According to the Guardian newspaper, Barak said: “Israel has an urgent, even necessary, need to respond, and I believe that no sovereign country on earth can fail to respond.”
“The model of the Israeli response can be seen in the retaliatory air strikes carried out against oil facilities, power plants and docks controlled by the Houthis in the Yemeni port of Hodeidah,” said the former prime minister, who also served as defense minister, foreign minister and army chief of staff.
He added: “I think we may see something like this. It could be a massive attack, and it could be repeated more than once.”
US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that there were discussions in Washington about a possible Israeli attack on the Iranian oil sector, but he did not give any details or clarify whether the United States would support such an attack.
Barak added that there are also suggestions in Israel that it is necessary to exploit this opportunity to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, but he indicated that this would not significantly delay the Iranian program.
When Barak served as Defense Minister from 2007 to 2013, under both Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, he was among the strongest supporters of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, and he failed to convince Presidents George Bush and then Barack Obama to contribute American military force to the campaign.
On Wednesday, Biden followed Obama’s lead in expressing his opposition to any Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.
Now Barak himself acknowledges that Iran’s nuclear program is so advanced that no bombing campaign could significantly hamper it.
While Barak believes that a major Israeli military response to the Iranian military attack on Tuesday night is now inevitable and justified, he stresses that the drift into a regional war could have been avoided much earlier, if Benjamin Netanyahu had been open to a plan promoted by the United States to mobilize… Arab support for a Palestinian government to replace Hamas after the war in Gaza.
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