By Jeremy Salt
Thus encouraged, Israel knew that in the future it only had to ask to get what it wanted, whether the bombs now supplied to destroy Gaza and Lebanon or war on Iran sometime this year.
Gaza has fully exposed the limitless violence inherent in a colonial settler state. Israel’s genocide is aimed at extinguishing everything that is Palestinian, the people, the water they drink, the food they eat, and the trees they grow.
Although sacrosanct under international law, all of Gaza’s hospitals and clinics have been partly or wholly destroyed since October 2023. The destruction includes the Basma IVF fertility center and the 4000 embryos stored there, thus Palestinians were killed even before they were born.
Israel has now just destroyed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which specialized in oncology. It was mined from end to end and blown up while the soldiers who committed this fresh war crime stood back and watched.
Days later the emergency unit in the Nasser Medical Complex was targeted in a missile attack that killed five people and wounded others.
Israel began bombing the Nasser hospital in late 2023, killing or wounding patients and staff. From February to April 2024, the hospital was besieged, with snipers shooting into the hospital and anyone in the vicinity. The UN described it as “a place of death.” After the occupying forces withdrew, 300 bodies were uncovered from a mass grave.
In March 2025, violating the ceasefire, Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza, murdering more than 600 people in a week, including hundreds of children. The destruction of one more hospital, as well as the attack on another, is advance warning that a state committing such crimes after more than 18 months already spent slaughtering civilians is capable of anything.
However, while the people of the world are horrified by what they are seeing, their governments are not. It is not just the genocide. Israel, fully backed by the US government, is tearing international law into shreds. The past 2000 years of developing codes of civilized behavior by states seem a waste of time.
Only other governments can stop this but they are choosing not to stop it. Some are aiding and abetting it, by supplying Israel with weapons so it can keep on killing, by maintaining diplomatic and trade relations with this criminal state, and by issuing statements that reek of cowardice and hypocrisy.
Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, reacted to the latest round of destruction with a statement repeating the official line of calling for a ceasefire and continuing to work towards a two-state solution. It is completely out of touch with reality. Israel does not respect ceasefires and the ‘two-state’ solution lies abandoned in the dust with all other ‘solutions.’
At a time of genocide, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, went even further proudly calling himself a zionist.
Now Yemen and Iran are on the chopping board with the cleaver poised above them. Trump has threatened Ansarallah (the Houthis) with “complete annihilation and warned Iran of “dire consequences” if it continues to support them. North Yemen survived the genocidal assault by Saudi Arabia and is now threatened with another one.
US presidents have been threatening Iran ever since 1979 so Trump is only closer to the red line of an all-out attack. As anyone with a modicum of brain matter knows, Iran is not the problem. The problem is Israel. If the US is gearing up for an attack on Iran it is because of Israel and nothing else but it is probably going to take the aftermath of a devastating war for the US to realize this.
“From now on every bullet fired by the Houthis will be considered as fired from Iranian weapons and leadership,” Trump has said. “Iran will be held responsible for this and will have to face the consequences, which will be very terrible.” He has also given Israel the “right” to take independent action against Iran. In fact, Israel would never attack Iran without US planning, consent, and involvement, like all of Israel’s wars, with the sole exception of the attack on Egypt in 1956. Even if it did launch a supposedly independent attack, it knows that the US would have to come in behind it anyway.
There is a broad consensus between US intelligence agencies that Israel will attack Iran this year, possibly as early as May, as suggested by the Washington Post. The targets would be nuclear installations, air defenses, ballistic missile sites, and possibly oil fields. Such an attack would be extremely complex and beyond Israel’s capacity to carry out alone.
For example, the Fordow and Natanz centrifuge plants are buried up to 100 meters deep under concrete and rock. The only way to get at them would be through use of the US-made ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrator’ GBU-57A/B bomb, which weighs 13.2 tons and could only be carried by a US B2 Spirit bomber.
If the first bomb does not succeed, multiple bombs would be dropped, each one burrowing deeper than the one before. If repetitive bombings don’t work there is still one more option. Israel regards Iran (or chooses to regard it) as an existential threat that would justify the use of nuclear weapons.
Some of the MOP bombs may have already been dropped as a practice run on underground sites in North Yemen, where the mountainous terrain is similar to the location of the Fordow and Natanz sites in Iran. In early March 2025, the US and Israel also sent a clear message to Iran by staging a joint air exercise involving F15 and F35 fighter jets, refueling aircraft, and B52 bombers.
As extermination has gone mainstream in Israel, human life would be the least of its concerns. The bombing of nuclear installations would poison the atmosphere over all of Iran’s neighbors, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
Qatar’s prime minister said recently that if Iran’s coastal nuclear plant at Busheir was bombed, the sea would be contaminated and Qatar – which relies on desalination -would run out of water in three days. “No water, no fish – no life,” he said.
Historian Benny Morris believes that if Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear plants with conventional weapons, “then it may not have an option but to resort to its non-conventional capabilities.” If it did there would be “significant understanding” amongst “international onlookers.”
Others have also been talking about picking up the nuclear option. Yair Katz, the head of the Israel Aerospace Industry workers’ council said in June 2024 that “if Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen decide to settle scores with Israel, Tel Aviv has the ability to use doomsday weapons and destroy everyone once and for all.” In November 2023, ‘Heritage Minister’ Amichai Eliyahu said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was among the “possibilities.”
Trump’s green lights clear the way to the war on Iran that Netanyahu has long wanted.
By no means can it be ruled out that such a criminal would not use nuclear weapons. Israel is believed to have up to 400 of them, ranging from neutron bombs and tactical and strategic bombs down to suitcase bombs.
Dating back to the 1950s, both the US – through President Eisenhower’s ‘atoms for peace’ program – and France helped Israel develop a nuclear capacity. After the 1956 Suez war, France gave Israel a small reactor, as compensation for being forced to leave Sinai by President Eisenhower while still being threatened with extermination by Arab states, according to Israel.
France then supplied Israel with the Dimona reactor and everything needed to produce nuclear weapons, irrespective of whether that was its intention. About $40 million of the $100 million – more than a billion dollars today – needed to pay France was raised through a fund-raising appeal in the US.
Israel repeatedly deceived the US about Dimona’s true purpose but intelligence agencies gradually worked out what was going on.
The opportunity to block Israel’s nuclear weapons development came in the late 1960s when adherence to the NPT was the quid pro quo for the supply of US planes and tanks Israel wanted.
However, in the White House, Lyndon Johnson assured the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, not to worry about State Department pressure because Israel would get the planes and tanks without having to sign on to the NPT.
Knowing this, Rabin behaved with consummate arrogance. When State Department officials insisted that Israel sign the NPT, give a guarantee that it would not develop nuclear weapons, and allow US inspectors into Dimona he retorted: “You are only selling arms. How do you feel you have the right to ask all these things?”
The US knew with almost 100 percent certainty before the 1967 war that Israel had developed a nuclear weapon. The ‘opacity’ policy of not knowing whether it did or didn’t was a lie.
Thus encouraged, Israel knew that in the future it only had to ask to get what it wanted, whether the bombs now supplied to destroy Gaza and Lebanon or war on Iran sometime this year. As Israel always gets what it wants, there seems little chance now that such a war can be avoided.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Blackmail. From Epstein compromised Trump to the Nazi Zionist Regime blackmails the whole world. Do what we want our we will irradiate global oil reserves! A lunatic casino heiress rules the dying hegemon.