Israel’s military campaign against Iran, which opened with airstrikes in the early hours of 13 June, marks the start of a deadly new phase in its moves to reengineer the region in the wake of the 7 October 2023 terror attacks. It’s also achieved what months of diplomatic confrontation couldn’t: within hours, it wiped from front pages the reality that Gazans are starving and being killed even while seeking help, and dissipated the international pressure that was building against Israel.

Democratic states, which have largely failed miserably to hold Israel to account, don’t want to be seen to be taking the side of Iran’s autocratic theocracy, whose response to widespread women’s rights protests that flared in 2022 was to kill protesters and punish dissent with the death penalty. As a result, few have so far condemned Israel for its latest act of escalation.

The nuclear pretext

Most fatalities to date have come on the Iranian side, reflecting Israel’s military superiority, including its ability to intercept most Iranian missiles before they reach their targets. Israel has hit Iranian nuclear facilities, but is unable to reach those constructed deep underground. It has also bombed oil and gas infrastructure, while Iran has hit a refinery in Israel.

On 16 June, Israel issued an order for people to leave a large area of Iran’s capital, Tehran, prior to bombing. This was reminiscent of its repeated displacement orders in Gaza. Israel says it’s targeting military infrastructure, but it has hit a TV station, killing three of its workers, and has killed many other civilians, while Iran has killed civilians in Israel.

Israel justified its attacks, which appear to have caught Iran by surprise, on the claim that Iran had achieved the capability to build several nuclear bombs. If true, Israel knows something the rest of the world doesn’t.

Iran’s nuclear status has long been the subject of international speculation and scrutiny. In 2015, Iran plus a group of powerful states – including the five permanent United Nations (UN) Security Council members – agreed to a deal: Iran would limit its nuclear programme to civilian uses in exchange for the withdrawal of most sanctions. In 2018, the first Donald Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions. Under the second Trump administration, Iran-US talks to try to reach a new deal, brokered by Oman, began in April. While five rapid rounds of talks didn’t deliver a breakthrough, a sixth, now postponed, was scheduled for the week after Israel began its strikes.

Negotiations have long been characterised by tensions between international scrutiny and Iranian secrecy. The consensus is that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but any intentions to develop weapons and if so, how close it may be, are unclear. As late as March, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said that US intelligence services’ assessment was that Iran wasn’t actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors compliance with the 2015 agreement, had recently criticised Iran for its lack of cooperation, and the day before Israel launched its strikes declared it in breach of its obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. But it also said it had ‘no credible indications’ of a secret nuclear weapons programme.

Iran says it remains opposed to nuclear weapons, but has reacted to the strikes by announcing it will withdraw from the treaty. The irony, of course, is that the one state in the region that definitely has nuclear weapons is Israel, even though it never officially admits it. Israel never signed the treaty and refuses to cooperate with the IAEA.

Netanyahu’s strategic calculations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have informed Trump of his intentions on the eve of the strikes, enabling the USA, Israel’s closest ally, to evacuate some personnel. But he evidently went ahead without US cooperation, on the apparent gamble he could bounce Trump into backing the strikes to save losing face.

The gamble has paid off for Netanyahu. Despite the scheduled Oman talks indicating otherwise, Trump quickly pivoted to claiming the Israeli attack had been the plan all along, and more recently went on to demand Iran’s unconditional surrender. Netanyahu now knows that Israel can expect US protection even when acting independently.

What the USA does next is the big question. Trump’s campaign promised to keep US troops out of foreign wars, and military intervention is a faultline in the Trump camp, which encompasses both America-first isolationists opposed to foreign entanglements and more traditional neo-conservative hawks eager to defend hegemony through force.

Trump’s blend of narcissism and transactional politics always makes him the wildcard. Right now, he’s talking up war, but he could rapidly pivot to his favoured role as a dealmaker to front some kind of a ceasefire. But what Israel wants is active US intervention: it’s likely only US bombers could significantly damage the Fordow uranium enrichment facility, buried under a mountain.

The USA has kept its options open by dispatching an aircraft carrier. Meanwhile Trump’s early exit from the G7 meeting in Canada communicated to the leaders of major democratic powers that he’ll make his decisions without consulting them.

For Netanyahu personally, continued power is the prize. His fractious political coalition is glued together by war and wouldn’t last long in peacetime. Unceasing war also helps defer the corruption trials Netanyahu should be facing. Public opinion in Israel seems broadly supportive of the action against Iran, so the attack may also serve the aim of stemming domestic pressure over the government’s lack of focus on securing the release of Israeli hostages.

The broader regional context has been made favourable to Netanyahu’s aims. Iran’s regional strategy has fallen apart since the 7 October attacks. It had maintained a strategic buffer against Israel and, as a largely Shia Muslim country, against the predominantly Sunni Muslim Gulf nations. But its allies have been degraded one by one. Israel has hit Hamas as part of its general devastation of Gaza, along with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, another ally, was ousted in December 2024, with Russia, Iran’s key partner in sustaining the Assad regime, powerless to act due to its ongoing war on Ukraine. Iran even played down its previously overt support for Yemen’s Houthi rebels as part of the price of rebuilding relations with Saudi Arabia. Israel’s project to reshape the region around its interests has been building to this moment.

Israel’s strikes have been planned to maximise their political impact. They’ve killed many of the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, a dominant force in Iran’s governance, along with key nuclear scientists. Reportedly, the Trump administration vetoed a plan to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – at least for now.

Israel has now moved beyond its initially stated aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear capacity; Defence Minister Israel Katz has recently said the attacks are intended to ‘undermine the regime’. The fall of Iran’s theocratic regime may result, but there appears no plan for what happens next, and the history of military interventions in the region shows that chaos is often the consequence.

While some in Iran and among the diaspora have welcomed the attacks in the hope they’ll cause their deeply repressive government to fall, democracy is never the primary objective of a bombing campaign. Israel may hope that Iran’s suppressed reform movement rises up in revolt, but there’s nothing in its actions that implies any recognition of or attempt to boost the movement’s potential to act. Just as Gazans have been penalised for what Israel sees as their crime of failing to overthrow the Hamas government, Iranians may ultimately be punished for the sin of living under an autocratic regime. If a new regime results, the experience of civilian deaths at Israel’s hands is unlikely to lead to friendlier relations between the two countries, and Israel may then not regard the issue as settled. A patriotic reaction to the bombings might even end up benefiting the current regime.

The reality of Gaza

A particularly devastating consequence of Israel’s Iranian adventure is that it allows genocide to continue unchecked in Gaza, just as some international pressure had at last been building against Israel. In May, Israel launched the latest phase of its onslaught, Operation Gideon’s Chariots, with the aim of taking full control of Gaza though extensive bombing and an intensive ground presence. Israel’s Security Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, proclaimed that Gaza would be ‘completely destroyed’, with people pushed into a small southern zone before their forced relocation to other countries. This is textbook ethnic cleansing.

Israel’s control of aid has become a weapon of war. After imposing another blockade on humanitarian supplies in March, Israel forced Gazans into starvation. With the UN and civil society groups barred from access, in May the Israeli and US governments designated the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an obscure and opaque US organisation founded just three months before, as the sole permitted distributor of aid. Small amounts of aid are distributed at a handful of points, mostly in the south, equipped with Israeli and US security contractors. Gazans must travel to there to receive any aid. Desperate people have made the journey at deadly risk. Soldiers have shot hundreds dead close to aid centres.

At best, this is a dangerous militarisation of a supposedly humanitarian response, which makes any access to aid conditional on cooperation with Israel’s military objectives, since Gazans must move to the area Israel wants to confine them to, making a mockery of the principle of neutrality. At worst, with almost daily reports of killings, the aid points appear to be deliberate death traps.

This reality became impossible to ignore, fuelling more intense global demands for action. The Madleen, the ship crewed by Greta Thunberg and other activists, sought to focus moral pressure by bringing a symbolic amount of aid to Gaza, but Israeli forces intercepted it and deported its crew. The Global March to Gaza brought activists from around the world to Egypt to make a symbolic attempt to cross into Gaza – but the Egyptian government detained its leaders and ordered international activists to leave.

Ups and downs of international pressure

Significant momentum had finally been building against Israel. Global south governments led the way in applying diplomatic pressure, including through South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice for breaches of the Genocide Convention. Meanwhile, many global north states sat on their hands, even after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But even states traditionally supportive of Israel had begun changing their tone. With mounting evidence of atrocities and civil society pressure, they began using tougher language. In May, Canada, France and the UK threatened sanctions; in June, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the UK imposed them on two Israeli ministers for inciting violence against Palestinians. Belgium’s foreign minister said ‘only the word genocide’ could describe Israel’s actions. Sweden made clear Israel’s annexation of Gaza would be against international law. Even the normally staunchly supportive German government said Israel’s acts could no longer be justified as anti-terrorist measures. The UN’s human rights head, Volker Türk, said Israel’s bombing campaign that aimed to force Palestinians to move was ‘tantamount to ethnic cleansing’.

Most significantly, momentum was building towards international recognition of Palestine. Many global north states still don’t recognise Palestine’s statehood, and this means Palestine can’t achieve full UN membership and the potential to engage with the UN human rights system this entails. But in recent years, this was starting to change.

Full UN membership requires Security Council approval, where the USA has veto power, and it’s hard to see the USA coming round to the idea anytime soon. However, recognition still has symbolic power, and it’s a prerequisite of a two-state solution where Israel and Palestine exist side by side as independent states with the same legal standing. At a time when Israel is intent on annexing Gaza and increasingly undermining the West Bank’s territorial integrity by parcelling it into illegal settlements, recognising Palestinian statehood amounts to communicating that Israel must respect Palestinian territory and therefore Palestinian rights.

A summit on a two-state solution, organised by France and Saudi Arabia, was due later in June. France and the UK, and potentially Australia, were reportedly planning to use the moment to recognise Palestine, which would have put fresh pressure on Israel and the USA. But as a result of the latest phase of conflict, the summit has been indefinitely postponed.

Netanyahu’s strategic gamble has paid off spectacularly. The carefully constructed momentum towards recognising Palestine has evaporated. The planned summit has been shelved. Because Iran has few global north friends, governments that were beginning to criticise Israel over Gaza now find it politically inconvenient to condemn this latest escalation.

A call for sanity

The international community should face a moment of truth. Too many governments can be expected to keep turning a blind eye to gross human rights violations because it’s politically expedient to do so. They’ll do this even though Israel has probably broken international law yet again, since its unilateral attack on Iran can’t plausibly be classified as self-defence, which is the legal justification for war under the UN Charter.

As a result of inaction, hopes of a rules-based international order will continue to recede, replaced by the principle that might makes right. The result will be still more civilian deaths and gross human rights violations, in Iran and continuing in Gaza, where the world’s distraction will allow the slaughter to go on.

The moment demands moral clarity instead of political calculation. It falls to civil society around the world to fill the vacuum left by governmental cowardice, renewing its call for the killing to stop and human rights to prevail. Only by maintaining relentless pressure on all fronts – Gaza, Iran and the centres of power that enable both wars – is there hope of putting an end to the madness.

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