Strategic & military objectives pursued by Netanyahu and complications involved.

• The military campaign launched against Iran by Israel is both very bold and highly sophisticated

• As discussed in yesterday's cables, a number of nuclear scientists in Iran have been assassinated, and heads of Chief of Staff of the Army, of IRGC, of Quds Force (responsible for foreign ops- their previous leader Soleimani was assassinated in January 2020, with an order from Trump himself.), Air Force, and more than a dozen other senior commanders of Iran have been eliminated.

• Iran has responded with a barrage of ballistic missiles aimed at Tel Aviv and (today) at Haifa, with reports being that there are cluster munitions used in ballistic missiles in Haifa.

• Notably, unlike Israeli strikes, Iran has attacked large cities with indiscriminate targeting.

• These ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel have a circular error probable of 900 meters (meaning that half of the missiles are expected to land outside the 900 meters radius)—they're very inaccurate.

• (side note: shorter-range Iranian ballistic missiles (like the Fath-360) supplied to Russia, have much better accuracy, but they don't care as much payload—and they're not capable of reaching Israel.)

• This doesn’t mean however that Iran was Totally incapable of striking high-value military targets.

• Indeed, there are reports of the IDF headquarters sustaining heavy damage from ballistic missiles.

• That this particular strike was not successfully intercepted by Israeli air defenses is not the best look for the IDF— they should have been better prepared - given that they are the ones that instigated the military campaign, and they should have known that IDF HQ was going to be one of the primary targets for Iran.

• A lot of residential apartments have been destroyed, even foreign diplomats have been injured.

• With that said, due to early warning radars and each building in Tel Aviv having shelter, the civilian casualties have been minimal, with only few dead and few wounded.

• Iran is yet to launch a sophisticated military response.

• So far, they're in a fully reactive mode, hopelessly reacting and lashing out at Israel without any clear strategy in play.

• One has to also note that there hasn't been a general mobilization in Iran.