Israel attacked an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base in Iran and assassinated a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett revealed on Thursday.
Bennett, who was Israeli prime minister from 13 June 2021 to 30 June 2022, made the admission in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal.
"I directed Israel’s security forces to make Tehran pay for its decision to sponsor terror. Enough impunity," Bennett wrote in his op-ed. "After Iran launched two failed UAV attacks on Israel in February 2022, Israel destroyed a UAV base on Iranian soil. In March 2022, Iran’s terror unit attempted to kill Israeli tourists in Turkey and failed. Shortly thereafter, the commander of that very unit was assassinated in the center of Tehran."
Israel rarely admits publicly to attacking Iran directly, but the Islamic Republic has long been a target of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his several tenures in power.
Iran's Middle Eastern Proxies
Bennett's op-ed, published under the title "The US and Israel Need to Take Iran On Directly" calls for the two allies to make Iran's ayatollahs "pay for sowing chaos through their Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies."Iran has widely been regarded as the major destabilizing element in the Middle East, channeling millions of dollars, weapons, military expertise, and training to Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Last week, a senior IRGC commander, Sayyed Reza Mousavi, was killed by an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria, for which Iranian officials warned that Israel would pay for the killing.
The Islamic Republic is also seen as the driving force behind Hamas's October 7 attacks on Israel, when 1,200 people were killed and over 240 taken hostage by the terror group and taken back to Gaza.
"The Iranian regime is at the center of most of the Middle East’s problems and much of global terror," the former prime minister wrote. "Yet inexplicably, almost nobody is touching it.""The US and Israel must set the clear goal of bringing down Iran’s evil regime. Not only is this possible, it is vital for the safety and security of the Middle East—and the entire civilized world," Bennett's piece concludes. It was later revealed that Bennett published the op-ed's sensitive military information without the approval of the IDF's censor unit.Bennett responded that "The problem with Iran is not the publication of the moves we made against it that were already known in the past, but that Iran ambushes us through Hamas and Hezbollah and even the Houthis, and the governments over the past decade speak and talk but do not exact a painful price from the leaders of Iran. "