New Delhi: 'Operational opportunity to strike Iran came up after PM Modi left': Israel's India envoy
With the regional conflict still raging across West Asia and the US continuing its strikes on Iranian targets, Israel’s ambassador to India has revealed “right moment” for the strike was reached, after years of planning, waiting and boosting of Israel’s military establishment for the operation.
The joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran came not so long after Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his two-day state visit to Israel, addressed the Parliament there and met his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu.
Elaborating on how the attack plan was readied, Reuven Azar, Israel’s Ambassador to India, told The Indian Express that the timing of the military action against Iran wasn’t finalised when PM Modi was visiting. “It was an operational opportunity that came up only after Prime Minister Modi left,” he told the publication, adding that while the regional conflict was discussed with the prime minister, “we couldn’t have actually shared something that we didn’t know”.
He said that the launch of the operation was granted a nod by the security cabinet on Saturday morning, about two days after PM Modi left Israel.
The Israeli envoy’s remarks on the timing of the attack come days after an Axios report claimed that the US and Israel had planned the attack on Iran one week before it happened, but delayed it for “operational and intelligence reasons”.
Speaking more about the planning that went into launching the operation against Iran with the US’s help, the Israeli envoy said that his country had “prepared at the highest level”.
Being at the end of threats from Iran for years, Israel had to take time to fully understand the operations in its enemy country, who was in control there and where they were located, Azar told IE. He said that Israel invested billions to strengthen its defence capabilities for years to protect itself from Iran and its proxies.
“And now, before this operation, we’ve been coordinating with the United States for a long time and been waiting for the right moment (to attack the Iranian leadership), which we didn’t know when was going to happen,” he was quoted as saying.
Shortly after the US-Israel’s joint attack on Iran over the weekend, PM Modi’s Israel trip, concluded just two days before, received backlash from the Opposition in India.
During his address to the Knesset, PM Modi had declared that India stood with Israel “firmly with full conviction”, a move later used by the Congress to slam the prime minister’s “highest moral cowardice”.
“This Israel visit was shameful and it is even more so in light of the war that has been launched by two of Mr. Modi’s ‘good friends’,” Congress MP Jairam Ramesh wrote on X, pointing to Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, both of whom have called PM Modi a good friend in the past.
The Congress MP also said that the US-Israel attack was long expected, in the backdrop of the already tense situation in the region and several talks between Tehran and Washington that remained inconclusive. “Mr. Modi nevertheless chose to go to Israel, where he displayed the highest moral cowardice. He declared that India stood with Israel and got himself an award for saying so,” Ramesh wrote.
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