As missile barrages continue, the region edges toward a wider war The Gulf is on the brink of a dramatic and dangerous escalation. For weeks, Iran has bombarded its neighbors with an unprecedented torrent of drones and ballistic missiles, striking airports, energy facilities, and areas near American military installations across all six Gulf Cooperation Council states. Now, the patience of those states is expiring — and the threat of a direct military counterstrike is no longer hypothetical. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan has warned publicly that the kingdom and its allies possess significant capabilities that can be activated if needed, stressing that their current restraint is not boundless — and hinting that Iran has only days, or perhaps a week, before a potential shift in posture. These are not the words of a government searching for a diplomatic off-ramp. These are the words of a government preparing its public — and its adversary — for war. The scale of what Iran has u...
Israel will never fully eliminate the Hezbollah threat regardless of how hard it strikes the Lebanese militant group, a former Israeli cabinet minister and special forces commander has warned, calling on the government to abandon what he describes as dangerous illusions of total victory. Writing in an opinion piece published Thursday in Haaretz, Omer Bar-Lev — a former public security minister and commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit — argued that both Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to recover significant military capabilities within months of being struck, rendering the current approach strategically futile. "However hard we hit Iran and Hezbollah, in a few months they recover a significant part of their military capabilities," Bar-Lev wrote, invoking the maxim attributed to Albert Einstein about the insanity of repeating the same actions while expecting different results. Bar-Lev pointed to the ongoing Gaza war as further evidence of th...