Israel: Iran strike needed to end ‘existential threat’

The joint U.S.-Israeli campaign was necessary to eliminate an “existential threat” from Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and to preempt an expected large-scale attack, the Prime Minister’s Office said on Thursday.

“After ‘Operation Rising Lion’ and ‘Midnight Hammer’ six months ago now, the Iranian regime began building new underground bunkers that would make their ballistic missile program and atomic bomb program immune within months. This was an unacceptable threat,” Shosh Bedrosian, spokeswoman for the PMO’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, said in her first press briefing since “Operation Roaring Lion” was launched on Saturday.

“Even more urgently, we had to embark on the operation because we had such strong reason to believe the Islamic Republic wanted to attack Israel and American forces in the Middle East first. That is why it was urgent for the United States and Israel to act in time to prevent that Iranian attack from happening,” she continued.

Caroline Glick, international affairs adviser and spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former JNS senior contributing editor, said in an interview with ABC News on Wednesday that Israel had been working “very, very closely” with Washington on the Iran issue for months and warned of Iran’s rapidly expanding missile production.

Iran “was going to produce a hundred missiles a month” while Israel can produce “seven interceptor missiles a month,” she said, noting that such an imbalance “would have overwhelmed our defenses—not only for Israel and the United States, but for Arab countries and beyond.”

Glick said the ballistic missiles, which she described as “the size of buses,” had already caused lethal damage and would allow Iran to create an “impermeable” offensive shield behind which it could complete nuclear weapons work in hardened underground facilities.

“From that perspective, it was imperative to move,” she said, adding that Israeli and U.S. leaders were “very concerned” that Iran “was going to preemptively attack, and we moved when we did.”