, we wiped out most of the ballistic missile stockpiles Hezbollah had amassed.”
The almost two-month-long operation, which included a limited ground offensive, came to a halt last month with a ceasefire agreement, after Hezbollah lost almost its entire leadership and was left with greatly diminished capabilities.
Speaking to the objectives of the Lebanon operation, Netanyahu said it also targeted Hezbollah’s underground network in south Lebanon, which was similar to the tunnels Hamas used for its October 7 attack last year and throughout the ensuing war with Israel.
The terror group’s tunnel system “was going to be Hezbollah’s main thrust for an invasion of the Galilee. They could reach Haifa, easily, and beyond, The subterranean network turned out to be enormous—much bigger than we thought,” he said. (The Israeli military says the vast tunnel network was to be used in a planned invasion, though only one tunnel was found to actually cross the border, by a few meters.)
Netanyahu noted that he had overruled internal opposition to a campaign against Hezbollah by some in Israel who argued that “we’re going to get a ceasefire anyway… so, why not skip the fighting?”
The prime minister’s response: “It makes a hell of a difference whether we make the ceasefire after we cut Hezbollah down to size or after we leave it intact.”
‘It’s not easy to be president’
Netanyahu has also found himself at odds with the United States throughout the war in Gaza, with Washington often criticizing Jerusalem over civilian deaths and the difficult humanitarian situation in Gaza — but the prime minister acknowledged America’s overarching support, and praised US President Joe Biden for his solidarity visit at the beginning of the war, which made him the first US premier to visit Israel during wartime.
Netanyahu said he understood the pressure Biden was under at times to take a hard line with Israel. “The US withheld critical weapons,” Netanyahu said, citing delays in shipments of heavy bombs.
“It’s not easy to be president, let’s face it, with these very radical fringes in his party. It wasn’t easy to do what Mr. Biden did” in supporting of Israel, he added, including during Israel’s counterattack on Iran this past October.
Netanyahu also told the WSJ he remains hopeful that US support will remain strong during President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming second term in the White House. The prime minister expressed optimism that the new president would help bring about another hostage deal in Gaza, as well as a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia.
“It would be the natural expansion of the Abraham Accords that we forged under President Trump’s leadership,” he said, referring to a series of normalization agreements with Arab states that were brokered under Trump’s first administration.
Netanyahu also reiterated his stance against a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, saying he would only agree to a temporary pause as part of a hostage release deal, and reiterating his plan to see Hamas completely dismantled.
“I’m not going to agree to end the war before we remove Hamas,” he said. “We’re not going to leave them in power in Gaza, 30 miles from Tel Aviv. It’s not going to happen.”
His critics have warned that this could leave the majority of the remaining hostages languishing in Gaza indefinitely.
It is believed that 96 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF. Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
Hamas had long asserted that it would not agree to a ceasefire without an Israeli commitment to end the war. Recent reports have indicated it may have softened its position to allow a limited release of so-called humanitarian cases without such a commitment, though it would likely hold on to the majority of the hostages until the final phase of a deal, when a permanent cessation of hostilities is agreed upon.
Netanyahu has also thus far refused to allow a role for the Palestinian Authority in the post-war management of Gaza.
Israel’s security establishment has warned this robs Jerusalem of a viable alternative to Hamas’s rule, and all but ensures that the IDF will continue fighting the terror group for the foreseeable future, as vacuums temporarily created by military operations are re-filled by Hamas shortly thereafter.