In normal times, senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials, alongside the prime minister and the political echelon, would now be engaged with full vigor in an attempt to stop Iran, which is close to becoming a nuclear threshold state.
An International Atomic Energy Agency report published a month ago, centered on the accumulation of uranium enriched to 60%, blocking supervision and control, and expanding enrichment facilities unhindered, should have caused the West in general and Israel in particular to take active action, just before it will no longer be possible to stop the ayatollahs' regime. But it's all focused on Israel's war against Hamas, Iran's number one, and Hezbollah's threat, Iranian proxy number two, while Tehran itself conveniently scratches the red line.
"Don't miss progress"
In response to a request from Israel Hayom, political sources said they were aware of Iran's violations and its nuclear progress, and even said that the NSC and intelligence agencies hold regular discussions. "We are closely monitoring developments to make sure there is no progress beyond what we know," one of the sources said.
Iran: The IRGC held a huge exercise in the south of the country. archive
Israeli surveillance raises two assumptions: first, at the level of enriched material, the Iranians have made great progress, to the point where it will take less than two weeks to move to 90 percent enrichment; Second, Iran does not have weapons for transporting bombs. In other words, according to Israeli assessments (which should be questioned after October <>), it is assumed that Iran does not, as of this writing, have the capability to achieve a military nuclear program.
However, while Western eyes in general and those of the United States in particular are fixed on what is happening in Israel vis-à-vis local enemies, in addition to the Red Sea arena vis-à-vis the Houthis, the breakthrough could be rapid. Just last Friday, Mossad chief Dadi Barnea raised the issue in his meeting with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. The two also discussed the Houthi-Iranian threat to trade routes – a problem that Israel made sure to go global in order to enable American treatment of it. Reminder: Before October 7, Israel felt that Iran would try to prevent the agreement with Saudi Arabia by various means. The rejection was achieved through the massacre, but the Iranian threat remains.
Doubt the appreciation
"The attention to the local arena created the impression that the Iranian issue is less 'bothering,'" says Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of the research division at Military Intelligence and a current member of the Misgav Institute. "We saw in the IAEA report that they continue to accumulate more enriched material and develop the advanced centrifuge system, and impose far-reaching restrictions on the nuclear program supervision system. All this is happening at the same time as dealing with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, which deepens their entry into the reality of a nuclear threshold state."
Regarding the assessments in Israel about the Iranian regime's progress toward a nuclear program, Kuperwasser says: "If there is any lesson we need to learn from October 7, it is that every assessment must be combined with the degree of security in that assessment. The fact that they say that nothing is happening in the field of uranium enrichment is an assessment that should be questioned. When you reach this level of uranium enrichment that can be converted militarily in a short time, the temptation to move on grows."
Barel. "Low probability of an agreement with Iran", photo: None
Halit Barel, a former director of the National Security Council and a researcher of nuclear deterrence, is focusing her attention on the American distancing from agreements with Iran as they were before October 7. "If before the war the United States tried to reach an agreement with Iran in exchange for economic relief, now we are facing a very low probability of a temporary agreement or agreements as they talked about at the time," estimates Barel, who is also a founding member of the Dvora Forum. According to her, the reason for the distancing from the agreement is also the Iranian use of its proxies in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East against the United States, which creates fierce opposition in Congress to the agreement.
Waving the threat
Meanwhile, the region seems to have created the opposite deterrence: instead of deterring Iran from going nuclear, it is the one using the threat to prevent the West from acting against it. "The Iranians are employing latent deterrence: they have not reached a nuclear program, but they are using the idea of reaching enrichment to 90 percent, and this deters the superpowers from acting against them," Barel says, "Today Iran is a nuclear threshold state and it uses approaching the nuclear threshold as a deterrent without using the program itself."
"The U.S. is acting as if Iran is nuclear." Kuperwasser,
According to Kuperwasser, "For a long time, the United States has behaved as if Iran is nuclear. This is Israel's mission, and people are less asking themselves what the U.S. will do but what Israel will do. Ostensibly, the transition to military-grade enrichment is perceived as a red line by the Americans as well, but we also remember senior US officials saying that they would not accept the deployment of nuclear weapons – that is, their red line is further from the one we knew. But something also happened here on October 7. Certainly in light of Iran's closer relations with Russia and China and the implications of Iran's buildup on the Middle East, the shipments to Hezbollah, and support for the Houthis.
"There is a supreme effort here by the Iranians to change the reality in the Middle East, and everyone understands what Iran's role is in this campaign, but Israel is not focusing its efforts on Iran. It operates, for example, against Iranian targets in Syria, but beyond that there is no one available to deal with the Iranian issue centrally. The reality in which only its proxies are handled is a very convenient reality for Iranians. If Israel defeats Hamas and deals with the Hezbollah threat in Lebanon, the pendulum will swing in the opposite direction, and then it will be interesting to know how it will affect the Iranians."
Documentation of the demolitions in Beit Lahia following Israeli Air Force airstrikes // Arab networks
This question remains open even in the conversation with Barel, and the changing reality in the Middle East may make it more relevant than ever: how and when Iran will act, if and when Israel "handles" its proxy here. "If Iran were already nuclear today and close to losing its proxy in Gaza, it is inconceivable to assume that it would send nuclear clues to stop us," Kuperwasser concludes.
The American Goal: To Contain
And at the moment, as was evident in the visit of the US Secretary of Defense last night, the US is busy defending itself against the threats directed from Iran. "From a military point of view, the United States is very cautious, it is almost completely defensive, and there is an attempt to contain this development," says Barel. "The entire American military presence in the region is intended to prevent a real multi-front war, so that we will complete the mission in Gaza. They also focus on not breaking the agreements reached between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and in practice avoid entering into a direct confrontation with Iran, which in the meantime is leaving without paying a direct price for all its actions in the region."
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