Iran Considering Attacks Ahead of Elections in America and Israel

Signs are growing that the Islamic Republic, under growing economic pressure, is considering a military escalation this fall, hoping for a Shabikhooneh Aban, which Iran watchers say is a proximate Farsi language translation for “October surprise.”As the midterm elections and Israel national poll near, the Trump administration is tightening an economic noose on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the de facto rulers of Iran. Striking America or Israel and launching a doomsday scenario could be a way out of economic pressures and growing public dissent. The Iranians “like to attack during Jewish holidays because they hate Jews, but we are prepared, both defensively and offensively,” the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said on Wednesday. The upcoming three weeks of Hebrew calendar holidays — Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot — begin on September 11.Different possible dates for an Iranian attack aimed at influencing elections could include the last week of September, when world leaders arrive at New York for the annual gathering at the United Nations. Israel’s polls on October 27 could be another opportunity for Iranians to strike the Jewish state, likely forcing America to engage in a major battle ahead of the November 3 midterm midterms. “The Iranian regime would love war right now,” a reporter at the anti-regime Iran International, Negar Mojtahedi, tells The New York Sun. “They’re talking about the November midterms all the time.” She quotes a top Tehran official predicting on national television that if Iran can raise global oil prices, Mr. Trump would lose the election.“They’re terrified of an uprising, terrified of the people of Iran,” Ms. Mojtahedi says. “And they know that there is nothing they can do to bring about meaningful change to make lives better in Iran.” An average Iranian family, 70 percent of the population, she adds, can no longer afford meat or any other source of protein. Violence, she adds, is the only solution the regime knows. If the regime spent resources “on their own people, the Iranian people would be better off,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on Wednesday. Instead, he said, Tehran spends all its money on arms and on proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. For now the Revolutionary Guard are introducing new types of drones and missiles in their attacks against American bases in the region. “Russia has been secretly helping Iran develop advanced supersonic cruise missiles in one of the most significant known transfers of strategic military technology from Moscow to Tehran,” the Financial Times reported Wednesday. An American base in southern Jordan on Tuesday was struck by Kheibar Shekan, or “Castle Breaker,” missiles, according to Iranian press outlets. The projectile is a “a solid-fuel, mobile-launch missile with 900-mile range, maneuverable warhead, and satellite guidance that can turn on a dime,” USA Today’s Josh Meyer, writes on X. It can slip past American missile defense systems, he adds. On the nuclear front Iran has “lost years’ worth of effort, equipment, facilities, centrifuges, so they have been set back dramatically,” an arms proliferation watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Andrea Stricker, tells the Sun. Yet, she adds, “We do have missing nuclear material, unaccounted for nuclear material enough for up to 22 nuclear weapons in the low and high enrichment.”A nuclear watchdog, the Institute for Science and International Studies, published new satellite images showing a previously uninspected low-enriched uranium storage facility at Natanz. America must demand that inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency get access to Iran’s facilities, Ms. Stricker says. Israeli sources say that 80 percent of Iran’s nuclear program was destroyed this year and last June. “It’s reasonable to believe that Iran would attack us” in the coming weeks, the head of Rafael, a top Israeli arms manufacturer, Yuval Steinitz, told Kan News Wednesday. “But if so, it’d be an opportunity for us to hit back and destroy the nuclear program’s remaining 20 percent.” Iran may therefore refrain from attacking Israel, which it was careful to spare in recent attacks on American targets in the region. Such an attack might also lead to a bad political outcome, from Iran’s point of view.“Tehran fears that an attack on the eve of elections could in fact boost the Republicans and Bibi,” a top Iran researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. “The Iranians fear ‘crazy’ Israel. We would take out top regime officials, so they’d strike us only if everything else fails.”

Iran Considering Attacks Ahead of Elections in America and Israel

Iran Considering Attacks Ahead of Elections in America and Israel

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