November 19, 2025: The June 13 Israeli air strikes on Iranian nuclear development facilities and personnel did more than just kill essential technical personnel. These scientists and administrative officials were difficult to replace. It required decades of training and work experience to create qualified personnel. It will take even longer to replace them. That assumes any qualified Iranians are willing to join the nuclear weapons project.

Iran has another problem. It was obvious that the Israeli Mossad foreign intelligence service has hundreds of operatives, nearly all of them Iranians, working for Israel in Iran. On June 25 Iranian intelligence forces arrested over 700 Iranians and accused them of being Israeli intelligence agents. Earlier two Iranians were executed after be accused of meeting with Israeli Mossad agents. This year Iran executed at least a thousand men, most of them on suspicion of working for Israel. This has created a culture of fear and paranoia among Iranian nuclear scientists and the military personnel that work with them. Iran is desperate to discover how much Mossad has penetrated their nuclear development program as well as the Iranian military. Several key scientific and military personnel were believed to be working for Mossad. Before restarting its nuclear weapons program, Iran has to find out who can be trusted. This will take years and it might not be until the 2030s that the nuclear program can be resumed in ear

Iran has had these trust issues before. That’s because there are still many descendants of Iranian Jews in Israel. When Israel was founded in 1948, Jews living in Muslim countries throughout the region became unwelcome. They fled to Israel, where they found safety and greater prosperity than in their former homelands. This migration also provided the Israeli secret service, Mossad, with qualified recruits for espionage and intelligence analysis, enabling them to monitor neighboring countries. Over time, Israel secured peace and trade agreements with its neighbors, starting with Egypt and Jordan. Eventually, the Gulf Arab states recognized Israel as a valuable ally against Iran. Before Iran’s religious revolution in the 1980s, Israel and the Iranian monarchy maintained good relations. Many Iranians today wish to restore that relationship.

Israel and Iran have been adversaries since 1979, when Iran’s monarchy was replaced by a religious dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. The new government held elections, with nominally elected officials running the state, but senior religious leaders, or Ayatollahs, retained the power to approve candidates. The senior Ayatollah’s role involves more politics than religion. A key distinction between Iranian religious leaders and those in Arab countries is that Iranians are Shia Muslims, while over 80 percent of Muslims worldwide are Sunni. Shia and Sunni Muslims generally coexist, though disagreements persist over which branch represents the more legitimate form of Islam.

Israel exploits these differences, often aligning with Sunni Arabs against the Persians, as some in the region still refer to Iranians. The term Iranian began replacing Persian about a century ago, but Persian persists. Historically, Shia Iranians and Sunni Arabs have clashed. Until oil was discovered and exported a century ago, these tensions were inconsequential. Oil wealth transformed the dynamic between Iranians and Arabs. The Arabs possessed far more oil, but Iran leveraged its oil revenue to bolster its military. Iran’s advantages of abundant agriculture and natural resources gave it a military edge over the Gulf Arabs, whose Arabian Peninsula offered little arable land. They survived through coastal towns and cities, importing goods to trade with interior tribes. Only Yemen, in the far south of the peninsula, had sufficient rainfall to support agriculture, but the region lacked oil.

In religious terms, the Gulf Arabs and Iranians viewed Israelis as enemies of Islam, a group to be eradicated from the region. Yet Israel proved remarkably resilient against these threats. Over recent decades, the Gulf Arabs have come to see the prosperous and militarily formidable Israel as a useful ally, particularly as Iran edged closer to developing nuclear weapons, a prospect no one in the region, nor the nations purchasing Persian Gulf oil, supported.

This context set the stage for the massive June Israeli-American airstrikes on Iran, which destroyed most of Iran’s nuclear weapons development and production facilities. Israel’s informant network in Iran identified key military, intelligence, and security officials for targeted elimination during the attack.

Israeli military planners exploited Iranian leaders’ miscalculations. The Iranians believed Israel would refrain from action before the next round of nuclear weapons negotiations, dismissing Israeli moves as mere propaganda to extract concessions. This misjudgment proved fatal, as Iran failed to implement safety protocols, such as restricting leadership meetings to secure locations. Instead, leaders convened at a military base, a fact noted and reported by Israeli operatives inside Iran.

Israel maintains hundreds of operatives within Iran, mostly Iranians disillusioned with the religious dictatorship mismanaging the country. Iranian leaders largely dismiss the possibility that Israel could recruit and deploy such operatives. This arrogance has repeatedly proven costly. In 2018, these operatives enabled Israel to extract half a ton of Iranian nuclear weapons program documents. Iranian underestimation of Israeli capabilities remains a recurring flaw.

Israel’s exploitation of Iranian errors has succeeded multiple times because Iranian leaders refuse to accept that Israel operates this way, or that their own people harbor such deep resentment as to collaborate with Israeli intelligence, or that Israel has infiltrated Iran’s regime security forces. During the June 13 Israeli attack, Iran made further costly miscalculations. Israel, with American assistance, killed several senior military leaders, destroyed most Iranian air defense systems and ballistic missile operations, and crippled underground nuclear material processing facilities.

The June 13 attacks enraged Iran’s leaders, prompting retaliation with roughly a hundred missiles and drones that survived the Israeli assault. Some struck their targets, causing about two dozen Israeli casualties and damaging buildings. Iran launched subsequent attacks, inflicting further damage.

Meanwhile, Iran’s challenges are mounting. A new program aims to cripple Iranian oil exports by imposing severe financial penalties on nations purchasing Iranian oil. This won’t halt sales entirely but will reduce them, limiting Iran’s funds for regional mischief.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei survived because the American B-2 bombers that struck Iran’s underground nuclear facilities were not deployed to target him. Israel and the U.S. agreed to leave Khamenei in place, viewing him as a known quantity, whereas his successor could be worse.

Ultimately, this brief Iran-Israel war left over 5,000 Iranians dead or wounded, while Israel suffered 29 deaths and nearly 3,500 injuries. Iranian errors, coupled with Israeli ingenuity and swift action, secured victory once again. The war persists, but Iran received another stark reminder not to underestimate Israel. The Iranians, however, never stop trying.