With Tehran Looking Vulnerable, Washington Steps Up Pressure Campaign on Israel To Avoid Attacking Iran’s Nuclear Program

A year-long pattern of America pressuring Israel to hold back while it battles Tehran and its many proxies is intensifying just as a window of opportunity opens to scale back the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Washington is “offering a package that includes an extensive diplomatic defense and additional arms, if Israel refrains from attacking certain targets in Iran,” Kan News reported Sunday, citing unidentified “sources familiar” with the situation. The apparent incentives seem to come with an implied threat: If Israel ignores Washington’s warnings, President Biden might stop protecting Israel at the United Nations, or join President Macron of France in an arm embargo. “It’s certainly more extortion than compensation, when you consider the White House is currently holding back weapons and already planning a UN surprise on Palestinian statehood in the lame duck,” a former White House official, Richard Goldberg, tells the Sun.American officials are frantically attempting to deter Israel from hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities. The U.S. Central Command chief, General Michael Kurilla, consulted with top Israeli security officials on Sunday, and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, is due for a quick visit at Washington on Wednesday. “We support Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran,” Mr. Biden said Monday in a statement commemorating the atrocities of October 7, 2023. As Israelis marked the somber anniversary, though, a barrage of rockets and missiles from Gaza and Lebanon has sent many to bomb shelters. A ballistic missile from Yemen put most of the country on the alert and briefly shut down Ben Gurion airport before it was intercepted by the Israeli air force. The assaults on Israel by Iran’s proxies since last October have included 13,200 rockets from Gaza, 12,400 rocket and ballistic missiles launched from Lebanon, 180 ballistic missiles and suicide drones from Yemen, and 60 drones from Syria, the Israel Defesne Force reported Monday. Iran itself launched 400 ballistic missiles, including a barrage last week. Even as he recited Israel’s right of defense following the latest Islamic Republic attack, Mr. Biden urged caution. While initially indicating he might not oppose targeting Iranian oil installations, the president later said, “If I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields.” He was even more adamant last week when asked about a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying, “The answer is no.” Washington officials are now publicly expressing doubts that Israel could deal a significant blow to their enemy’s fast-advancing nuclear program.“Bombing Iranian nuclear facilities requires air capabilities that only Washington possesses,” an unidentified American defense official tells Sky News Arabia. “Israel has some of the capabilities required to strike such facilities, which are geographically complex.” A former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector, David Albright, disagrees. “The odds of the Iranian regime building nukes has just gone up, yet it is uniquely vulnerable,” he writes on X. Israel, he adds, could target Iran’s three enrichment plants, its stored centrifuges, the means to make them, and its stocks of 20 percent and 60 percent enriched uranium. Tehran’s “ring of fire” proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah, are weakened, Mr. Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, writes. “If ever there was a time, justified, called for, less risky, to consider seriously damaging Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities, that time is now.” Mr. Goldberg, now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says Israel mostly needs America’s “support to remove Tehran’s extensional threat before it’s too late. The world becomes a lot more dangerous for America the day the mullahs get the bomb, and not just because of the looming threat of a second Holocaust.”Yet, even while expressing sympathy on the October 7 anniversary, world leaders are increasingly critical of Israel. “The pain is still here, as acute as a year ago,” Mr. Macron said Monday in a statement posted in Hebrew on X. Last week, though, he called for a global arms embargo on Israel. Pressed to similarly muzzle Israel, Vice President Harris told the CBS program “60 Minutes” on Sunday that America is “making clear our principles, which include the need for humanitarian aid, the need for this war to end, the need for a deal to be done which would release the hostages and create a cease-fire.”Public pressure over alleged IDF use of excessive force and of targeting Gaza civilians has prompted Mr. Biden to at least temporarily limit deliveries of some arms systems. Yet, on Monday Channel 12 cited an unidentified Palestinian source close to Hamas, who said that 80 percent of the more than 40,000 people who were killed in Gaza are either members of the terror organization or their family relatives. “It is time for us to stand with Israel,” a former British prime minister, Boris Johnson, writes. “Bring back moral clarity. Bring back the hostages.”

With Tehran Looking Vulnerable, Washington Steps Up Pressure Campaign on Israel To Avoid Attacking Iran’s Nuclear Program

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