NEW YORK (Dispatches) -- Several current and former senior Israeli military officials and experts have said that the occupying regime lacks the ability to pull off an assault on Iran’s nuclear program, the New York Times reported Saturday.
The Zionist regime’s war minister has reportedly ordered his forces to prepare a military option, warning that Israel would take matters into its own hands if current talks underway in Vienna did not sufficiently constrain Iran.
One current high-ranking security official said it would take at least two years to prepare an attack that could cause significant damage to Iran’s nuclear program, the paper said.
A strike “to destroy the dozens of nuclear sites in distant parts of Iran — the kind of attack Israeli officials have threatened — would be beyond the current resources of the Israeli armed forces,” it added.
“It’s very difficult — I would say even impossible — to launch a campaign that would take care of all these sites,” Relik Shafir, a retired Israeli air force general who was a pilot in a 1981 strike on an Iraqi nuclear facility, told the paper.
According to the Times, the recent bluster of a military attack on Iran is part of Israel’s pressure campaign to make sure that the countries negotiating with Iran in Vienna do not agree to what Israeli officials consider “a bad deal”.
Until now, the occupying regime has tried to undermine Iran’s nuclear program, through a combination of aggressive diplomacy and clandestine terrorist attacks.
It has waged a shadow war through espionage, targeted assassinations, sabotage and cyberattacks — smaller-scale operations that it has never formally claimed.
The Zionist regime, the Times claimed, secretly considered mounting full-scale airstrikes in 2012 before abandoning them.
In September, the head of the Israeli armed forces, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, bragged that large parts of a military budget increase had been allocated to preparing a strike on Iran. Early this month, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, said Israel would do “whatever it takes” to stop Iran’s nuclear energy program.
This month, during a visit to the United States, war minister Benny Gantz publicly boasted that he had ordered the occupying regime’s military to prepare for a possible military strike on Iran.
“But Israeli experts and military officials say that Israel currently lacks the ability to deal Iran’s nuclear program a knockout blow by air,” the New York Times wrote.
One official said Israel did not have the ability to inflict serious damage to the Fordow nuclear plant, a fuel enrichment center buried deep under a mountain on a military base in northern Iran, it added.
Iran has dozens of nuclear sites, some deep underground that would be hard for Israeli bombs to penetrate and destroy, Shafir said. The Israeli air force does not have warplanes large enough to carry the latest bunker-busting bombs, he added.
One current senior security official said Israel did not have the ability to inflict any significant damage to the underground facilities at Natanz and Fordow, the Times said.
Such a plan, it said, would be complicated by a shortage of refueling planes that may have to travel more than 2,000 miles round trip, crossing over Arab countries that would not want to be a refueling stop for an Israeli strike.
The occupying regime of Israel has reportedly ordered eight new KC-46 tankers from Boeing at a cost of $2.4 billion but the aircraft are back-ordered and the Zionist regime is unlikely to receive even one before late 2024.
The Times said that aside from the ability to hit the targets, Israel would have to simultaneously fend off Iranian fighter jets and air-defense systems.
“Any attack on Iran would also likely set off retaliatory attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, allies of Iran that would try to force Israel to fight a war on several fronts simultaneously,” it said.
“Iran’s defense capabilities are also much stronger than in 2012, when Israel last seriously considered attacking. Its nuclear sites are better fortified, and it has more surface-to-surface missiles that can be launched swiftly from tunnels,” the paper added.
“It is very possible that when the Israeli planes try to land back in Israel, they will find that the Iranian missiles destroyed their runways,” Tal Inbar, an aviation expert and former head of the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies, an aviation-focused research group, told the Times.
The distance between the current regime’s threats and its ability to carry them out has provoked criticism of the former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
who led the occupying regime until last June and was a dogged advocate for a harsher approach to Iran. His critics claim that he restricted funding for a possible strike.
“Whether or not Netanyahu restricted the funding, experts have said that the money under discussion would not have significantly changed the army’s ability to attack Iran,” the New York Times wrote.
“You can always improve — buying more refueling airplanes, newer ones, bigger loads of fuel,” Shafir said. But even with these improvements and a superior air force, he said, Israeli airstrikes would not end Iran’s nuclear program.
“They would likely, however, set the region on fire,” the Times said.