<\/p>\n
JERUSALEM, Israel\u00a0\u2013\u00a0As 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.<\/p>\n
Israel and the United States continue to target Iranian military and terror infrastructure as the war expands across the region. Iran\u2019s proxy Hezbollah has formally entered the fight, opening another front against Israel.<\/p>\n
Israeli forces \u201cflattened\u201d a building in Tehran where Iran\u2019s 88-member Assembly of Experts had gathered to select the country\u2019s next supreme leader on Tuesday. The strike comes after Iran\u2019s longtime supreme leader Khamenei and other top Iranian leaders were killed on the first day of the war.<\/p>\n
President Trump has made it clear that Israel did not push the United States into the conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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\u2019t do it,\u201d Trump declared.<\/p>\n
Trump said his negotiators are great but with the way talks were going he didn\u2019t want Iran to attack first.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf anything I might have forced Israel\u2019s hand but Israel was ready and we were ready and we\u2019ve had a very, very powerful impact because virtually everything they have has been knocked out now.\u201d Trump emphasized.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the first time an F-35 has ever shot down a manned fighter aircraft.<\/p>\n
Despite the strikes, Iran continues launching missiles and UAV\u2019s at Israel, forcing Israelis to repeatedly take shelter. Most incoming threats have been intercepted by Israel\u2019s anti-missile defense systems.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Trump stated, \u201cThey’ve hit UAE, they’ve hit Saudi Arabia, they’ve hit Oman, they were helping us negotiate. They got hit, everybody got hit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some nations are now retaliating. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates have reportedly launched strikes against Iran.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hezbollah, Iran\u2019s powerful proxy in Lebanon, has formally joined the war, launching deadly drones and rockets at Israel.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. \u201cHezbollah is basically the Lebanese branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Bar explained. \u201cThey are totally under the control of the IRGC.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israel has warned many civilians in southern Lebanon to evacuate certain areas and launched a ground operation aimed at protecting communities in northern Israel.<\/p>\n
Bar said, \u201cthe first thing is Israel did not want to, tell the population in northern Israel to, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOne rocket fell in Kibbutz Dam, 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.\u201d Bar emphasized.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only way out of it is to weaken Hezbollah and to continue to weaken Hezbollah until that point, that a the Shiite population in, in Lebanon,\u201d Bar noted, \u201cwill turn its back on Hezbollah and say, okay, it’s enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JERUSALEM, Israel\u00a0\u2013\u00a0As 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[6952,2645,3048,3825,6953,1139],"class_list":["post-21044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jesus","tag-f35","tag-historic","tag-intensifies","tag-iran","tag-shootdown","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}