On Thursday, the US-Israel war on Iran reached its 13th day – officially surpassing last June’s conflict, dubbed the 12 day war by Donald Trump. The current round is not just longer – with absolutely no discernible end, nor obvious endgame, in sight – but more dangerous and far-reaching than the preceding one.
In June 2025, with the exception of a tightly choreographed strike on the US central command HQ in Doha, hostilities were contained to the territories of Iran and Israel (in addition to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza, where Israel had already been waging war, including against Iranian proxies.) This March, Iranian missiles and drones began hitting Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Cyprus, while the US Navy sank, for no apparent reason, an Iranian navy ship off the coast of Sri Lanka. In its first few days alone, the war unfurled from the East Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, a ghastly arc 3,500 miles long – similar to the distance from New York City to Peru, or from London to Kazakhstan. And of course, the indirect impact is even wider. Combatants are being drawn in from the UK, France and Greece; gas and oil prices are spiking the world over. This is precisely the nightmare scenario analysts have warned about for decades whenever direct military action against Iran was considered: a regional war coupled with tectonic disruption of energy markets, a kind of a 1970s Opec embargo redux.
Yet in Israel, the key combatant and instigator, this round of war is experienced as far less cataclysmic than forecasted, and in many ways, far less dramatic than the more limited one in June. Ahead of the war, Israeli media prophesied gargantuan saturation barrages overwhelming missile defences and levelling Israeli cities, with thousands of fatalities in the first few days – or, at the very least, pinpoint missile strikes eliminating Israel’s water, sanitation and energy grids and creating mass waves of temporary or permanent emigration.
So far, virtually none of the above has come to pass. Far from reaching the thousands or even the hundreds, fatalities after two weeks of war amount to just over a dozen – less than half the casualties of the June war, when 28 Israelis died. The multiple online forums and WhatsApp groups set up to facilitate evacuations – overland via Egypt and Jordan, over sea to Cyprus – are noticeably more subdued; sailboat skippers are resorting to last minute rate-slashing to fill their boats. Partly, this is because the impact on Israel has been lower than in the June exchanges. But it also speaks to how quickly civilian populations can adapt to living under fire – and to Netanyahu’s skill in exploiting this adaptability for his own survival.
The former factor has been so startling that outside observers are asking if an unprecedented censorship clampdown in Israel is going on, or even more outlandishly, if mass casualties and devastation are being covered up.
To an extent, the former group has a point. Israel inherited British colonial rules on media censorship, and war-related reporting does need to be approved by censors on a case by case basis. Blanket bans, enforced both upon media professionals and civilians, prohibit publication of precise coordinates of strikes so as not to facilitate future strikes’ triangulation, and can obscure or delay reporting on damage to military infrastructure and military casualties (hence the detention of several media professionals reporting from in front of a frequent target, the IDF HQ). But in a nation with near-compete smartphone penetration and unfettered (though by no means unsurveilled) access to the internet, delaying is usually as far as it goes. The HQ occupies an entire neighbourhood of central Tel Aviv; other targets, like the Haifa oil refinery and Israel’s key power stations, are visible from miles away. Hits on those would induce national blackouts, which have so far conspicuously failed to happen.
As to casualties, Israel is too small and intimately interlinked a society for fatalities to be concealable for long – especially with Jewish funeral rites demanding that burials take place before sundown on the day of the death. The degree of separation of any Israeli from any other is not likely to be greater than three, and informal Telegram channels contain hundreds of thousands of users spread up and down a country of nine million. Reports of casualties and their numbers appear on these groups within minutes of impact. Mainstream media follow up well within an hour for civilians, up to five or six hours for military casualties; names are released within a day or two. This has not changed in the last two and a half years of war, and there is no suggestion casualties are being underreported.
In truth, the limited impact has a much simpler explanation: the barrages from Iran have been much smaller, too. Iran may be economising by choice, having realised that firing one or two missiles has about the same paralysing effect over wide areas of Israel as firing 50; or by necessity, given the relentless Israeli and American attacks on missile stockpiles and launchers, and the fact it must spread its firepower much thinner now that most other Gulf countries have become targets as well. Or perhaps it is biding its time, waiting for Israel and the US to run out of interceptors. Whatever the reason, the missiles strikes have been relentless, but curiously sparse, and so far, interception rates appear to have improved since the first round.
But the relative nonchalance reveals another truth: Netanyahu has accomplished the seemingly impossible, and got many Israelis to begin accepting regular showers of ballistic missiles almost as just one of those things. This is especially astonishing given that Israel’s founding premise has been a safe-haven for Jews from the world over. Netanyahu built his astonishingly successful career on campaigning as Mr Security, the one guy who’ll keep you safe while lefties hand guns to terrorists and fret about their feelings. Yet under him it has become the world’s least safe place to be Jewish.
Having served a mere two years as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, just after the second intifada was definitively suppressed. Instead of using the relative quiet to advance any kind of diplomatic settlement, Netanyahu set out entrenching and deepening the occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza. By the mid 2010s, armed attacks had resumed, with dozens of stabbing and ramming attacks, largely carried out by lone-wolf Palestinian attackers at checkpoints. Rather than promising to put an end to these attacks once and for all, Netanyahu presented a new argument. He told his cabinet that he was often asked: “Will we live by the sword forever?” And he always replied: “Yes, we will.”
In the decade since, Netanyahu has fallen back on that narrative repeatedly, often using the same phrases. In the process, he defined his own role. No longer the guy that would permanently secure Israel and bring lasting peace, he was simply the guy you want on your side in a tough neighbourhood – the guy who will hit back harder (or ten to 20 times as hard, to judge by the Israeli to Palestinian civilian fatality ratio). Netanyahu’s failure is his strength: so long as the neighbourhood is rough, you will always need him. In this new world, old certainties about Israeli pain thresholds began to fall away. Before Netanyahu, Israel was reluctantly dragged to the negotiating table in Camp David (after being briefly overwhelmed in the 1973 October War) and in Oslo (under the pressure of the First Intifada). The loss of hundreds of Israeli troops in South Lebanon precipitated a grassroots campaign to end Israel’s 18-year occupation there.
But under Netanyahu, who simply refused to treat any Israeli death as a failure of his policy – or as the fault of anything at all other than innate Arab murderousness and inexorable, eternal global anti-Semitism – the threshold began to rise. No mass protests came after the invasion of Gaza in 2014, which cost the lives of over 60 Israeli soldiers in four weeks, the highest casualty rate in a quarter-century. No groundswell for peace came among the Knives Intifada of the mid-2010s.
Even 7 October, the worst Israeli military collapse and the worst massacre of Israeli civilians, did not prove his downfall: Netanyahu not only remained prime minister but has rigged up a toothless inquiry committee and demoted and besmirched the military and security services leaders who tried to warn him of a Hamas attack in advance. He is currently moving to erase the word “massacre” from official commemorations of the day, replacing it instead with “events”. The same is now being applied to the war with Iran. Netanyahu continued the Gaza war in pursuit of an illusory “total victory” – to eject Hamas from the enclave, a goal which justified both Israeli losses and Israeli war crimes. (Hamas remains the only credible political force in Gaza, almost three years in.) In Iran, by calling for regime change but preemptively placing the responsibility on Iranians themselves, Netanyahu is setting the scene for an inconclusive war and for yet another round in a year, or two, or three. In the meantime, he is now confident enough in his polling to begin mulling bringing the election forward instead of eking out the last year of this parliament’s fixed term.
Ever the pawnshop Churchill, Netanyahu is telling Israelis that when you’re going through hell, keep going. And that the hell that he built, for Israelis and for everyone in reach of their arsenal, seems eternal.
[Further reading: Kharg Island, the key to Iran’s fate]
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