Benjamin Netanyahu has answered the charge his rivals are running on. In an Army Radio interview on Wednesday, the prime minister said he was not in favour of a preemptive strike against Iran before the October 27 election, dismissing the idea in plain terms and noting that even an Iranian missile attack would be blamed on him politically. He declined to discuss a strike after the election or his recent talks with Washington about Iran.
The context is a war on pause. The United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28 and Tehran struck back at Israel and Gulf states, but Israel and Iran have not traded fire since June. Netanyahu said Iran’s proxies were looking to attack Israel before the election, a claim carried here as his assertion, and repeated his standing warning that Israel would respond forcefully if attacked. Asked whether Israel was helping Saudi Arabia against Houthi attacks, after the Riyadh airport strike on Saturday that killed 13 people, he declined to discuss it, saying only that many countries in the region were turning to Israel.
The harder line came from his defence minister. Israel Katz, speaking from the self declared security zone Israeli forces occupy in southern Lebanon, warned Hezbollah that it would suffer a severe blow and lose more territory in the Nabatieh and Litani regions, which he said would become part of Israel’s permanent security zone, and that a million Shiites would be displaced and Beirut’s Hezbollah stronghold not spared. Israel launched air strikes and a ground invasion in southern Lebanon this year after Hezbollah fired into Israel in support of Tehran, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people.
For voters, Bloomberg’s reporting frames an electorate more tired than engaged by an election both camps call crucial. The practical read for the next 12 days is narrower: the incumbent has publicly priced a pre election strike as a political cost rather than an asset, which makes a deliberate Israeli escalation before October 27 less likely, while leaving the Lebanon front, where the threats are current and territorial, as the live risk. Status: campaign statements, no new operation announced.