JERUSALEM, Israel – As residents of Jerusalem mark the second day of Purim, recalling the biblical story of how the Jewish people were delivered from an evil Persian official in the Book of Esther, the modern conflict with Iran appears to be intensifying.
Israel and the United States continue to target Iranian military and terror infrastructure as the war expands across the region. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah has formally entered the fight, opening another front against Israel.
Israeli forces “flattened” a building in Tehran where Iran’s 88-member Assembly of Experts reportedly had gathered to select the country’s next supreme leader on Tuesday. Iran says the building was empty and the council met virtually. The strike comes after Iran’s longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other top Iranian leaders were killed on the first day of the war.
CENTCOM announced there are more than 50,000 American troops deployed in the region.
Tuesday, President Trump said Israel did not push the United States into the war with Iran.
“We were having negotiations with these lunatics and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack if we didn’t do it,” Trump declared.
Trump said his negotiators are great but with the way talks were going he didn’t want Iran to attack first.
“If anything I might have forced Israel’s hand but Israel was ready and we were ready and we’ve had a very, very powerful impact because virtually everything they have has been knocked out now.” Trump emphasized.
The Israel Defense Forces announced Wednesday morning that it had begun a broad wave of strikes targeting terror regime sites in Tehran and had already struck dozens of military infrastructure locations overnight, including facilities used to store, produce, and launch ballistic missiles used by the regime.
The CIA is reportedly working to arm Kurdish forces on the Iran-Iraq border to help spark an internal uprising.
In a historic development, the IDF said an Israeli Air Force F-35I fighter jet shot down an Iranian Air Force Yak-130 fighter jet over Tehran — the first time an F-35 has ever shot down a manned fighter aircraft.
Despite the strikes, Iran continues launching missiles and UAV’s at Israel, forcing Israelis to repeatedly take shelter. Most incoming threats have been intercepted by Israel’s anti-missile defense systems.
The conflict is also spreading beyond Israel. Iran has reportedly struck multiple countries in the region, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Cyprus, and the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Trump stated, “They’ve hit UAE, they’ve hit Saudi Arabia, they’ve hit Oman, they were helping us negotiate. They got hit, everybody got hit.”
At the same time, Hezbollah, Iran’s powerful proxy in Lebanon, has formally joined the war, launching deadly drones and rockets at Israel.
Former Israeli intelligence official Dr. Shmuel Bar told journalists in a briefing sponsored by Media Central that Hezbollah operates essentially as an arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Hezbollah is basically the Lebanese branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps,” Bar explained. “They are totally under the control of the IRGC.”
Israel has warned many civilians in southern Lebanon to evacuate certain areas and launched a ground operation aimed at protecting communities in northern Israel.
Bar said, “the first thing is Israel did not want to tell the population in northern Israel to get out and, you know, like it did at the beginning of the war after 7th of October, because that was highly considered a very bad, decision. It’s the role of the government is to give security.”
“One rocket fell in Kibbutz Dan, which is on the border. And so the idea is to keep, those to a minimum so that people will be able to continue to live in their areas,” Bar emphasized.
“The only way out of it is to weaken Hezbollah and to continue to weaken Hezbollah until that point, that a the Shiite population in Lebanon,” Bar noted, “will turn its back on Hezbollah and say, okay, it’s enough, they’re causing us too much damage.” He added another option is to bring a balance of power between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah, where the Lebanese army could eventually take over.
