Israeli officials raised their rhetoric against Tehran, while the army leadership deliberately leaked the orders of the Chief of Staff, Aviv Kohavi, to the air force to prepare well to strike targets in Iran and set up a plan to start the exercise.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that confrontation with Tehran was inevitable and only a matter of time.
The military correspondent for Israeli television Channel 12, Nir Dvory, revealed that Kohavi instructed the Israeli air force to resume training exercises on the possibility of attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, after such maneuvers were stopped two years ago.
Dvory explained that revealing these exercises was not directed at Tehran alone, but also at the leaders of the United States and the West, who are still trying to bring Iran back to the nuclear agreement.
Quoting Israeli military officials, the correspondent said that there was an Israeli, and perhaps an American conviction that it would be difficult to bring Iran back into the nuclear agreement without putting forward the real and effective military option backed by clear operations.
Earlier this week, the Israeli government approved the allocation of 5 billion shekels (USD 1.5 billion) in the Israeli general budget, to be added to the army’s budget for the purpose of building a military capacity to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Lieberman boasted of this decision, saying in televised statements on Thursday that a confrontation with Iran was imminent and was just a matter of time.
“Any diplomatic process or agreement will not stop Iran’s nuclear program,” he stated.
On the other hand, an Israeli official told the US Monitor website that there was a feeling of frustration in Tel Aviv “with the realization that the United States and Israel do not agree on the same goal, and that their strategic perceptions of the Iranian nuclear threat are fundamentally different.”
The official said that the talks between the US and Israeli national security advisers on Iran "were good… but in essence, the situation is bad.”
He underlined the lack of a joint operational contingency plan against Iran in case efforts to restore the nuclear deal fail.
