At three o’clock on Friday morning, sirens blared across Israel, and my family in Tel Aviv sprang awake. As I shuffled my groggy children to the stairwell of our apartment building, I noticed that a garbage truck outside was carrying on as usual: loading a bin, unloading an empty one, beeping in reverse. Sirens have become so frequent in the past eighteen months that some Israelis have become inured to the threat.

“Brother!” someone shouted from a nearby window. “It’s Iran!”

The truck driver reconsidered. He stopped in the middle of the street, got out, and ducked inside our building to wait it out.

Across the Persian Gulf, Israel was carrying out a sophisticated attack against Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon. Warplanes struck the Natanz nuclear facility, while other operations killed Iran’s top military general, the leader of its Revolutionary Guards, the head of its Air Force, and at least six nuclear scientists. News images showed apartment buildings in Tehran with smoke billowing from specific rooms, indicating precisely targeted attacks (though Iran said that eighty civilians were also killed). An unnamed security source told Channel 12 that the Mossad intelligence services had recently established bases inside Iran, where they kept precision missiles and suicide drones. The news aired grainy black-and-white footage of masked Mossad agents on the ground there, delicately setting down what were reportedly explosive drones, aimed at destroying the country’s air defenses. For twenty years, Israel had threatened to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Seemingly within minutes, it suddenly had. On Israeli television, military reporters warned of “complicated days ahead.” Yonit Levi, the anchorwoman of the leading news network on Channel 12, declared, “We are entering an entirely new situation.”

The attack left many analysts asking: why now? The preceding days had been eventful. A dispute over the prospect of subjecting ultra-Orthodox men to the military draft had threatened to topple the Israeli government, as the opposition tried to dissolve the parliament. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to scuttle the attempt, but his coalition emerged scathed and fractious. A U.N. watchdog had also declared that Iran was in violation of nuclear safeguards. Israeli intelligence has long warned that Iran was on the brink of having “breakout” capabilities—the ability to transform its weapons-grade uranium into a bomb—but the new declaration was seen as unusually damning.

Negotiations between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear program have been under way in recent weeks and were set to resume next week in Oman. Some speculated that the attacks were intended to disrupt the talks. Raz Zimmt, the director of the Iran program at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, acknowledged to reporters on Friday that Israel clearly “did not want a bad deal with Iran.” But when I asked him if this explained the timing of the strikes, he demurred. “I certainly don’t think Israel will be displeased that it managed to stop negotiations between Iran and the U.S.,” he said, but added that Israel’s real aim was to degrade Iranian capabilities.

Nadav Eyal, a well-sourced columnist for Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper, went further, arguing that the attacks had been planned to occur between rounds of talks in order to deceive Iran’s leadership. He wrote on X that the Israelis had “planted the idea that nothing could happen” before the negotiations resumed in Oman in order to lull top Iranian commanders into a sense of “false security” before they were targeted.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general and a former national-security adviser to Netanyahu, insisted that Mossad—which he said had conducted three separate operations in Iran—worked on its own timeline. “A military operation you can postpone—you tell the pilots to go home,” he said. “But when you have what the Mossad had inside Iran, you cannot postpone and renew whenever you want. So the pressure came from the Mossad side. The longer that you are inside Iran, you are in danger of being exposed.” He also noted that it made tactical sense to strike while Iran was weak. Its proxies in Lebanon and Syria, once a potent force in the region, had sustained immense damage in recent fighting. A covert Israeli operation in October had left its air defenses gravely compromised. As Netanyahu weighed the threat of a response, Amidror said, he didn’t have to “take into consideration a hundred thousand missiles from Lebanon.”

Israel continued the attacks on Friday, including a second strike on Natanz, the uranium-enrichment site; there were some indications that it also had its sights on Iran’s most fortified site, in Fordo. An argument festered over whether there had been help from America. Eyal, the Yediot columnist, said in his post that “without a green light from the U.S., none of this would have happened.” He added, “A strike like this requires American coordination—over Middle East airspace, over shared intelligence, over ammunition supply chains.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed in a statement that the attacks were “unilateral action” by Israel and that the U.S. was “not involved in the strikes.” But President Donald Trump seemed to almost relish them, telling an ABC reporter, “They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come. A lot more.”

The full extent of the damage will likely not be known for a long time, though Iran acknowledged that “several parts” of its facility in Natanz had been damaged. Amidror, the former general, argued that the exact results of the strikes were beside the point. “Israel showed its capabilities to deter,” he said. “Philosophically, it doesn’t matter by how much Israel succeeded in postponing the actual plan.” He suggested that, for Israel, the scientists had been even more important targets than the military and Revolutionary Guards leaders were.

In Israel, there was widespread pride that the country had succeeded in a complex intelligence operation, especially after its spectacular failure to prevent the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. But questions swirled. Did this constitute a new war? Or an escalation of the twenty months of conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza? Hezbollah announced that it would not instigate an attack against Israel. But even without the aid of Hezbollah, Iran’s leaders felt intense pressure to mount an aggressive response.

On Friday, Iran threatened to retaliate, saying that the “end of the story will be written by Iran’s hand.” Israeli schools and workplaces closed, along with all the synagogues. The public was ordered not to congregate and to stay close to bomb shelters. Typically, when there are incoming rockets, Israelis are advised to seek cover and wait for ten minutes. This time, the head of Israel’s Home Front Command said, at the sound of a siren, “we go into our protected spaces and we don’t leave.”

Amos Harel, a military reporter for Haaretz, suspected that Iran would attempt to strike not just military assets but also civilian targets inside Israel. Last April, when Iran launched more than three hundred drones and missiles across the border, an international coalition led by Israel destroyed ninety-nine per cent of them. But Iran still had some two thousand ballistic missiles in its arsenal, with the capability to produce about fifty more each month. It was unclear how much of this capacity remained after Thursday night’s attack, but on Israeli television the alarm was still palpable. Would Iran manage to overwhelm Israel this time around? And how far back did the attack set Iran? Months? Years?