Top IDF officials sure Iran will try to make a nuclear comeback, but say they'll be ready

In fact, top sources said that they will be even more ready in the future, given the confidence and experience gained from this war.

It was just one of many IDF reveals on Thursday about what led up to the war, what happened during the war, and expectations for the future.

Top IDF officials revealed that even in early 2023, the military started to significantly shift its structure, personnel, and resources toward being ready for a larger attack on Iran.

However, at that stage, the attack was still focused overwhelmingly on Iran’s nuclear program.

By the summer of 2023, The Jerusalem Post was presented with a classified potential scenario for attacking Iran, which contained a much wider range of targets beyond the nuclear program, and yet even then, the concrete actions for attacking were still more limited to attacking the nuclear program.

From October-December 2023, and then with a jump forward from May-August 2024, the IDF shifted its thinking from Iran as a “third circle” faraway threat because of its 1,500 kilometer distance, to being a “first circle” threat, effectively on Israel’s border.

This started to evolve due to the extreme increase in aggressiveness of Iran’s proxies against Israel – from Hamas, Hezbollah, and in Syria and Iraq.

But this thinking jumped forward when Tehran attacked Israel with over 100 ballistic missiles and almost 200 drones in April 2024.

After Israel and Iran exchanged significant attacks against each other again in October 2024, the IDF already felt far more experienced for planning a concrete widespread attack against its mortal enemy, far beyond just the nuclear program.

In January 2025, both the Iran desk and the broader Analysis Division of IDF intelligence produced written warnings that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, especially in weaponization activities, was moving forward in newly dangerous ways.

Another reason the military wanted to attack not much later than June was that intelligence showed the Iranians were learning a lot from more limited IDF attacks in April and October 2024, and it was concerned that its qualitative advantage was starting to be erased by these adjustments.

Around five months before the war, the IDF was already moving all kinds of forces and infrastructure to be more ready for war whenever the battle might break out – something which led to almost no damage to any IDF power despite 500 Iranian ballistic missiles.

Just last month, IDF Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Shlomi Binder issued his own highest-level warning in writing that Tehran’s nuclear program might only be a few months from developing a nuclear weapon, adding that the short time period left might be too short to notice and prevent a breakout to a nuclear weapon if Israel did not act soon.

At this point, Jerusalem was deep in conversation with the Washington about wanting to attack, but up until US President Donald Trump saw Israel’s fantastic results and that 80% of Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles had been destroyed by Israel in the relevant key areas, he did not commit, and the IDF at most hoped Washington would weigh in.

Had Trump not ordered the attack on the Fordow nuclear facility, the IDF would have attempted its own attack on the facility, however weaker the results might have been.

One trick Israel and the US did pull off in coordination last month was flooding the media with stories about a potential attack until Iran started to disregard these stories as “the boy who cried wolf,” restoring to Jerusalem the upper hand and the element of surprise.

When the war started, the IDF was concerned that Tehran would fire off 500 ballistic missiles within a few minutes to a few hours.

This was why the military sent the whole country into safe rooms at 3 a.m. on Friday, June 13.

The absence of an attack for much of the day was a byproduct of Israel’s massive successful surprise, setting back Tehran’s ability to respond for much of the first day to an extent not fully imagined in the most optimistic scenarios of IDF planners.

Eventually, the military would drop 4,600 bombs on Iran, with the Islamic Republic only hitting Israel in residential areas 36 times.

The 36 hits came from 18 salvos totaling more than 500 ballistic missiles, four of which had cluster- or scatter-bomb capabilities.

Iran also launched over 1,000 drones at the Jewish state during the 12-day war, with only two hitting anything, no Israelis being killed, and the only death being a Syrian woman who was hit by a drone that crashed prematurely before getting to Israel.

Top IDF officials said that it turned out that Israel was able to use Iran’s size against it, because the giant country had to defend a huge surface area, whereas Israel could reduce Iran’s missiles into a bottleneck as they all took a narrow trajectory to hit the exponentially smaller Jewish state.

Another new revelation was that one major effort by the IDF in recent months has been to keep Turkey out of Syria and especially areas of Syrian airspace, in order to make it easier for Israel to send its aircraft over Syria undetected to Iran on the day the order to attack would be given.

Curiously, and despite statements by Israeli political officials, top IDF officials said that regime change in Iran was never a priority.

Rather, they said that top internal regime power centers were not even hit until near the end of the war when it was decided to hit them to jump the level of pressure on the regime to agree to a ceasefire.

Also, interestingly, IRGC Quds Force Chief Esmail Ghaani was not killed, because he was not targetable during the time that the war was taking place.