The Israel Defense Forces’ “Operation Rising Lion” against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs will forever be “etched in the history of our people,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Monday.
“In Iran, a threat was created for us that was no less strong and perhaps even greater than the pan-Arab threat at its peak, and it still threatens us,” Netanyahu stated during a meeting with the IDF’s General Staff Forum, which includes around 30 of the military’s top commanders.
After the Jewish People went into exile some 2,000 years ago, they “lost the ability to oppose those who attacked it,” declared Netanyahu. “We became as a leaf driven in the wind, a people that experienced exile, pogroms, murders and, in the end, the worst act of murder in history.
When Theodor Herzl and others founded modern political Zionism in the late 1800s, “most of them did not think that the attacks on the Jewish people would end with the establishment of the State of Israel,” he said.
Rather, the fathers of Zionism believed in employing “diplomatic and military force to oppose these attacks,” according to the Israeli leader.
“This is the line that separates between the generations of Jewish history and what has happened in our generation—the establishment of the state and the IDF,” Netanyahu said in his remarks to the military.
The Islamic Republic built “three axes of annihilation,” he said, listing the nuclear and ballistic missile threat, as well as Tehran’s plan to invade the Jewish state through its regional terrorist proxies and “conquer the Middle East” after Israel would be destroyed.
Israel “was like a person who has two cancerous tumors—one was the nuclear threat and the second was the missile threat,” said Netanyahu. “If you do not excise them, you die. It could be that you excise them and they return, like you treat cancer. But if you do not excise them, we die.”
According to the prime minister, there was “no question” among the political and military leadership regarding the action against Tehran.
“We had to make this decision. And the way in which it was made, unanimously by the political echelon, and unanimously by the IDF command, under your outstanding leadership, which improved exceptionally on a daily and weekly basis,” said the premier.
The U.S. military’s involvement in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities “was not a condition” for launching the military operation, he said, while noting that Jerusalem “did everything to get them on board.”
However, “none of this would have been possible without the intensive and superb operation that will be etched in the history of our people, and, in my view, in the history of the world, certainly in the military history, which I believe everyone will come to study,” he concluded.
Speaking alongside Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz praised “Operation Rising Lion” as “one of the most complex, significant and courageous decisions the State of Israel has made since its founding.”
Katz thanked Netanyahu for “having led the struggle against the Iranian threat for many years—both domestically and internationally—and for standing firm in his position that Iran must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, despite numerous pressures and challenges.”
“There is no army in the world that could have done what you did—you showed the entire world the might of the IDF and the power of the State of Israel,” the minister stated in his remarks to the General Staff Forum.
The Israeli-U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities left the regime’s abilities “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday.
An Israel Atomic Energy Commission report concluded last week that the airstrikes targeting Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant destroyed critical infrastructure, rendering the facility “inoperable.”
The IAEC assessment said that the American assault, “combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program,” set back Tehran’s abilities to develop nuclear weapons “by many years.”
“The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material,” continued the IAEC report, the conclusions of which were published by the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu has said that “many opportunities” have opened up in the wake of the campaign against Iran, including “broad” regional moves.
“Many opportunities have opened up … as a result of this victory. First of all, to rescue the hostages,” he said Sunday, referring to the captives in Gaza. “Of course, we will also need to resolve the Gaza issue and defeat Hamas, but I believe we will accomplish both tasks,” Netanyahu added.