Before the sun rose over east Tehran, Iran, on Friday, June 13, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a sudden, blistering attack on key Iranian nuclear facilities, military sites, and military and scientific officials across the country. Despite plunging the Middle East further into dangerous territory, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resolved in a statement Friday morning that this operation “will continue for as many days as it takes to remove [Iran’s nuclear] threat.” 

Iranians in major cities throughout the nation woke up to scenes of bloody destruction in the middle of the night. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, stated that Israel had “opened its dirty and bloody hand to a crime [and] must expect severe punishment.” Within hours after the first Israeli missiles reached Iranian soil, Iran launched a retaliation force of 100 drones and missiles toward Israel.

While Israel’s recent attack came without warning, it is not unprecedented. The missiles flying across the Fertile Crescent underscore a Middle East in complete geopolitical fragility and a new peak of a conflict that has been decades in the making. 

Historical Timeline

Over the roughly three decades following Israel’s founding in 1948, the two countries were formally allied, maintaining friendly ties. Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel, and the two cooperated heavily on vital infrastructure which transport oil from the Middle East to Europe. Israel’s opening of the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline enabled Iran to nearly double its oil exports, and subsequently, Israel imported over ninety percent of its oil from Iran. 

The 1979 Iranian Revolution resulted in a complete reversal of Israeli-Iranian relations—one that, to this today, remains unresolved. After a period of upheaval, Iranians overthrew the Western-backed Shah regime, installing Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini believed that the ideals of the revolution should have been exported throughout the Middle East and the world as a whole. The new regime viewed Israel, a Western-backed nation in the Middle East, as a serious obstacle to this goal. Consequently, Iran rebuked its recognition of Israel as a state, calling Israel a “Little Satan.” Iran also began funding militant proxies to strengthen its military influence in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982. 

For the next decades, both nations formulated their hostilities into proxies. Tehran funded Shiite militias, while Tel Aviv covertly supported anti-Iranian groups. Cross-border skirmishes, led by these proxies, became frequent by the 1990s, most notably along the Israel-Lebanon border. 

In the early 2000s, international inspectors found traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian nuclear plant in Natanz, one of the facilities that Israel struck this morning. Iran was subsequently forced to halt its nuclear operations, but secretly resumed them in 2006. They insisted that they were allowed to by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and years of economic sanctions against Iran followed. 

Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program dominated the early-2000s. No state was more concerned than Israel, whose staunch opposition to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons stems from a deep-seated fear of existential threat and a more bipolar, nuclear Middle East. Israel developed the Begin Doctrine in response, a preemptive policy that has led to its repeated attacks on potential nuclear threats abroad. Meanwhile, Iran quietly continued its uranium enrichment and missile testing in secret facilities across the country, getting ever-closer to attaining nuclear weapons. 

As a result of the outbreak of civil war in Syria, the regional proxy conflict expanded. Israel attacked Iranian-backed forces operating near Damascus to prevent a buildup of Iran’s regional influence. Iran’s proxies, including Hezbollah, retaliated by hitting sites along Israel’s border and Red Sea posts of its allies. Israel, meanwhile, quietly conducted assassinations in Iran, notably of Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military officer, and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist. 

After the COVID-19 pandemic, Israeli-Iranian tensions were reignited in 2023, this time in Palestine. On October 7, Palestinian militants led by Hamas started a now-year-long war in Gaza. Backed by financial aid and military training from Iran, the group waged the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Supreme Leader Khamenei denied any Iranian responsibility for the attacks, but documents reveal that Hamas received approval for its plans from Iran. 

As the Gaza conflict continued, Netanyahu proposed to United States President Donald Trump, his biggest ally, at the beginning of 2025 a plan to strike Iranian nuclear sites. The Trump Administration debated the plan for months, ultimately handing Netanyahu disapproval in April. Within minutes of Israel’s attack on Iran on June 13, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied any U.S. involvement. 

Impact on Regional Stability and Relations

The world is in a state of shock as instantaneous as this outburst. The broader fallout is deeply concerning—and imminent. 

Economically, global markets dropped, and the price of oil rose sharply. Analysts warn that the price of oil could reach one hundred dollars per barrel for only the second time since 2014 in the coming weeks. An energy crisis is imminent if the conflict escalates further. 

Militarily, Dan Hoffman, an experienced CIA station chief, fears that the situation in the Middle East right now looks like an “all-out war.” Supreme Leader Khamenei has ventured over the course of the day to say that “Israel has prepared a bitter fate for itself, which it will surely receive.” In other words, this conflict is far from over. A point of fragility is the Lebanese border, which Hezbollah may exploit as an opening for a broader conflict since Israel and Iran do not neighbor each other. 

Diplomatically, everything has turned cold. The United States and Iran were set to hold talks on the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program on Sunday, but just hours ago, Iran withdrew. Both Iran and Israel have now doubled down on hardline positions against each other. Arab normalization with Israel from the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE may be compromised. Global powers, such as the United States, must balance their support for Israel with the imperative of preventing a wide war. 

The precariousness of a stable relationship between the Middle East’s two dominant powers, Israel and Iran, has never been more evident. Both cannot bear the other’s existence, and the decades-long fear of a Middle East engulfed in an open war—the first since 1973—may have just come true.