At the end of October, Israel held a tactical exercise for which the military from leading Western countries traveled to Tel Aviv.
Code name: "Noah's Ark".
The Israeli armed forces asked their partners to update the evacuation plans for their nationals in Lebanon in the event of a military confrontation with the Shiite organization Hezbollah, which is controlled by Iran.
Christoph Ehrhardt
Correspondent for the Arab countries based in Beirut.
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Christian Meier
Political Correspondent for the Middle East and Northeast Africa.
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Around the same time, the Israeli military was hosting a large-scale air force exercise.
Fighter planes over the Negev desert trained their use in an imaginary "dragon land", which nonetheless aroused associations with Iran or Syria.
A little later, a sudden outbreak of war on the border with Lebanon was simulated for the Israeli reservists.
Such maneuvers should no longer be dismissed as mere saber rattles and chilling messages.
Because with the progressive expansion of the Iranian nuclear program, the risk of a military confrontation increases, which could spread to the entire region.
The reports of the tough negotiations in Vienna do not sound very encouraging.
And even if an agreement were to be reached, some of Iran's advances could hardly be turned back.
The regime in Tehran would retain the know-how.
The room for maneuver in the “dilemma zone”, in which some observers see the Israeli government, is getting smaller and smaller.
The strategists in Tel Aviv have to weigh two risks against each other: that of an increasing nuclear threat - and that of a complex military attack in order to significantly set back the Iranian nuclear program.
For years, Israel’s policy has been based on the threat of a blow being credible.
A decade ago then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to win the support of American President Barack Obama for such plans.
When that failed, he openly threatened that Israel would act alone.
Can Israel strike alone?
Today the constellation is pretty similar: From an Israeli perspective, Washington shows no readiness to embark on a new military adventure. On the contrary, the prevailing view is that Joe Biden desperately wants a deal with Iran. The news portal N12 quoted a representative of the Israeli security apparatus on Wednesday as saying that if the sanctions against Iran were lifted without a new agreement, the regime in Tehran would achieve nuclear weapons capability within six months. "And then Israel will have no choice but to take its fate into its own hands."
However, there are doubts that Israel currently has the capabilities to carry out an attack on Iran's nuclear program on its own. This would be a great challenge in terms of logistics and military tactics. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Defense Minister Benny Gantz had urgently instructed the military to develop attack plans, the Israel Hayom newspaper said on Wednesday. Since the conclusion of the nuclear deal in 2015, Israel’s military capabilities have been concentrated in other arenas: above all in Syria and Lebanon, where the conflict is being waged with forces directed by Iran.
In Syria, Israel has been targeting such targets for several months and is said to have recently expanded the radius of its operations.
Individual attacks took place during the day, which is unusual.
Iran itself continues to be the target of alleged Israeli actions, albeit in a different form: through cyber attacks.
"Soft targets" are increasingly being targeted.
The Iranian gas station network was hacked at the end of October.
Shortly afterwards, Iranian hackers from the Black Shadow group apparently broke into a dating portal of the Israeli LGBTQ community and published private data.