"Iran's victorious... operation means that the era of strategic patience is over," the Iranian president's political deputy, Mohammad Jamshidi wrote on X. "Now the equation has changed. Targeting Iranian personnel and assets by the regime will be met with a direct and punishing response."

Western governments denounced Iran's retaliation as "destabilising the region". Iran, however, insisted the attack was "limited" and urged Western nations to "appreciate its restraint" towards Israel, especially since the outbreak of the Gaza war on October 7.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has frequently called for Israel's destruction and made support for the Palestinian cause a centrepiece of its foreign policy. But it had refrained from directly striking Israel until Saturday, an attack on a scale which appeared to catch many in the international community by surprise.

The reformist Ham Mihan newspaper said the attack "ended the status quo and broke the rules of the conflict that pitted the two sides against each other for 20 years and pushed the situation into another phase". "This is no longer a shadow war," it said.

A chief IDF spokesman responded to the threats, vowing that Iran will face retaliation. IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “We cannot stand still from this kind of aggression, Iran will not get [off] scot-free with this aggression. We will respond in our time, in our place, in the way that we will choose."

Colonel Hamish de-Bretton Gordon, a weapons and defence expert, said that Iran could be hinting at unleashing nuclear, biological and chemical warfare. "What I take from this is further bluster from Iran. They're obviously desperately concerned that the Israelis are going to hit them back hard."

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) urged "extreme restraint" from Israel. He revealed that Iran temporarily closed its nuclear facilities over "security considerations" in the wake of its missile and drone attack.

They reopened on Monday but inspectors were kept away "until we see that the situation is completely calm". Iran has long said its nuclear programme is peaceful but Western countries accuse Tehran of attempting to build nuclear bombs.

The deal, originally negotiated by Barack Obama and signed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear facilities in return for dropping sanctions against the country. During a debate in the House of Lords about Iran’s attack on Israel, independent crossbench peer Baroness Deech said: “We seem to have forgotten about the nuclear plan, the JCPOA, we’ve taken our eye off that." She added: “Iran is within minutes of getting nuclear capability and mad enough to use it."

Aminoach, formerly the financial adviser to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, said West Jerusalem used such munitions as Arrow and David’s Sling interceptor missiles, which have per-unit costs of about $3.5 million and $1 million, respectively. He also included sortie expenses for the fighter jets that did the bulk of the work in shooting down Iranian drones.

The general lamented that it was far cheaper for Iran to launch the attack than for Israel to defend itself. “The attack cost Iran less than 10% of what it cost us to defend against it,” he told Ynet. “In the future – in a year, two years, or five years – they can carry out 50 such attacks. And let’s say that if the IDF’s net budget in 2023 was 60 billion shekels, with less than double that you have no chance of reaching a situation where we can maintain the required amounts.”

According to the Times of Israel, Channel 12 is reporting that the Israeli government has decided to hit Iran 'clearly and forcefully'… In an unsourced report, Channel 12 claims the war cabinet has made the decision to hit back 'clearly and forcefully' against Iran for its missile and drone attack on Saturday night. The response will be designed to send the message that Israel 'will not allow an attack of that magnitude against it to pass without a reaction,' the report says.

We have been waiting for this war for a very long time. Now it is here. The Iranians and the Israelis have both been preparing for this showdown for decades. The Iranians would like to see Israel wiped off the face of the map, and the Israelis are absolutely determined to do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening. In a conflict where the stakes are this high, it can be very easy to panic.

Both sides have some surprises up their sleeves, and unfortunately I have a feeling that it will not be too long before some of those surprises are finally unveiled.

• Roughly 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles were fired on April 13, 2024.


• This is the first time that Iran has fired on Israel from Iranian territory (approximately 900 miles).


• Iran is retaliating for an Israeli strike on April 1, 2024 that destroyed a meeting taking place in the building next to the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria. The dead included General Mohamad Reza Zahedi, 65, who oversaw Iran’s covert military operations in Syria and Lebanon, two other generals and four officers in the Quds Force.


• Two key facilities in Iran supported the launches - Bakhtarun and Khorramabad (also known as Imam Ali). There are extensive hardened underground preparation, fueling, assembly, and launch facilities at these two locations.


• Barrage occurred after seizure of MSC Aries in Straits of Hormuz - ship ownership further traces to Israeli shipping magnate Eyal Ofer. This is an expansion of the Red Sea Naval War.


• Jordan and Saudi Arabia engaged and shot down a significant number of the Iranian attempts to strike Israel.


• The US and UK supported the inner defense layer along with Israeli capabilities.


• UK flew from Cyprus to support. US elements in the Red Sea, Cyprus, Mediterranean, and other locations provided support.


• Remote Access Cyber operations by multiple countries likely played a role to disrupt the Industrial Control Systems supporting Iranian C4I including the Iranian preparation and launch facilities.


• A resounding success so far.


• Iran threatened any country allowing Israeli overflight in counter-attacks (ie Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others).


• Russia threatened regional war against the US if the US strikes Iran.


• Iran and China now ask for calm.


• We are in WWIII. September 1939 was October 2023.

There has already been speculation that the recent death of aid workers in Israel could have resulted from an AI-powered military decision that would not have been made if actual people had full control of the battlefield strategy.

RT.com reports that Hinton, the former Google engineer who quit the company last year, compared the use of AI for military purposes to chemical weapons deployment – warning that “very nasty things” will occur before the global community arrives at a comprehensive agreement comparable to the Geneva Conventions.

So the guys who created AI are now warning of its risks. How rich. They create the beast, then fear-monger the public into believing this beast could take over the world, setting the stage for the beast’s creators to offer an even more frightening solution — total regulation of all information and all human behaviour. Classic Hegelianism.

[Hegelianism: “All of Hegel’s thinking was concerned with the apparent conflicts he observed in religion and politics. He did this with the radical concept that… all being is constantly in motion and constantly developing through a three-stage process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” (newworldencyclopedia.org)]

Rizvi stood in the middle of a circle as listeners wearing black masks could be seen attentively paying attention to the organizer. “So I’m going to teach you a chant in Persian that you can use if you ever encounter those Zionist freaks – whether they be Iranian or whatever, all right? Now, I don’t drink margaritas, but we all know what a margarita is. We all know what a bar is. So you’re going to say ‘Marg bar,'” Rizvi stated as the crowd echoed his chant.

Tehran had signalled that an attack was coming in retaliation for an airstrike on its diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, that killed two top Iranian generals earlier this month. IDF Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari accused Iran of trying to 'ignite the Middle East and escalate the region' by firing 60 tonnes of suicide drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and rockets at Israel overnight - but insisted his army was on 'high alert'.

'Over the last two hours, we approved operational plans for both offensive and defensive action,' he told reporters on Sunday. 'We will continue to protect the State of Israel, and together with our partners, we will continue to build a more secure and stable future for the entire Middle East.'

Israel is expected to launch a counterattack against Iran. Former IDF captain Caroline Glick told MailOnline: '[Iran's] overthrow is the key to the restoration of regional stability. Just last week, when a regime authority called for a moment of silence in memory of the Iranian terror masters Israel killed in Damascus two weeks ago, the crowd instead began calling for the overthrow of the regime.'

In May 2018, President Donald Trump pulled America out of the nuclear deal with Iran that his predecessor Barack Obama had negotiated in 2015 (the vice-president back then, of course, being Joe Biden). Under that deal, sanctions on Tehran were lifted in the hope that the mullahs would honour their 'promise' not to pursue a nuclear-weapons programme.

Obama's approach was utter folly. The mullahs' coffers were soon filling up thanks to the lifting of sanctions and – just as opponents of his deal had warned – Iran was once again enthusiastically funding and training its bloodthirsty proxy groups, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Hamas in Gaza.

Experts, meanwhile, warned that its supposedly 'civil' nuclear programme was in fact a weapons project in disguise. Trump rightly tore up Obama's deal, facing down hysterical objections from co-signatories Britain, France and Germany. But The Donald's approach worked. Trump's sanctions shrunk Iran's economy by 4.8 per cent in 2018 and 9.5 per cent in 2019 – diminishing the wider threat to the Middle East. But after Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he resumed talks on a renewed deal, sending an implicit message to Iran's Supreme Leader that the US was no longer serious about imposing them.

We need to learn some lessons here. When Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement in 1938, Hitler felt empowered to invade Poland. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the West stood back and watched – galvanising him to launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And now Israel has been attacked on its own soil once again after Biden undid Trump's good work in standing up to the mad mullahs. The world is growing too dangerous for us to keep repeating this mistake.

The Israeli military says Iran fired more than 100 bomb-carrying drones toward Israel. Hours later, Iran announced it had also launched much more destructive ballistic missiles. The attack marked the first time Iran has launched a direct military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Condemnation was swift, with France saying that “Iran has crossed a new threshold with regard to its destabilizing activities and is risking a potential military escalation.” Britain called the attacks “reckless.”