The eve of April 14, 2024, and the hours that followed into the night will be recorded in history as truly momentous, for it saw the Islamic Republic of Iran launch a military operation directly from its soil on apartheid Israel’s colonial regime.
‘Operation True Promise’, as it was called, was a natural and legitimate response to the Tel Aviv regime’s illegal airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, which resulted in the assassination of seven Iranian military officials, including a senior IRGC commander.
Settlers attest to the tense hours when Iranian long-range drones and ballistic missiles hovered over the night skies of the occupied territories as bewildering, shocking and alarming.
Many said they spent the night in bunkers and safe rooms, frightened, anxious, and sleepless.
It was a new reality they were confronted with, to have been on the receiving end of an attack, much different from being cheerleaders to the slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the repetitive pogroms in the occupied West Bank.
A columnist in Forward described the somber reality of the effects of Iran's retaliatory strikes in the following words: "Sunday is the start of the Israeli workweek, but schools and many offices were closed for the day. This cosmopolitan city’s typically crowded light rail was sparse and remarkably silent, with the few passengers glued to their smartphones looking for answers nobody could seem to find".
While the uncertainty of the result of Iran's epoch-making attack has preoccupied military analysts keen to find answers, they certainly cannot ignore the fact that the regime’s deterrence capacity has been severely compromised and its much-hyped intelligence prowess has been exposed as a myth.
Former French military mission chief to the United Nations, General Dominique Trinquand made an important point: "The significant development in this conflict is that Iran has directly hit Israel".