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Could a Nuclear War with Iran Really Happen?
Military personnel stand guard at a nuclear facility in the Zardanjan area of Isfahan, Iran, April 19, 2024. Photo: West Asia News Agency via REUTERS
For the moment, as Iran remains “pre-nuclear,” an Israel-Iran nuclear exchange is out of the question. Nonetheless, if Israel is able to maintain its asymmetrical nuclear advantage, a one-sided nuclear war would still be possible. Circumstances could sometime arise in which Israel felt compelled to launch parts of its “ambiguous” nuclear arsenal against Iran. The most plausible rationale of any such launch would be to (1) prevent Iranian “escalation dominance;” and (2) keep Iran from “becoming nuclear.”
In offering suitable explanations, recent history will show that during April 2024, Israel and Iran engaged in a brief but direct interstate conflict. Looking ahead, it would be reasonable to expect additional rounds of direct warfare between these two bitter adversaries. Conflict durations could be much longer and more protracted. It follows that Israel would be under expanding pressures to dominate escalation during periods of hyper-warfare with Iran and that such potentially existential pressures could precipitate an Israeli resort to nuclear weapons use.
Above all else, Israel’s strategic objective vis-à-vis Iran should be nuclear war avoidance. In a near worst-case scenario, Israel could calculate that nothing short of massive non-nuclear preemption would halt Tehran’s ongoing nuclearization.
An Israeli nuclear preemption is inconceivable. But even if Israel’s determination to launch a non-nuclear preemption were analytically correct and law-enforcing, its tangible results could still be catastrophic.
What should now be done by Jerusalem? How should principal Israeli decision-makers balance these dissuasive results against all calculable risks and benefits?
A best answer should be drawn from conceptual and theoretical fundamentals. Israeli strategists should always examine their country’s available security options as an intellectual rather than political task.
There will be pertinent details, both conspicuous and inconspicuous. Any tactically successful conventional preemption against Iranian weapons and infrastructures could come at more-or-less unacceptable costs. In 2003-2004, when this writer’s Project Daniel Group presented an early report on Iranian nuclearization to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, prospective Iranian targets were already more directly threatening to Israel than Iraq’s nuclear Osirak reactor had been on June 7, 1981. That was the date of Israel’s law-based preemption, an operation code-named “Opera.”
To the extent that they could be estimated accurately, the risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war would ultimately depend on whether the conflict was intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this critical three-part distinction, there would be no good reason to expect optimally useful strategic assessments from Tel Aviv (MOD/IDF).
Once applied, however, Israeli planners should fully understand that their complex subject is without any clarifying precedents, and that this absence would present an insurmountable prediction problem.
It will also be obligatory for Israeli strategists and war planners to bear in mind the timeless warnings of Prussian thinker Karl von Clausewitz on the role of “friction.” At its core, friction represents “the difference between war on paper and war as it actually is.”
Peremptory rules of logic and mathematics preclude any meaningful assignments of probability in matters that are unprecedented or sui generis. To come up with any logically-meaningful estimations of probability, these predictions would have to be based upon the determinable frequency of relevant past events. As there have been no occasions of an interstate nuclear exchange, there could be no relevant past events.
Competent Israeli strategic analysts must examine all current and future nuclear risks from Iran. Such a comprehensive examination should take special note of Iran’s radiation dispersal weapons and its potential capacity to attack Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor with non-nuclear missiles. Also worth emphasizing is that North Korea, bolstered by Russia and China, has been a clamorous ally of Iran, and could sometime allow its national nuclear forces to serve as Iranian proxies during a protracted war with Israel.
If any Israeli planners should assume that a “Trump II” presidency could help in such unpredictable scenarios, they ought first to recall Trump’s ambiguous summarizing message after the Singapore Summit: “We [Trump and Kim] fell in love.”
Following their Singapore meeting, Trump and Kim each seemed to assume the other’s decisional rationality and also the mutual primacy of decisional intent. If such an assumption had not existed, it would have made no logical sense for either president to strike existential retaliatory fear in the other. But what are the derivative lessons of “Singapore” for Israel vis-à-vis Iran? Should Israel also assume a fully rational adversary in Iran? Though any such assumption would be more or less reassuring in Jerusalem’s decision-making circles, it could also be incorrect.
On several occasions during his presidential tenure, Donald Trump praised pretended irrationality as a potentially promising US nuclear strategy. But such a strategic preference could never be purposeful for Israel. This is the case despite Moshe Dayan’s much earlier musing about Israel and its enemies: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
Though neither Israel nor Iran might prefer conditions of a steadily escalating war, either or both “players” could still commit catastrophic errors during their obligatory searches for “escalation dominance.” If Jerusalem and Tehran undertake competitive risk-taking in extremis, Israel’s only reliable “ace in the hole” will be its continuing nuclear monopoly.
An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Israel and Iran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This includes hacking interference and should bring to mind corollary distinctions between unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war.
Though all accidental nuclear war would be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war would be caused by accident. An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could sometime be the result of certain misjudgments about enemy intentions.
“In war,” says Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously in On War, “everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Fashioning a successful “endgame” to any impending future nuclear confrontation with Iran, Israel’s leaders will need to understand that a crisis in extremis is inevitably about more than maximizing any “correlation of forces” or “missile-interception” capabilities. It will be about variously antecedent Israeli triumphs of “mind over mind.”
As a nuclear war has never been fought, what will be needed in Jerusalem is more broadly intellectual guidance than Israel could ever reasonably expect from even its most senior and capable military officers.
The reason is simple.
There are no plausible experts on fighting an unprecedented kind of war, not in Jerusalem, not in Tehran, not anywhere. It was not by happenstance that the first serious theoreticians of nuclear war and nuclear deterrence in the 1950s were academic mathematicians, physicists, and political scientists. Having to deal with matters that lacked usable historic or empirical data, these thinkers were forced to rely essentially on deductive logic, deriving their essential strategic theories from meticulously assembled abstractions.
There remains one final point about still-estimable risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war. From the standpoint of Jerusalem, the only truly successful outcome would be a crisis or confrontation that ends with a reduction of Iranian nuclear war fighting intentions and capabilities. It would represent a serious mistake for Israel to settle for any bloated boasts of “victory” based upon a one-time avoidance of nuclear war. In this geo-strategic conflict with Iran, potentially existential dangers to Israel are foreseeably continuous.
The Israel-Iran strategic conflict is self-propelling. For Jerusalem, providing Israeli national security vis-à-vis a steadily-nuclearizing Iran ought never to become an ad hoc or “seat-of-the-pants” struggle. Without any suitably long-term plan in place for avoiding an atomic war, a nuclear conflict that is deliberate, unintentional or accidental could “sometimes happen.”
At every stage of its corrosive competition with Tehran, Israel should avoid losing sight of the only rational use for its presumptive nuclear weapons and doctrine. That limited use is to maintain Israeli “escalation dominance” during military crisis and to prevent an operationally usable Iranian nuclear force. More generally, nuclear weapons can succeed only as instruments of strategic deterrence and nuclear war avoidance. By reasonable definition, any actual use of a state’s nuclear weapons would “automatically” signify their failure. Israel ought to view ongoing “asymmetrical” conflict with Iran as the preferred context for preventing Iranian nuclear weapons.
There is something else. In the absence of such conflict, an already nuclear Israel could still exercise a preemption option against a pre-nuclear Iran, but only as a “bolt-from-the-blue” attack. Though this particular sort of action could fulfil all authoritative expectations of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law, it would be vastly more difficult to support in political and public relations terms.
What if Israel and Iran were both “already nuclear”? In such a next-to-worst case scenario, Israel, having failed to act in a timely fashion, could have to strike preemptively against a more menacing adversary. In a worst case scenario, Israel would fail to prevent a nuclear Iran, and Iran would become the first adversary to fire its nuclear weapons. Certain specific Arab states could rush to join the “nuclear club.” In all likelihood, these states — potentially joined by Turkey — would be Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Summarizing all these “strategy of conflict” issues in policy-relevant terms, Israel’s only cost-effective strategy would be to prevent Iranian nuclearization and correlative Arab state nuclearization by dominating escalations during a non-nuclear war or an asymmetrical nuclear war. Ideally, such a strategy would be exercised during the course of an already-ongoing armed conflict, though Israel could, as last resort, plan “bolt-from-the-blue” strikes against Iranian hard targets that are convincingly lawful expressions of national survival options. Under international law, these permissible strikes would be examples of “anticipatory self-defense.”
In the end, we are all creatures of biology. For Israel and Iran, a nuclear war would resemble any other incurable disease. For both, therefore, the only reasonable survival strategies must lie in prevention.
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel. Over recent years, he has published on nuclear warfare issues in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Atlantic; Israel Defense; Jewish Website; The New York Times; Israel National News; The Jerusalem Post; The Hill and other sites. A different version of this article was originally published by Israel National News.
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Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire

Explosions send smoke into the air in Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, July 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said on Friday that while the Palestinian terrorist group favors reaching an interim truce in the Gaza war, if such an agreement is not reached in current negotiations it could revert to insisting on a full package deal to end the conflict.
Hamas has previously offered to release all the hostages held in Gaza and conclude a permanent ceasefire agreement, and Israel has refused, Abu Ubaida added in a televised speech.
Arab mediators Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have hosted more than 10 days of talks on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day truce in the war.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on a call he had with Pope Leo on Friday that Israel‘s efforts to secure a hostage release deal and 60-day ceasefire “have so far not been reciprocated by Hamas.”
As part of the potential deal, 10 hostages held in Gaza would be returned along with the bodies of 18 others, spread out over 60 days. In exchange, Israel would release a number of detained Palestinians.
“If the enemy remains obstinate and evades this round as it has done every time before, we cannot guarantee a return to partial deals or the proposal of the 10 captives,” said Abu Ubaida.
Disputes remain over maps of Israeli army withdrawals, aid delivery mechanisms into Gaza, and guarantees that any eventual truce would lead to ending the war, said two Hamas officials who spoke to Reuters on Friday.
The officials said the talks have not reached a breakthrough on the issues under discussion.
Hamas says any agreement must lead to ending the war, while Netanyahu says the war will only end once Hamas is disarmed and its leaders expelled from Gaza.
Almost 1,650 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed as a result of the conflict, including 1,200 killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Over 250 hostages were kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.
Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
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Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel

People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas
Iran on Friday marked the 31st anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires by slamming Argentina for what it called “baseless” accusations over Tehran’s alleged role in the terrorist attack and accusing Israel of politicizing the atrocity to influence the investigation and judicial process.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on the anniversary of Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
“While completely rejecting the accusations against Iranian citizens, the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns attempts by certain Argentine factions to pressure the judiciary into issuing baseless charges and politically motivated rulings,” the statement read.
“Reaffirming that the charges against its citizens are unfounded, the Islamic Republic of Iran insists on restoring their reputation and calls for an end to this staged legal proceeding,” it continued.
Last month, a federal judge in Argentina ordered the trial in absentia of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of orchestrating the attack in Buenos Aires.
The ten suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the terrorist attack.
In its statement on Friday, Iran also accused Israel of influencing the investigation to advance a political campaign against the Islamist regime in Tehran, claiming the case has been used to serve Israeli interests and hinder efforts to uncover the truth.
“From the outset, elements and entities linked to the Zionist regime [Israel] exploited this suspicious explosion, pushing the investigation down a false and misleading path, among whose consequences was to disrupt the long‑standing relations between the people of Iran and Argentina,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.
“Clear, undeniable evidence now shows the Zionist regime and its affiliates exerting influence on the Argentine judiciary to frame Iranian nationals,” the statement continued.
In April, lead prosecutor Sebastián Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Alberto Nisman — requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.
Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.
In a post on X, the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), the country’s Jewish umbrella organization, released a statement commemorating the 31st anniversary of the bombing.
“It was a brutal attack on Argentina, its democracy, and its rule of law,” the group said. “At DAIA, we continue to demand truth and justice — because impunity is painful, and memory is a commitment to both the present and the future.”
31 años del atentado a la AMIA – DAIA. 31 años sin justicia.
El 18 de julio de 1994, un atentado terrorista dejó 85 personas muertas y más de 300 heridas. Fue un ataque brutal contra la Argentina, su democracia y su Estado de derecho.
Desde la DAIA, seguimos exigiendo verdad y… pic.twitter.com/kV2ReGNTIk
— DAIA (@DAIAArgentina) July 18, 2025
Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.
Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.
To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.
In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.
Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.
Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.
The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.
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Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns

Murad Adailah, the head of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, attends an interview with Reuters in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jehad Shelbak
The Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements, has been implicated in a wide-ranging network of illegal financial activities in Jordan and abroad, according to a new investigative report.
Investigations conducted by Jordanian authorities — along with evidence gathered from seized materials — revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood raised tens of millions of Jordanian dinars through various illegal activities, the Jordan news agency (Petra) reported this week.
With operations intensifying over the past eight years, the report showed that the group’s complex financial network was funded through various sources, including illegal donations, profits from investments in Jordan and abroad, and monthly fees paid by members inside and outside the country.
The report also indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken advantage of the war in Gaza to raise donations illegally.
Out of all donations meant for Gaza, the group provided no information on where the funds came from, how much was collected, or how they were distributed, and failed to work with any international or relief organizations to manage the transfers properly.
Rather, the investigations revealed that the Islamist network used illicit financial mechanisms to transfer funds abroad.
According to Jordanian authorities, the group gathered more than JD 30 million (around $42 million) over recent years.
With funds transferred to several Arab, regional, and foreign countries, part of the money was allegedly used to finance domestic political campaigns in 2024, as well as illegal activities and cells.
In April, Jordan outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most vocal opposition group, and confiscated its assets after members of the Islamist movement were found to be linked to a sabotage plot.
The movement’s political arm in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front, became the largest political grouping in parliament after elections last September, although most seats are still held by supporters of the government.
Opponents of the group, which is banned in most Arab countries, label it a terrorist organization. However, the movement claims it renounced violence decades ago and now promotes its Islamist agenda through peaceful means.
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