Two years ago, dozens of Israeli fighter jets flew over the Mediterranean Sea, simulating an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities—a drill that the IDF openly labeled as a “long-range flight, aerial refueling, and striking distant targets.”

The goal of the exercise wasn’t just to scare the Iranians. It was also meant to send a message to the Biden administration: the Israeli Air Force is training to carry out the operation on its own, even though the chances of success would be much higher if the U.S.—with its arsenal of bunker-busting bombs—joined the attack.

In interviews, former and current Israeli officials have expressed doubts about whether Israel can inflict significant damage on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. Pentagon officials have quietly wondered in recent days whether the Israelis are preparing to go it alone, The New York Times reported.

President Biden warned Israel against striking nuclear or energy sites, stating that any response should be “proportionate” to Iran’s attack on Israel last week

According to the report, Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran will likely focus on military bases, and perhaps some intelligence or leadership sites, and avoid an attack on nuclear facilities just yet. After much discussion, Israel seems to have decided to reserve nuclear sites for later, if the Iranians escalate the conflict with counterstrikes.

However, there is a growing call within Israel, echoed by some in the U.S., to seize the moment – “to set back, for years or more, an Iranian capability that American intelligence officials and outside experts increasingly say is at the threshold of producing a bomb.”

The debate raises new questions. If Israel does attack Iranian nuclear facilities, how seriously can it set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities? For 22 years, Israel’s focus of attention has been Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, located about three stories underground in the desert.

Israel has developed plans to destroy or disable the giant centrifuge facility. But hitting it would be an act of war, which the US is trying to avoid. The US actively blocked Israel from acquiring the bombs it would need to destroy Fordow, another nuclear facility built deep in a mountain, with President George W. Bush refusing Israel’s requests for bigger bunker-busting bombs and the B-2 bombers needed to deliver them.

“The nuclear target is a very difficult target,” said Gen. Frank McKenzie, who was in charge of the Iran war plans when he ran United States Central Command. “There are a lot of other alternatives to that target,” he said, adding that many of them — including energy infrastructure — would be easier to execute.

The report added new concerns about Iran’s nuclear future, including the fact that Russia is sharing technology with Iran on nuclear issues and that the Iranian nuclear program will become increasingly hard to attack.

“Several years ago, under the watchful eyes of American and Israeli satellites, Iran began digging a vast tunnel network just south of Natanz, for what the United States believes is a new enrichment center, Iran’s largest. It is not yet up and running. In the past — when Israel destroyed not-yet-complete nuclear reactors in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 — that is exactly the moment it chose to mount pre-emptive attacks,” the report concludes.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)