The Israel Defense Forces launched “Operation Rising Lion” against Iran after an intelligence breakthrough revealed that Tehran was close to weaponizing its nuclear program, Israel’s Army Radio reported on Sunday.
Israeli intelligence reportedly uncovered “golden information” that the Islamic regime had assembled an elite “weapons group” in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel.
While Tehran already possessed enough enriched uranium for roughly 15 bombs, the weapons group had reached the experimental phase over the past months, with successful tests confirming rapid technical progress.
Israel’s defense establishment concluded that the Islamic Republic was mere weeks away from being capable of assembling a working nuclear weapon, with warnings indicating that its true capabilities might even be further developed, according to Sunday’s Army Radio report.
Early on Friday, Israeli Air Force fighter jets launched attacks on dozens of targets, including military and nuclear sites, in a “preemptive, precise, combined offensive” campaign against Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
The IDF said the attacks were based on “high-quality intelligence” and “in response to the Iranian regime’s ongoing aggression against Israel.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday morning said that the operation would “continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat,” vowing to remove “the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
In recent years, and also after the beginning of the war against Hamas in Gaza, the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate has analyzed vast quantities of intelligence files that reveal the Tehran regime has a concrete program, which it calls “The Destruction of Israel Plan,” according to the army.
In parallel with Tehran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, the regime has focused on producing ‘tens of thousands” of missiles and drones, while advancing its concrete plans to carry out a “combined ground offensive against Israel on multiple fronts,” the IDF revealed on Friday.
According to the military, the Islamic Republic’s war plan would start with a “large-scale rocket and missile barrage,” launched by Tehran’s terrorist proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and across the Middle East.
Amid the aerial assault, thousands of Islamic terrorists were to invade Israel from the Gaza Strip, Judea, Samaria, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Yemen. The Iranian-backed forces would seek to “destroy the State of Israel and establish a Palestinian state on its ruins,” the IDF revealed.