The Government of Israel notified the White House on Thursday that the attack on Iran would take place in the next 24 or 48 hours, according to several US media outlets.
Tel Aviv also assured Joe Biden's government that Iran's nuclear facilities would not be the target of the bombing, according to the NBC television network.. Isfahan has key facilities in Iran's nuclear program.
Washington has also confirmed that its Armed Forces did not participate in the attack.. At the moment there is no official reaction from the US Government, which wants the situation to calm down and would have preferred if Tel Aviv had not attacked.
US President Joe Biden himself had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attack Iran.. The political website Axios reported this week that Biden told Netanyahu: “You've had a victory, take it.”
The “victory” that Bien spoke of was the shooting down of the vast majority of the approximately 320 missiles and drones launched by Iran against Israel on the night of Saturday to Sunday.. A considerable part of these mills – more than a third of the total – were shot down by the Armed Forces of the US, France, the United Kingdom and Jordan.. The rest were shot down by Israel's air defense, at a cost ranging between 520 and 1,225 million euros, according to the Jewish State's own estimates by analysts.
Israel, however, decided to attack. According to the US media, the initial date of the attack was going to be Monday, but, under pressure from Washington, Netanyahu decided to wait.. Likewise, the US forced Netanyahu to reduce the dimensions of the military action.
Washington hopes the bombing was little more than symbolic, just as the one Iran launched against Israel on Saturday night was.. In fact, Tehran had warned the air traffic authorities of Saudi Arabia and other countries the day before that there would be a significant number of unregistered and unidentified aircraft flying over the region in the following days.. It was a subtle way of saying that military devices were going to take off from Iran.
ATTACK-COUNTERATTACK DYNAMICS
However, in the US there is concern about the possibility of a reaction from Tehran that would establish a dynamic of attacks and counterattacks between both countries.. The fact that the 'hardest' sectors are in power in both Israel and Iran is a factor that aggravates the uncertainty.
Iran attacked Israel to 'save face' after that country's bombing of its consulate in Damascus (Syria) on April 1. Now, Israel seems to have done the same to show Iran that attacks on its territory do not go unpunished.. The question is whether Iran is going to counterattack directly, through its allies in the region – such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon – or if it is going to choose to do nothing.
That Israel carried out the attack despite US opposition highlights the incredible influence of Tel Aviv over Washington. The United States gives military aid to Israel equivalent to almost four times what the USSR gave to Cuba during the Cold War (adjusting prices for inflation). According to the Bloomberg news agency, the US also pays a third of the Gaza war. Even weapons systems that are entirely Israeli and over which Tel Aviv has complete control have been paid for by the American taxpayer.. This is the case of the 'Iron Dome' anti-missile system, which Tel Aviv has repeatedly refused to deliver to Ukraine – despite the fact that the president of that country, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish – and which will be one of the large beneficiaries of the aid package of 14 billion dollars (more than 13 billion euros) for Israel that the US Government is going to approve this Saturday.
The US has air defense systems in all the countries that Israel has had to fly over to attack Iran, with the exception of Syria – aligned with Russia – and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the Persian Gulf. The air defense systems of these countries have also had to detect Israel's aircraft.
For the Government of Joe Biden, the attack is another failure in the cascade of disasters that has occurred in the Middle East since the terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.. Washington has failed to try to get Israel to carry out a targeted offensive against terrorist targets in Gaza, instead of carrying out a conventional attack that has devastated much of the territory.
Nor has it managed to get Tel Aviv to allow large amounts of humanitarian aid into the enclave, which is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.. Washington has informed Iran through diplomatic channels that it did not participate in any way – neither by providing information nor with any type of support – in the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, in which eight members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and which has unleashed this wave of attacks and counterattacks.
In the White House and in the Democratic Party, there are those who believe that Benjamin Netanyahu – whose bad personal relationship with the American president is as notorious as his closeness to 'Trumpism' and, especially, his friendship with the former president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner – is carrying out an escalation in the conflict to drag the US into the war.
On the part of the Republican Party, however, there are no fissures in support for Israel, which is summarized in the phrase of former President Donald Trump, who has urged Tel Aviv to “finish the job” in Gaza. Kushner has criticized the fact that a beach tourism infrastructure has not been created in Gaza under the Hamas administration, which was a clear reference to the Palestinian economic failure, although there have been those who have taken it as a covert proposal for Israel to annex the coast of the region and expel the Palestinians from it.
This situation has caused the Ibex 35 to start this Friday's session, the last of the week, with a fall of 0.8%, standing at 10,678 points, in a context marked by tensions.