On 30 September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed what he called “the noble people of Iran”. In a short speech, he promised that Iran would be “liberated sooner than people think”. That sentence was widely interpreted as the pre-announcement of an attack on Iran that Israeli leaders have been discussing with renewed fervour for several months.
The moment seemed favourable for Israel: Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, was assassinated on 27 September in an Israeli attack in Dahieh, a suburb of Beirut. The militant group seemed in disarray, with all of its top leadership eliminated. Without Hezbollah and its strength and proximity to Israel’s northern border, Iran was finally deprived of a serious deterrent against an Israeli attack.
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