Talk of a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities dominated the Israeli press on Friday, a day after Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the issue had become more “urgent.”
“(Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and Barak are determined to attack in Iran in the autumn,” trumpeted a front-page headline in top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot. According to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, two of the paper’s most senior writers, if Netanyahu and Barak were to decide on their own, they would likely order an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities “in the coming months of autumn, before the US elections.”
“There is immense significance to the fact that these two senior figures, the prime minister and defence minister, are determined to take the decision,” they wrote.
“It is no less significant that not one senior official in the establishment — not in the military, nor in defence establishment, nor even the president (Shimon Peres) — currently supports an Israeli attack.”
The Haaretz newspaper led its weekend edition with an unnamed Israeli official warning that Israel was currently in greater danger than before the 1967 Middle East war.
“The sword at our throat now is sharper than the sword at our throat before the Six Day War,” the official told Haaretz, stressing that despite US commitments to prevent a nuclear Iran, “Israel must responsibly ask itself what a lack of action now would mean.”
And the Maariv newspaper’s front page highlighted an opinion poll which found that 37 percent of Israelis believe a nuclear Iran could lead to “a second Holocaust.”
Netanyahu has warned that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of “Iran’s ayatollah’s” could lead to “another genocide,” and President Shimon Peres said that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was “threatening a new Shoah,” the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Talk of Iran strike dominates Israel press
