TEL AVIV, Israel — Benjamin Netanyahu has said for three decades that the central threat to Israel’s existence is Iran’s nuclear program. At least twice over that period, he came within inches of carrying out an attack on it.

Now, at age 75, the Israeli premier has launched the biggest strike on Iran in his country’s history. It’s an operation of enormous risk and promise that will define the legacy of Israel’s longest-serving leader — and upend the Mideast.

In a speech to the nation Friday evening, Netanyahu said he ordered preparations for the assault back in November. But the audacious attack was the result of a confluence of factors dating back years.

Hamas’ deadly 2023 attack forced a rethinking of how Israel defends itself and allowed its military to decimate threats from Iranian proxies like Hezbollah. After years of efforts, Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran so deeply it could strike its protected nuclear program from inside the country. A supportive U.S. president and a hawkish circle in the Israeli leadership made it possible for Netanyahu, his own popularity tarnished, to make the move he’d avoided for so long.

A day after the first wave of attacks — hundreds of warplanes hit hundreds of sites 1,700 km (1,000 miles) away — it’s far too early to assess how this new war will develop and whether it will expand beyond Iran and Israel.

But initial reports have led Israeli commentators to argue that the operation is so far a success: a dozen top Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists killed, a major nuclear site badly damaged and Iran’s capacity to retaliate curbed. Late Friday, Israel said it had hit another nuclear installation, this time in Isfahan.

Shortly afterward, Iran launched missiles at Israel and residents were ordered to shelters. Authorities reported several people were injured by the attacks in the central part of the country. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to “act forcefully” and avenge the Israeli strikes. That retaliation is expected both directly and indirectly, and Israel’s assault is due to last days or weeks.

Since thousands of Iran-backed Hamas operatives broke into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1200 people and abducting 250, Israel has taken a much more aggressive approach to its borders, stationing its troops inside Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and relying less on opponents’ intent and focusing on their capabilities.

Attacked on all sides as Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen joined in, Israelis felt they were in a battle for their survival — even if from afar many saw a powerful, nuclear-armed nation against small militias that couldn’t challenge it.

Since then, Israel has carried out a brutal war in Gaza, destroying vast areas and killing some 55,000, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. It has taken out the missile arsenals of Hamas and Hezbollah and helped trigger the collapse of the Syrian regime.

It has also waged what a defense official and a former Mossad official described as a sophisticated intelligence operation within Iran, smuggling in large amounts of special weaponry, deploying it throughout the country and firing it toward ballistic missile launchers and air defense systems as the warplanes hit.

“They set up a base of explosive drones that were infiltrated into Iran by different agents long before the attacks,” said Sima Shine, a former top Mossad official who was briefed on the operation.

This comes nearly a year after Israel assassinated a top Hamas leader in a Tehran government guesthouse, another sign of its deep penetration of Iran. Much of the work is being carried out by Iranians opposed to their government.

The force behind the current operation is Netanyahu, whose popularity sank after his indictment on bribery and fraud and the 2023 security breach.

On Thursday, he was nearly driven from office by an attempt to dissolve parliament. But partly through arguing that the Iran operation was too important to jeopardize, he survived. And now the country is rallying around him and the attack. Even opposition leader Benny Gantz praised the decision to attack Friday.

Netanyahu has argued since the late 1990s that no threat to Israel compares with Iran. It dismisses the Jewish state as illegitimate and has been enriching uranium, building ballistic missiles and arming anti-Israel proxies across the Mideast.

As prime minister in 2010 and again in 2012, he nearly carried out an assault on Iran’s nuclear program, pulling back at the last minute on both occasions because his security chiefs and top ministers — and then-U.S. President Barack Obama — objected. Today, his aides and top ministers have all been fully supportive.

His predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who began on the political right but is now distinctly on the left, said he, too, considered seriously attacking Iran but then-U.S. President George W. Bush strongly opposed it and he himself had doubts.

“The universal wisdom was that we could delay Iran for a year and a half,” Olmert said in an interview earlier this week. “I had to decide whether to shatter everything in the Middle East for a delay of a year and a half. It didn’t make sense — and this was at a time when Iran hadn’t buried its program deep underground and it would have been easier to hit.”

The current U.S. president, Donald Trump, has been more supportive of military action against Iran, despite a public stance favoring negotiations. He praised Friday’s attack on Iran and said he’d warned the Iranians that if they didn’t agree to end enrichment, they’d suffer a military assault. He says the attacks could push Iran to compromise although initial reaction in Tehran appears defiant.

Unlike in Olmert’s era, Israel’s leadership is now willing to embrace a strike that merely delays Iran’s nuclear program, but doesn’t destroy it. The latter option would only be possible with a U.S.-led attack and its bunker busters and B-2 fleet, something Trump so far has not agreed to.

Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, says when Iran began its nuclear operations in the 1990s, experts said it would take 10 to 15 years to build a bomb.

“It’s now 15 years later and they still don’t have the bomb,” he said. “We know we’re playing with time. If we succeed in postponing it another two to three years, it’s good enough. Ultimately, it will require an agreement or a change of regime.”

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With assistance from Dave Merrill.

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