Media Report 2025.06.18
Israeli tanks kill 59 people at Khan Younis aid site in Gaza, local medics say
ABC / Reuters| 18 June 2025
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-18/brk-israeli-tank-fires-on-gaza-aid/105429632
- At least 59 people have been killed at a Gaza aid site in southern Gaza.
- Local medics say Israeli tanks opened fire on crowds as they attempted to access aid.
- A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Force says the organisation is aware of the incident and is investigating.
Israeli tanks fired into a crowd trying to get aid from trucks in Gaza on Tuesday, killing at least 59 people, according to medics, in one of the bloodiest incidents yet in mounting violence as desperate residents struggle for food.
The Israeli military, which has been at war with Hamas-led Palestinian militants in Gaza since October 2023, acknowledged firing in the area and said it was looking into the incident.
It is one of the deadliest incidents yet in mounting violence as desperate residents in the Palestinian enclave struggle to get food.
Video shared on social media showed around a dozen mangled bodies lying in a street in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
Witnesses interviewed by Reuters said Israeli tanks had launched at least two shells at a crowd of thousands who had gathered on the main eastern road through Khan Younis in the hope of obtaining food from aid trucks that use the route.
“All of a sudden, they let us move forward and made everyone gather, and then shells started falling, tank shells,” Alaa, an eyewitness, said at Nasser Hospital, where wounded victims lay sprawled on the floor and in corridors due to the lack of space.
“No one is looking at these people with mercy. The people are dying, they are being torn apart, to get food for their children.
“Look at these people, all these people are torn to get flour to feed their children.”
Palestinian medics said at least 59 people were killed and 221 wounded in the incident, at least 20 of them in critical condition.
Israeli military ‘regrets any harm’
Casualties were being rushed into the hospital in civilian cars, rickshaws and donkey carts. It was the worst death toll in a single day since aid resumed in Gaza in May.
In a statement, the Israeli military said: “Earlier today, a gathering was identified adjacent to an aid distribution truck that got stuck in the area of Khan Younis, and in proximity to IDF troops operating in the area.
Israeli forces of opening fire on civilians in three attacks in as many days, but the IDF denies shooting civilians.
“The IDF is aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd’s approach. The details of the incident are under review.
“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”
Medics said at least 14 other people were also killed by Israeli gunfire and air strikes elsewhere in the densely populated enclave, taking Tuesday’s overall death toll to at least 73.
The Hamas-run health ministry said 397 Palestinians, including those trying to get food aid, had been killed and more than 3,000 were wounded since late May.
The incident was the latest in nearly daily large-scale killings of Palestinians seeking aid in the three weeks since Israel partially lifted a total blockade on the territory it had imposed for nearly three months.
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More than 23 Gazans dead in latest round of shootings at Israeli-backed aid centre in Rafah
ABC / Reuters | 17 June 2025
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-17/israel-forces-kill-palestinians-near-aid-sites/105425490
- Israel’s military has killed more than 23 Palestinians waiting for food at an Israeli-backed distribution centre in Gaza.
- Witnesses say they were targeted by snipers, but Israel has previously blamed militants for provoking violence
- Palestinians and the UN are demanding Israel allow international agencies and NGOs to resume distributing aid, instead of the Israel-backed, US-operated centres.
Warning: This story contains details that readers may find distressing.
At least 23 people have been killed and 200 others injured after Israeli troops opened fire near a food distribution site in Gaza, medics say.
The shooting near a US-operated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in Rafah is the latest in daily mass shootings that have killed hundreds of Palestinians seeking aid since Israel imposed a new distribution system that blocked international agencies.
“We were walking on our way to get the aid, when a quad[copter] started firing at us,” said a relative of a Palestinian who was shot.
“We began to flee, but he was hit by gunfire from the quad.”
Gazan doctor Ahmed Alfara said people going to the aid centre were targeted by snipers.
“As you see, it is gunshot in the head, the brain matter is out. This is one of the most catastrophic and serious complications of the distribution of aid.”
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military about the latest reports of shootings but in previous incidents, it acknowledged that troops opened fire near aid sites and blamed militants for provoking the violence.
Relatives arrived at Nasser Hospital to mourn the dead, who were wrapped in white shrouds.
“We went there thinking we would get aid to feed our children, but it turned out to be a trap, a killing. I advise everyone: don’t go there,” said Ahmed Fayad, one of those who tried to reach aid on Monday.
Hours later, local health authorities said Israeli gunfire killed at least five people and wounded dozens of others as crowds of Palestinians gathered along the coastal road awaiting UN-funded aid trucks to enter the northern Gaza area.
Witnesses said dozens of desperate people looted four truckloads of food packages.
On Sunday, at least five people were killed as thousands of Palestinians approached two GHF distribution sites in the central and southern parts of the enclave.
The GHF said in a statement that it resumed food deliveries on Sunday, distributing more than 2 million meals from its three distribution sites without incident.
‘100 per cent failure’ in aid
Since Israel blocked all international aid entering Gaza three months ago, it appointed a new US-backed group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), to operate three sites in areas guarded by Israeli troops.
In a statement released after Monday’s shootings, GHF said it distributed more than 3 million meals at its four distribution sites without incident.
But Dr Alfara, who witnessed the shootings, called the centres a “100 per cent” failure and wanted the UN and NGOS to resume operating aid distribution centres.
“This is a big failure for that distribution and even the people in Gaza — no one can get that distribution, that aid, no one can get it.”
The United Nations has consistently rejected the plan, saying GHF distribution is inadequate, dangerous and violates humanitarian impartiality principles.
UN rights chief Volker Türk told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that Israel had “weaponised” food in Gaza and repeated calls for investigations into deadly attacks near distribution sites.
“Israel’s means and methods of warfare are inflicting horrifying, unconscionable suffering on Palestinians in Gaza,” said Mr Türk.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugees agency UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, reiterated on social media that despite an abundance of aid ready to be distributed, Israeli-imposed restrictions continued and called the current arrangement a “lethal distribution system”.
Before the new system was imposed, UN agencies with local staff distributed aid to Gaza’s 2.3 million residents across hundreds of sites.
Israel says it has had to crack down on distribution because Hamas fighters were diverting food aid but the militants deny this and say Israel is using hunger as a weapon.
Before Monday’s incident, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said that at least 300 people had been killed and more than 2,600 wounded near aid distribution sites since the GHF began operations in late May.
The war in Gaza erupted 20 months ago after Hamas-led militants raided Israel and took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, on October 7, 2023, Israel’s single deadliest day.
Israel’s military campaign since then has killed nearly 55,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to health authorities in Gaza, and flattened much of the densely populated strip.
Most of the population is displaced, and widespread malnutrition is a significant concern.
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Israel-Iran conflict at critical juncture as Trump demands Tehran’s ‘unconditional surrender’
US president triggers speculation about American military involvement after five days of Israeli bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes
The Guardian | Julian Borger, Patrick Wintour and Peter Walker | 18 June 2025
Israel’s war on Iran appeared to be approaching a pivotal moment on Tuesday night after five days of bombing and retaliatory Iranian missile strikes, as Donald Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and weighed his military options.
Trump convened a meeting of his national security team in the White House situation room after a day of febrile rhetoric in which the president gave sharply conflicting signals over whether US forces would participate directly in Israel’s bombing campaign over Iran.
He told journalists in the morning that he expected the Iranian nuclear programme to be “wiped out” long before US intervention would be necessary. Later he took to his own social media platform, Truth Social, to suggest that the US had Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in its bomb-sights, and could make an imminent decision to take offensive action.
“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump said. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”
In a post a few minutes later, Trump bluntly demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”.
It was not just Trump’s all-caps threats that triggered speculation that the US might join offensive operations. They were accompanied by the sudden forward deployment of US military aircraft to Europe and the Middle East, amid a general consensus that Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities could prove impregnable without huge bunker-busting bombs that only the US air force possesses.
“If Iran does not back down, complete destruction of Iranian nuclear programme is on the agenda, which Israel cannot achieve alone,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz told ZDF television a day after meeting Trump at the G7 summit in Canada.
But France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, urged restraint, saying: “We recognize Israel’s right to self-defense, but we do not support actions that threaten stability in the region. The biggest mistake that can be made today is to try to change the regime in Iran by military means – because that would lead to chaos.”
Despite the US military deployments and Trump’s menacing comments, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, who was also at the G7 meeting, insisted the US was not about to join the Israeli bombing campaign.
“There’s nothing the president said that suggests that he’s about to get involved in this conflict,” Starmer said. “On the contrary, the G7 statement was about de-escalation … I was sitting right next to President Trump [at the dinner], so I’ve no doubt, in my mind, the level of agreement.”
Trump left the Canadian summit a day early and flew back to Washington around midnight on Monday. On the way, he told journalists he was not seeking a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Iran but instead wanted to see a “complete give-up” by Iran, as well as “a real end” to Iran’s nuclear programme, with Tehran abandoning its uranium enrichment “entirely”.
The vice president, JD Vance, also took to social media to discuss Trump’s options.
“He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president,” Vance wrote, before adding that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy”.
The US president predicted Israel would not let up in its bombing campaign and suggested a decisive moment in that campaign was imminent, though he made clear he expected Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities without US help.
“You’re going to find out over the next two days … Nobody’s slowed up so far,” he told CBS News on the flight back to Washington, saying he was returning to the White House to focus on the conflict.
Israel’s justification for its shock attack on Iran was called into question on Tuesday when CNN cited US intelligence assessments as saying that when Iran was attacked, it had been “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver [a nuclear bomb] to a target of its choosing”.
The report echoed a public assessment in March by Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who told Congress “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and the supreme leader “has not authorised the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”.
On Tuesday, Trump shrugged off that assessment, siding instead with Israel’s claims that Tehran was on the brink of making a warhead.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said. “I think they were very close to having it.”
In freewheeling remarks to reporters on Air Force One, Trump also stressed that any Iranian attack on Americans or US bases, which Iran has threatened, would be met with overwhelming force, saying: “We’ll come down so hard, it’d be gloves off.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran was open to resuming talks with the US. “If President Trump is genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping this war, next steps are consequential,” he said.
Benjamin Netanyahu was also dismissive of the idea of diplomacy. “Of course they want to stop. They want to stop, and to keep producing the tools of death. We gave that a chance,” the Israeli prime minister said, laying out a new, expanded set of war aims.
“We want three central results: eliminating the nuclear programme, eliminating the ability to produce ballistic missiles and eliminating the axis of terror.”
He left vague what the third war aim would entail. Later on Tuesday, his foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, described it differently as a mission to “severely damage [the Iranians’] plan to eliminate the state of Israel”.
Asked how that would be achieved, Sa’ar told the Guardian: “We are doing that gradually. First we cut the [tentacles] of the octopus, when we dealt with Hamas and Hezbollah. Now we are dealing with the head of the octopus.”
“Regime change is not an objective of this war,” the minister insisted however, during a visit to a missile strike site in Rishon LeZion, east of Tel Aviv. He added that regime change “may be a result, but its not an objective” of the war.
Israel’s choice of targets has broadened over the course of the campaign, in line with its rhetoric. In recent days it has bombed the Iranian capital, ordering the residents of a part of northern Tehran, a third of a million people, to leave their homes. On Tuesday night, loud blasts were reported across the city.
The Israeli evacuation order was modelled on those routinely issued to Palestinians in Gaza, where bombing by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has flattened entire residential neighbourhoods over the course of a 20-month conflict.
The Israeli ultimatum on Monday said the bombing of Tehran would be aimed at “military infrastructure”, but one of the targets hit was a state television station, killing three staff and ending live broadcasts. Israel has also been bombing Iran’s oil and gas installations, and Iran has retaliated with strikes on Haifa, damaging a power station and a refinery in the Mediterranean port.
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 24 Iranians across the country on Tuesday morning, bringing the toll since Friday’s surprise attack to at least 224 people dead and more than 1,400 injured, Iran’s health ministry said. The scale of destruction and the threats from the IDF and Trump triggered an exodus of Tehranis, jamming the roads out of the capital overnight.
In Israel, the death toll after four days was 24, with about 600 injured. Iran fired a total of 20 to 30 missiles on Tuesday morning, according to the IDF, lightly wounding five people, marking a significant drop in the tempo of its attack compared with the previous few days.
The IDF said Iran had used 370 missiles in eight salvoes out of a US-estimated arsenal of 3,000 ballistic missiles. The IDF further claims to have destroyed 200 of Iran’s missile launchers, half the total.
Israel has also struck a severe blow to Iran’s chain of command, killing at least 11 top generals and, in some cases, their replacements. On Tuesday the IDF said it had killed the acting armed forces commander, Maj Gen Ali Shadmani, who had been in the post for only four days, after his predecessor was targeted in the first wave of strikes on Friday morning.
“Iran is completely naked and we have full freedom of action. This is an unprecedented achievement,” an IDF general staff officer told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
Iran continued to threaten Israeli cities however, with its senior army commander echoing Israeli methods by calling for the residents of Haifa and Tel Aviv to evacuate immediately.
If those threats prove empty and IDF claims of its dominance are borne out, it will leave Iran with few cards to play. The Iranian parliament has prepared a bill that would withdraw Iran from the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty, so that it would no longer be legally bound to forgo nuclear weapons, but the government insists it remains opposed to all weapons of mass destruction.
State TV has also aired calls from hardline politicians suggesting that Iran block the strategically important strait of Hormuz, potentially stopping the passage of more than 17m barrels of oil a day and producing a dramatic spike in world oil prices and global inflation.
On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Israeli bombing sorties on the enrichment plant in Natanz had penetrated to its underground levels. But, as the war enters its sixth day, the focus of key decisions in Israel and the US is likely to be the underground facility at Fordow, near the religious centre of Qom, which houses Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium as well as an enrichment plant. However, Kelsey Davenport, the director for non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said its presence was not likely to be relevant to military calculations
“Blowing up the stockpiles at Fordow would release a limited amount of radiation and chemical toxicity from the UF6, but it would be confined to the site,” Davenport said. “There may be a very slight risk that if Iran has enough 60 percent enriched uranium stored at the site, an explosion could trigger a chain reaction. But I would be very surprised if that is the reason Fordow is not being bombed. Israel knows it cannot destroy the site.”
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At least 51 Palestinians killed in Gaza waiting for food trucks, says health ministry
Hundreds of others wounded as they waited for UN and commercial trucks with supplies, according to Gaza officials
The Guardian / AP | 17 June 2025
At least 51 Palestinians have been killed and more than 200 wounded while waiting for UN and commercial trucks to enter the territory with desperately needed food, according to Gaza’s health ministry and a local hospital.
Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on a nearby home before opening fire toward the crowd in the southern city of Khan Younis on Tuesday morning. The military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The killings did not appear to be related to a new Israel- and US-supported aid delivery network that was introduced last month and has been marred by controversy and violence.
Yousef Nofal, a witness, said he saw many people motionless and bleeding on the ground after Israeli forces opened fire. “It was a massacre,” he said, adding that the soldiers continued firing on people as they fled the area.
Mohammed Abu Qeshfa said he heard a loud explosion followed by heavy gunfire and tank shelling. “I survived by a miracle,” he said.
The dead and wounded were taken to the city’s Nasser hospital, which confirmed the toll.
Samaher Meqdad was at the hospital looking for her two brothers and a nephew who had been in the crowd. “We don’t want flour. We don’t want food. We don’t want anything,” she said. “Why did they fire at the young people? Why? Aren’t we human beings?”
Palestinians say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds trying to reach food distribution points run by the US and Israel-backed private contractor the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since the centres opened last month. Local health officials say scores have been killed and hundreds wounded.
In those instances, the Israeli military has acknowledged firing warning shots at people who it said had approached its forces in a suspicious manner.
Israel says the new aid system operated by the GHF is designed to prevent Hamas from siphoning off aid to fund its militant activities.
UN agencies and major aid groups deny there is any major diversion of aid and have rejected the new system, saying it cannot meet the mounting needs in Gaza and violates humanitarian principles by allowing Israel to control who has access to aid.
Experts have warned of famine in the territory, which is home to about 2 million Palestinians.
The UN-run network has delivered aid across Gaza throughout the 20-month Israel-Hamas war, but has faced major obstacles since Israel loosened the total blockade it had imposed from early March until mid-May. UN officials say Israeli military restrictions, a breakdown of law and order, and widespread looting make it difficult to deliver the aid that Israel has allowed in.
Israel’s military campaign since October 2023 has killed more than 55,300 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Its count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel launched its campaign aiming to destroy Hamas after the group’s 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 251 hostage. The militants still hold 53 hostages, fewer than half of them alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals.
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World waits for Trump as Israel Iran crisis escalates
The Age (& SMH) / Reuters, Bloomberg| Natassia Chrysanthos | 18 June 2025
Iran and Israel have ramped up their missile attacks as the world waits to see what action US President Donald Trump will take after leaving the G7 summit in Canada a day early because of intensifying hostilities in the Middle East.
Residents of Tehran were caught in gridlock trying to flee the city as global anxiety centred on whether the United States would broker an end to the conflict or enter the fray by helping Israel destroy Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow, which only US “bunker-buster” bombs can reach.
Trump signed a statement from G7 leaders calling for a de-escalation in hostilities, despite early reports of his reluctance. The statement condemned Iran as the “principal source of regional instability and terror” and declared the theocratic state could not have nuclear weapons, while reiterating the leaders’ support for Israel’s security.
The US president then flew to Washington, DC, where his national security team had been called to assemble in the White House Situation Room. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s first face-to-face meeting with Trump was cancelled because of the president’s early departure, leaving Australia without an opportunity to advance its interests on tariffs, defence and the AUKUS security pact that is being reviewed by the US.
The White House said Trump had been pulled home by the unfolding situation in the Middle East, but the president later blasted French President Emmanuel Macron for claiming he had returned to the US to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
“Publicity seeking President Emmanuel Macron, of France, mistakenly said that I left the G7 Summit, in Canada, to go back to D.C. to work on a ‘cease f ire’ between Israel and Iran,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay Tuned!”
Trump’s statement on the social media platform yesterday afternoon came hours after a separate post called for Tehran’s residents to leave. “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life,” he wrote. “Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
Trump’s warning and Israel’s bombardment of Tehran the night before led to chaos on the city’s roads as people attempted to flee. Video posted to social media appeared to show long queues at petrol stations and on highways.
Israel’s military said yesterday its strikes had killed Ali Shadmani, whom it identified as Iran’s wartime chief of staff. “[It] adds to a series of eliminations of Iran’s most senior military leadership and degrades the chain of command of the Iranian armed forces,” the Israel Defence Forces said.
Iranian officials have reported at least 224 deaths, mostly civilians, in the five days since Israel’s initial attack. According to its Fars News Agency, they included three people killed in an attack on Iran’s state television building, which was broadcast live on air. News anchor Sahar Emami was presenting when a loud explosion shattered glass and plunged the studio into darkness. Debris fell from the ceiling and smoke wafted across the screen, but the station resumed transmission just a few minutes later.
Air sirens also wailed in Tel Aviv as Iran sent three waves of missiles towards Israel yesterday morning. Explosions were later heard across Jerusalem and central Israel as a further barrage of Iranian missiles arrived in the afternoon. Israel’s national emergency service, Magen David Adom, said relief teams had been sent to affected areas; fire and res cue services were dispatched to a bus that caught fire. Israel says at least 24civilians have been killed in the conflict, including two who were sheltering in a residential safe room, rattling Israelis who rely on them for protection during airstrikes.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said more than 1200 Australians were trying to get out of Israel and Iran. They included 650 Australians and their dependants who had asked for government help to exit Iran, and 600 people in the same category in Israel. “We are making plans to as sist Australians where it is safe to do so,” Wong told the ABC yesterday afternoon. “But at the moment, the airspace continues to be closed, and the reason for that is the risk to civilian air raft of a strike.”
The US has repositioned warships and military aircraft in the region, and is helping Israel intercept Tehran’s missiles. It has not joined Israel in striking Iran.
As Trump’s security team assembled at the White House, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News Trump was still aiming for a nuclear deal with Iran, while saying America would defend its assets in the region. According to reports from Reuters, Tehran had asked Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to urge Trump to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to an immediate ceasefire.
In return, Iran would show flexibility in nuclear negotiations, according to Reuters’ sources. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi wrote on X Trump’s next steps were consequential if he was “genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping this war”.
“Israel must halt its aggression, and absent a total cessation of military aggression against us, our responses will continue,” he posted early yesterday.
“It takes one phone call from Washington to muzzle someone like Netanyahu. That may pave the way for a return to diplomacy. Conversely, getting the US mired in the Mother of Forever Wars will destroy any prospect for a negotiated solution.”
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World waiting for next move from the US
The Age (& SMH) | Michael Koziol | 18 June 2025
In the third episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, a rookie president Josiah Bartlet is tasked with responding to the downing of an American plane carrying his new doctor and 57 other military healthcare workers – by the Syrian government.
New to the job and outraged by the unfairness of the world, Bartlet instinctively wants blood. He queries the virtue of a “proportional response” to the atrocity, suggesting “we come back with total disaster”. Those around him urge a more cautious, business-as-usual approach.
The analogy is far from perfect, but Donald Trump faces a not dissimilar quandary now, and perhaps the first genuine test of his second term as president. Does he persist with diplomacy, even as the United States’ special ally, Israel, decides that now is the time for action against Iran, and the Iranians rain missiles down on Israeli cities?
Or does he authorise the bombing of Fordow, Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facility, a target understood to be beyond Israel’s military cap should immediately evacuate Tehran!” abilities and could only be destroyed by US weaponry? To involve the US militarily would risk a great deal – the start of an all-out war, for one, as well as Trump’s self-styled reputation as a peacemaker who keeps Americans out of global conflicts.
In characteristic style, Trump is conducting his decision-making in full public view, broad casting conflicting messages at rapid pace. Since Israel’s bombardment began last week, he has maintained there is still time and goodwill for Iran to “make a deal” to curb its enrichment program.
Several reports also indicate Trump was cold on, or even vetoed, Israel’s plans to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His instinct here appears to be for de-escalation. But his premature departure from the G7 world leaders’ summit in Canada gives another impression.
And on social media, Trump’s language turned from optimistic to resigned. “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign,” he posted. “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
This is a bit like asking New York to evacuate if JFK, Newark and LaGuardia airports were all out of action, but highway cam eras showed lines of traffic streaming out of Tehran after the warning.
The president’s early G7 exit was also accompanied by reports that he had asked his National Security Council to convene in the White House Situation Room. A cynic might think this is all about Trump giving the Iranians the impression he is about to strike, without necessarily being prepared to do so. An even greater cynic might think it is more about focusing the world’s attention on Trump and his power.
Either way, he will soon have to make a choice. Unlike the Josiah Bartlet of Aaron Sorkin’s creation, this is a president whose preoccupation is grand plans and optics, rather than substance. He talks big, whether it be a takeover of Greenland, making Canada the 51st state, or imposing tariffs on America’s friends and foes. So often, these never advance beyond words. Or if they do, as with the China tariffs they don’t last long.
Trump badly wanted to play peacemaker between Russia and Ukraine, if only to teach us all a lesson about the “art of the deal”. He clearly wants a deal on Iran too, but unlike Russia- Ukraine he says it is somebody else’s problem. This time, Trump faces a real-world crisis with real world, high-stakes consequences, one in which he must be closely involved.
As the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations spend the night holed up on a mountainside in Alberta, their fate rests with a man heading back to the bunker under his Washington home, phone in hand, weaponry at the ready, and instinct for drama undiminished.
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Destructive old men: how much killing is enough?
The Age | Letters | 18 June 2025
Cathy Wilcox thinks of the Wild West (Letters, 17/6). The events in the Middle East remind me of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and of Greek tragedy: apparently irreconcilable differences in perspective and belief leading to endless violence. In Greek tragedy, a family cursed by the gods tears itself apart, the violence fuelled by destructive old men on each side. In Northern Ireland, the war ended when both sides grew tired of burying their children.
Presently, we are like a Greek chorus, flapping around, waiting for the gods to intervene. They won’t. Destructive old men will still make the decisions until both sides grow tired of burying their innocents.
David McLachlan, Armadale
Iran regime a danger
Why are we not uniting with the free world and Israel and putting an end to the Iran regime? I fully support Israel’s approach. How can a country sit back and watch while being told you should not exist and they fund terrorist organisations? How long should the world sit back while they continue their nuclear secrecy?
Steve Robertson, Torquay
Lack of diplomatic skills
One of President Donald Trump’s thoughts about the Iran-Israel conflict was “sometimes they have to fight it out, but we’re going to see what happens”. That idea might possibly work for a couple of kids fighting in the schoolyard but it’s an inane and unhelpful comment about an extremely volatile moment in global poli tics and one that demonstrates the leader of the free world’s limited grasp of foreign affairs and lack of diplomatic skills.
Ross Bardin, Williamstown
Wiping their enemies off the map
As your correspondent points out (Letters, 17/6), when Iran had its Islamist revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini quickly made it clear that Israel must be annihilated. From the very start Iran’s Jihadist mission has been to wipe Israel off the map, reclaim Jerusalem and es tablish a caliphate. A nuclear weapon is merely the tool.
Henry Herzog, St Kilda East
Fighting for its survival
Your correspondent (Letters, 17/6) has no deep understand ing of the threat to Israel’s existence by Iran. The Iranian Mullah leadership has called for the total destruction of the Jewish state of Israel for over 20 years. It is terrible to see the destruction and killing of innocent civilians in both Israel and Iran. Iran has paid the way for its proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Syria – to continue to fight for the destruction of Israel. The Israeli government saw the immediate opportunity to stop the Iranian threat of developing nuclear missiles.
Diplomacy was being stalled and delayed by Iran while it continued to develop nuclear warheads in breach of its agreement. If the Iran threat is not eliminated now , then Iran would continue to achieve its goal of a nuclear arsenal. Israel has not “crossed the line”. It is fighting for its survival against a tyrannical state seeking Israel’s total annihilation.
Ian Fayman, Malvern East
No winner but arms dealers
The current wars are being waged by control freaks as they have been for centuries. Now we have Iran and Israel , each wanting to wipe the other out. It won’t happen but how many innocent lives will be lost? No one will be winners except the arms manufacturers. If all leaders sat around a table and included the International Criminal Court it might be a start.
Ian Anderson, Surrey Hills
Defending themselves
Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Israel has a right to defend itself. Does she agree that Palestine and Iran also have a right to defend themselves?
Mick Webster, Chiltern
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Middle East
The Age | And another thing | 18 June 2025
If Iran can block the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply passes, who is the most powerful country now?
Wendy Brennan, Bendigo
Israel goes to war saying Iran threatens its right to exist as a separate Jewish state, while Israel denies the same right to Palestinians.
Malcolm McDonald, Burwood
Trump advises the residents of Tehran to evacuate, as does the IDF. Where do they expect them to go?
David Raymond, Doncaster East
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Smart option to stop war is clear
The Age (& SMH) / New York Times | Thomas Friedman | 18 June 2025
Behind the strikes and counter strikes in the current Israel-Iran war stands the clash of two strategic doctrines, one animating Iran and the other animating Israel, that are both deeply flawed. President Donald Trump has a chance to correct both of them and to create the best opportunity for stabilising the Middle East in decades – if he is up to it.
Iran’s flawed strategic doc trine, which was also practiced by its proxy, Hezbollah, to equally bad result, is a doctrine I call trying to out-crazy an adversary. Iran and Hezbollah are always ready to go all the way, thinking that whatever their opponents might do in response, Hezbollah or Iran will always outdo them with a more extreme measure.
You name it – assassinate the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri; blow up the US Embassy in Beirut; help Bashar Assad murder thousands of his own people to stay in power the imprints of Iran and its Hezbollah proxy are behind them all, together or separately. They are telling the world in effect: “No one will out-crazy us, so beware if you get in a fight with us, you will lose. Because we go all the way – and you moderates just go away.”
That Iranian doctrine did help Hezbollah drive Israel out of southern Lebanon. But where it fell short was Iran and Hezbollah thinking they could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Iran and Hezbollah are delusional in this regard – Hamas too. They keep referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise, with no indigenous connection to the land, and therefore they assume the Jews will eventually meet the same fate as the Belgians in the Belgian Congo. That is, under enough pressure they will eventually go back to their own version of Belgium.
But the Israeli Jews have no Belgium. They are as indigenous to their biblical homeland as the Palestinians, no matter what “anticolonial” nonsense they teach at elite universities. Therefore, you will never out crazy the Israeli Jews. If push comes to shove, they will out crazy you.
Former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, both thought Israel would never try to kill them personally, that Israel was, as Nasrallah liked to say, a “spider web” that would just unravel one day under pressure. He paid with his life with that miscalculation last year, and the supreme leader probably would have as well if Trump had not intervened, reportedly, last week to stop Israel from killing him. These Israeli Jews will not be out-crazied. That is how they still have a state in a very tough neighbourhood.
That said, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of extremists running the Israeli government is in the grip of its own strategic fallacy, which I call the doctrine of “once and for all”. I wish I had a dollar for every time, after some murderous attack on Israeli Jews by Palestinians or Iranian proxies, the Israeli government declared it was going to solve the problem with force “once and for all”.
There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture. But Israel has no chance of occupying all of Iran, and it has occupied the West Bank for 58 years and still has not wiped out Hamas’ influence there – let alone secular Palestinian nationalism. That is because Palestinians are every bit as indigenous as the Jews in their homeland. Israel will never “once and for all them” into submission, unless they kill every last one.
The only way to even get close to ending the Israeli Palestinian conflict “once and for all” is by working toward a two-state solution. This brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal”. If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.
One, that he will equip Israel’s air force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and US trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated.
Only if Iran completely com plies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force. At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognises the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination.
But to realise that, they must demonstrate they can fulfil the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leader ship that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.
Trump must also make clear, though, that he will not tolerate the rapid settlement expansion and one-state reality Israel is now creating, which is a pre scription for a forever war because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won’t disappear or “once and for all” give up their national identity and aspirations. (At the end of May the Netanyahu government ap proved 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank – the largest expansion in decades – which is simply insane.)
The necessary but not sufficient conditions for peace in the Middle East that will allow America to reduce, but not end, its military presence there are that Iran be forced to draw a clear western border and stop trying to colonise its Arab neighbours and destroy Israel with a nuclear bomb; that Israel be forced to draw a clear eastern border and stop trying to colonise the whole of the West Bank; and that Palestinians be forced to draw clear eastern and western borders between Israel and Jordan and stop with the “river to the sea” nonsense.
This war has created the best opportunity in decades for a wise statesman to use “coercive diplomacy.” Is Trump up to that?
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US choice is diplomacy or a bomb
Sydney Morning Herald / NY Times | David Sanger & Jonathan Swan |18 June 2025
US President Donald Trump is weighing up a critical decision in the war between Israel and Iran: whether to help Israel destroy Iran’s deeply buried nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow, which only US “bunker busters” dropped by US B-2 bombers, can reach. If he goes ahead, the United States will become a direct participant in a new conflict in the Middle East, taking on Iran in the kind of war Trump has sworn, in two campaigns, he would avoid.
Iranian officials warn that US participation in an attack on its facilities will imperil any chance of the nuclear disarmament deal Trump says he wants to pursue. Trump has encouraged Vice President JD Vance and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to offer to meet the Iranians this week, according to a US official. The offer may be well received.
If such a meeting happened, officials say, the likely Iranian interlocutor would be the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who played a key role in the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and knows every element of Iran’s nuclear complex. Araghchi signalled his openness to a deal, saying, “If President Trump is genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping this war, the next steps are consequential.” “It takes one phone call from Washington to muzzle someone like Netanyahu,” he said. “That may pave the way for a return to diplomacy.”
But if that diplomatic effort fizzles, or the Iranians remain unwilling to give in to Trump’s demand that they must end all uranium enrichment, the president will still have the option of ordering that Fordow and other nuclear facilities be destroyed. There is only one weapon for the job, experts contend. It is called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or the GBU-57, and it weighs so much – 30,000 pounds (13 tonnes) – that it can be lifted only by a B-2 bomber.
Israel does not own either the weapon or the bomber needed. If Trump holds back, it could mean Israel’s main objective in the war is never completed. “Fordow has always been the crux of this thing,” said Brett McGurk, who worked on Middle East issues for four successive US presidents, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. “If this ends with Fordow still enriching, it’s not a strategic gain.”
That has been true for a long time, and over the past two years the US military has refined the operation, under close White House scrutiny. The exercises led to the conclusion that one bomb would not solve the problem; any attack on Fordow would have to come in waves, with B-2s releasing one bomb after another down the same hole. And the operation would have to be executed by an American pilot and crew.
This was all in the world of war planning until the opening salvos on Friday morning in Tehran, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes, declaring Israel had discovered an “imminent” threat that required “pre-emptive action”.
New intelligence, he suggested without describing the details, indicated Iran was on the cusp of turning its fuel stockpile into weapons. US intelligence officials who have followed the Iranian program for years agree that Iranian scientists and nuclear specialists have been working to shorten the time it would take to manufacture a nuclear bomb, but they saw no huge breakthroughs
Yet they agree with McGurk and other experts on one point: if the Fordow facility survives the conflict, Iran will retain the key equipment it needs to stay on a pathway to the bomb, even if it would first have to rebuild much of the nuclear infrastructure that Israel has left in ruins over four days of bombing.
Netanyahu has pressed for the US to make its bunker busters available since the Bush administration, so far to no avail. But people who have spoken to Trump say the topic has come up repeatedly in his con versations with the Israeli PM. He has usually avoided a direct answer.
The pressure is on. Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga “the job has to be done, by Israel, by the United States”, an apparent reference to the fact that the bomb would have to be dropped by an American pilot in a US airplane. He said Trump had “the option to change the Middle East and influence the world.”
And Republican senator Lindsey Graham said on CBS on Sunday that “if diplomacy is not successful” he would urge Trump to “go all in to make sure that, when this operation is over, there’s nothing left standing in Iran regarding their nu clear program”. “If that means providing bombs, provide bombs,” he said, referencing the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. “If it means flying with Israel, fly with Israel”.
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Nuclear presence might keep Middle East balance
Sydney Morning Herald | Letters | 18 June 2025
The recent escalation of the Middle East war is allegedly to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, but nobody is talking about the stabilising effects of mutually assured destruction (“Israel and Iran bomb each other as nuclear talks tank”, June 16). This was most recently seen in the exchange between the nuclear armed powers of Pakistan and India, in which both parties talked a big game, had some symbolic inter changes and took the first available off-ramp to de-escalate. Perhaps a nuclear-armed Iran would lead to regional stability and temper Israel’s increasingly dominant role in the Middle East.
John Storer, Bulli
Your correspondents Judy Hungerford and John Rome (Letters, June 16) seem to have a blinkered view of the Israel Iran conflict. Mr Rome goes so far as to compare Israel’s actions with those of the US when it attacked Iraq in response to the false threat of weapons of mass destruction. By contrast, Iran, ruled by a malignant theocratic dictatorship mired in the Middle Ages and publicly avowing Israel’s destruction, has well-documented potential to produce nuclear weapons. This, coupled with its intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, presented a real and present danger, not only to Israel. The International Atomic Energy Agency just a few days ago declared, for the first time in 20 years, that Iran was in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. Iran has waged war on Israel for decades through its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Would Ms Hungerford and Mr Rome prefer Israel to wait until a mushroom cloud envelopes Jerusalem?
Michael Berger, Bellevue Hill
What sort of dystopian, brutal world does the president of the USA live in (“Evacuate Tehran immediately, says Trump”, June 17)? Tehran has a population of nearly 10 million. Where does he expect them to go? How does he expect them to carry out such an insane direction? What sort of madness is this? Recently he wanted all Gazans to leave their homeland so he could turn it into some sort of Las Vegas. Now he wants to depopulate an entire metropolis of 10 million people. Does he want to turn that proud city into a Disneyland? Why does Australia still bend its knee to such a destructive fool?
Terence Golding, Bolwarra
Correspondent David Lloyd defends Israel’s actions on the grounds it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” (Letters, June 17). Yet its government is controlled by an authoritarian, ultra-right religious group whose leaders have clearly stated their intention to wipe Palestine off the map. Surely, a true democracy would be putting all its efforts into se curing a lasting and effective peace through diplomacy rather than catastrophic warfare. And however hard Israel’s supporters try to claim the fighting would stop if Hamas would re lease all the hostages, the history of the region tells us the opposite. Extremists on both sides want only one outcome and we’re seeing it in horrific operation as each day passes.
Eric Hunter, Cook (ACT)
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Israel takes out Iran’s military chief
The Australian | Ben Packham & Sarah Ison | 18 June 2025
Israel says it has killed Iran’s top military commander as the nations’ escalating war prompted Donald Trump to leave the G7 summit early, order a second carrier strike group to the Middle East and call for Tehran’s evacuation.
As Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire for a fifth consecutive day there were growing fears the conflict could spiral out of control, with Tehran warning the US of “unfathomable consequences” if it joined the Jewish state’s attacks.
Mr Trump said Iran should have “signed the deal” he offered to dismantle its nuclear program in return for an easing of crippling sanctions, but he believed the regime was now prepared to return to the negotiating table.
As the death toll rose on both sides, with at least 24 Israelis and 244 Iranians killed, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said there were about 600 Australians seeking the government’s help to get out of Israel and 650 pleading for assistance to flee Iran.
“We’re looking at all options and we are assessing very carefully the security implications,” she said. “We will provide the assistance we can to get people to safety when it is safe to do so.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned the conflict represented a “perilous moment” for the global economy, with surging oil prices set to drive up inflation and put a brake on growth.
The Israeli Defence Forces said it had eliminated Iran’s newly appointed military chief Ali Shadmani – a close confidant of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – after an intelligence-led strike on a command centre in Tehran.
Despite reports of Mr Trump’s earlier veto of an Israeli assassination of Khamenei, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to rule out targeting the Supreme Leader.
Mr Trump abandoned the G7 summit in Canada a day early to head back to Washington to oversee the US response to the war.
He lashed “publicity seeking” French President Emmanuel Macron for suggesting he was returning to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.
“He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire,” the President said on his Truth Social network. “Much bigger than that. Whether purposely or not, Emmanuel always gets it wrong. Stay Tuned!” The President signed a G7 leaders’ statement before leaving the summit. It called for “a broader de-escalation of hostilities” in the Middle East.
He directed the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group to the region from the South China Sea, joining the USS Carl Vinson, to provide the US with expanded military options if its interests were threatened. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said American forces were “postured defensively in the region to be strong in pursuit of a peace deal”.
“We certainly hope that’s what happens here,” he told Fox News.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Israeli strikes had “severely damaged if not destroyed” Iran’s underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. But other underground facilities, at Isfahan and Fordow, appeared to have suffered “very limited” damage, the IAEA said.
Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, said only the US could successfully destroy the deeply buried sites, in a reference to its massive “bunker-buster” bombs. “In order for Fordow to be taken out by a bomb from the sky, the only country in the world that has that bomb is the United States,” he told Merit TV. “That’s a decision the United States has to take.”
Mr Trump lamented Iran’s refusal to agree to his nuclear deal, declaring on his Truth Social network: “What a shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”
The President added on the sidelines of the G7 that “I think a deal will be signed, or something will happen, but a deal will be signed, and I think Iran is foolish not to sign. I think Iran basically is at the negotiating table, they want to make a deal.”
China accused Mr Trump of “pouring oil” on the conflict by “making threats” that would only intensify the hostilities.
Reuters reported that Tehran had asked Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman to persuade Mr Trump to use his influence on Israel to land a ceasefire, with Iran in turn promising to be more “flexible” in nuclear negotiations. Axios reported there was potential for a meeting between the US and Iran this week, with US officials saying Mr Trump was considering the bunker-buster capability as “leverage” ahead of those talks. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that if the President was genuine about stopping the war, his next steps would be “consequential”.
“Israel must halt its aggression, and absent a total cessation of military aggression against us, our responses will continue. It takes one phone call from Washington to muzzle someone like Netanyahu,” he said on X.
“Conversely, getting the US mired in the Mother of Forever Wars will destroy any prospect for a negotiated solution, with dangerous, unpredictable and likely unfathomable consequences for regional security and the global economy.”
He added that “if the aggression stops, it is obvious that the ground will be prepared for a return to diplomacy”.
Mr Netanyahu said: “We are changing the face of the Middle East and that can lead to radical changes inside Iran itself and … pursuing three main objectives: the elimination of the nuclear program, the elimination of ballistic missile production capability, and the elimination of the axis of terrorism. We will do what is necessary to achieve these goals, and we are well co-ordinated with the United States.”
He added Israel had “eliminated Iran’s security leadership”, including three chiefs of staff, the commander of their air force and two intelligence chiefs.”
The comments came amid ongoing missile attacks between the two countries, with 16 Iranian missiles launched towards Israel early on Tuesday morning (AEST). One of Israel’s biggest oil companies, Bazan, shut all refinery facilities in Haifa because of damage done during the Iranian missile strikes.
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‘Our battle against evil is a service to humanity’, says Netanyahu
The Australian | Amanda Hodge | 18 June 2025
Benjamin Netanyahu has raised the stakes in Israel’s war with Iran, insisting his military campaign is a service to mankind that is “changing the face of the Middle East”, and that assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would end the conflict.
The Israeli Prime Minister has also issued a blunt appeal to the White House to help him dismantle Iran’s extensive military machine, telling America’s ABC News that Tehran would soon have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US if it were not stopped.
“Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. I understand America First. I don’t understand America dead. That’s what these people want,” he said. “We are doing something that is in the service of mankind, of humanity. It’s a battle of good against evil.”
Mr Netanyahu earlier said he was pursuing a three-pronged objective that went beyond simply disrupting Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, as he had previously claimed.
Instead, he said, the objectives were “the elimination of the nuclear program, the elimination of ballistic missile production capability, and the elimination of the axis of terrorism”, referring to Iran’s regional proxies of Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen and pro-Iranian Shia groups in Iraq and Syria. “We will do what is necessary to achieve these goals, and we are well co-ordinated with the United States,” he said.
“We are changing the face of the Middle East and that can lead to radical changes inside Iran itself.”
Mr Netanyahu has made it clear he aims to set the conditions for Iranians themselves to overthrow the Islamic theocracy. But he also refused to rule out killing Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader, saying: “It’s not going to escalate the conflict; it’s going to end the conflict.”
US President Donald Trump is said to have vetoed Mr Netanyahu’s plans to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader and has so far resisted Israeli requests to join the attacks, though the US military continues to assist in taking down Iranian missiles and drones.
But Washington has moved considerable military muscle into the region in the past 36 hours, rerouting the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier from the South China Sea to the Middle East on Monday, along with its nine air squadrons and five destroyers.
It joins the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group, which has been in the Arabian Sea for several months and previously partnered with the USS Harry S Truman strike group to hit Houthi targets in Yemen.
The redeployment of the Nimitz, which is expected to reach the Middle East later this week, would give the US the minimum force deployment its military protocol requires during times of conflict in the region. But it pulls a carrier away from the Pacific just as the administration says it wants to strengthen efforts to deter China.
Dozens of US refuelling planes are also being transferred to Europe amid fears of the conflict escalating into a full-blown war that could see the US intervene to finally destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity and Iran retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s main shipping route for oil, and deploy regional proxy forces against US and Israeli targets.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted on Tuesday that US forces were in a “defensive” posture in the Middle East and that the President’s priority was achieving a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Still, Mr Trump has been keeping everyone guessing, withdrawing early from the G7 summit in Canada and posting comments that have sparked speculation he may be readying to join the conflict.
“Iran should have signed the deal. I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life. IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran,” he wrote on social media.
Iranians have been streaming out of the capital since Israel’s first wave of pre-dawn attacks on Friday. On social media, some have even celebrated Israel’s assassination of military commanders who many blame for the 2022 crackdown on protests against the country’s strict religious constraints.
The Trump administration has been trying to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran since January, after Mr Trump scrapped the Obama administration’s 2015 deal during his first term.
But with Mr Netanyahu indicating far broader ambitions beyond disarming Tehran, many fear Israel is digging in on a gamble that the US will eventually provide the firepower it needs.
Mr Netanyahu told ABC News that Israel would “do what we need to do” to prevent a “forever war”, including killing Ayatollah Khamenei. “We’ve had half a century of conflict spread by this regime that terrorises everyone in the Middle East; has bombed the Aramco oilfields in Saudi Arabia; is spreading terrorism and subversion and sabotage everywhere,” he said.
Israel’s military campaign had demonstrated to Iranians that the widely loathed regime was far weaker than they had believed. “They realise it, and that could lead to results,” he said. “We have eliminated Iran’s security leadership, including three chiefs of staff, the commander of their air force, two intelligence chiefs. We are eliminating them, one after the other.”
Israel has also assassinated at least 14 Iranian nuclear scientists and caused significant damage to nuclear facilities at Natanz and Isfahan. But it has so far failed to cause any obvious damage to the heavily fortified Fordow fuel enrichment plant, which is critical to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
To do that, it needs US Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), or “bunker-buster”, bombs, the only conventional weapons with any hope of penetrating the facility 500m inside a mountain. The bombs can only be carried by large bombers such as America’s B2s. Israel has neither the bombs nor the bombers.
“The Israelis are never going to accept Iran having nuclear weapons so they have to take out Fordow but they don’t have the means, therefore they’re relying on the Americans to do that for them,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior defence analyst Malcolm Davis told The Australian.
“If they don’t take out Fordow then this will have all been for nothing because Iran can relatively quickly reconstitute its nuclear industry. So it is now a question of whether Trump wants to do that or not because, obviously, there are consequences. Iran could start attack forces across the region.”
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Bibi ‘keeps his head’ and flips the script to define his place in history
The Australian / Wall Street Journal | Walter Russell Mead | 18 June 2025
“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you … ”
These lines from Rudyard Kipling’s If echoed through my mind on June 8 as I sat down with an intense but calm Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an off-the-record conversation in his Jerusalem office.
Israel’s latest strikes against Iran had not been launched, and the conventional wisdom held that Bibi, as friends and foes alike call the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history, had his back to the wall.
Reports that the Israeli Prime Minister was on the outer with Donald Trump were all over the news. Trump hadn’t visited Israel on his recent trip to the region, Netanyahu’s critics pointed out, and the Gulf countries were making deals with the Americans while Netanyahu’s Israel watched from the sidelines.
For decades, Bibi’s popularity among conservative Americans helped cement his strength among Israeli conservatives. But that seemed to be changing early last week. From MAGA-world voices like Tucker Carlson came a chorus of anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu critiques. Was Trump’s apparent warmth toward an Obama-style nuclear agreement with Iran a sign that American Republicans were throwing Bibi under the bus? Would Israel lose a historic opportunity to settle scores with Iran because Netanyahu had mismanaged Israel’s relationship with the GOP?
Internationally, public opinion had turned against the Prime Minister and the nation he leads. UN resolutions, International Criminal Court arrest warrants, demonstrations, anti-Semitic outbreaks at elite universities and, most recently, a diplomatic effort from France to get Western countries to recognise a Palestinian state: Many at home and abroad blamed Netanyahu for Israel’s growing isolation.
Meanwhile in Israel, Bibi’s fractious government seemed on the brink of collapse. Religious parties, incensed by the government’s failure to restore draft exemptions for up to 80,000 ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, threatened to break up the Prime Minister’s coalition.
The opposition parties had scheduled a vote of confidence for June 11. If that wasn’t enough, his criminal trial is still under way.
When we met, the Prime Minister had a pile of annotated court transcripts before him. Thanks to the sublime wisdom of the Israeli criminal justice system, the Prime Minister must divide his attention between leading the country through a war and appearing regularly in court.
There is more. Netanyahu’s relations with some of the country’s military commanders and intelligence officials, the people with whom he must plan and act on the most sensitive issues, look almost irredeemably poisonous.
A coalition in revolt, prosecutors on his heels, powerful rivals looking to unseat him, chilly relations with Trump, growing opposition from Europe, sceptical military and intelligence chiefs and a hostile press – few leaders anywhere have faced this kind of pressure.
By week’s end, Bibi had flipped the script. A series of military blows exposed the weakness of Iran’s sulphurously belligerent regime and demonstrated Israel’s military and intelligence supremacy in the Middle East.
The government crisis subsided. Trump praised Israel’s audacious attack. As in the months after October 7, 2023, a determined Prime Minister harnessed the Israeli military machine to orchestrate a dazzling series of victories that stunned the world even if they did not win it over.
The Prime Minister, collected and focused during our conversation, didn’t reveal any secrets. I left with no idea that Israel’s next war was only days away. But I saw a man who was energised rather than debilitated.
For most of Bibi’s career, he has played his hand cautiously. Like Trump, he combined bellicose rhetoric with caution in the use of force. That has changed. Netanyahu today thinks that desperate times require risky choices.
Believing that the Iranian regime is motivated by an implacable hate against Israel, seeing it systematically assemble the nuclear and non-nuclear elements of an arsenal that could wipe Israel off the map, and knowing that Israel’s successes have reduced Iran to its weakest position in decades, Bibi launched the campaign that will define his place in history.
This is the defining decision of his life. War is unpredictable, and Israel’s early victories, while encouraging, are no guarantee of ultimate success. Iran has been weakened, but it remains Israel’s most formidable foe. Israeli air power, however effective, may not be sufficient to achieve the country’s full goals in the war.
In this campaign Bibi will deserve the one thing he knows he won’t get: the wholehearted support of the West. America’s security will be bolstered if he wins and badly undermined if he fails. Let us hope he prevails.
China and Russia will be watching this one closely.
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Five reasons why US may strike soon
The Australian | Peter Jennings | 18 June 2025
The US is getting ready to participate in military strikes against Iran, likely within a week.
Five things point to this.
First, Donald Trump left the G7 meeting in Canada early because of the Middle East situation.
It’s a four-hour flight from Kananaskis to Washington DC on Air Force One. Trump can perform his role as commander in chief on the flight to authorise a strike, but he will want to get to the White House Situation Room, to access advisers and real-time vision of targets.
The second pointer is Secretary of State Marco Rubio is calling key counterparts, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. With the G7 leaders in the same room, there is no need for Rubio to be calling unless something is urgent.
The third indicator a strike is imminent is the US Defence Department’s spokesman Sean Parnell saying: “American forces are maintaining their defensive posture and that has not changed.”
Take it from me: when the Pentagon says nothing is happening that means something big is about to go down.
Fourth, the aircraft carrier Nimitz and its strike group have cleared the Strait of Malacca and are now steaming at speed toward the Middle East. The Nimitz will join the carrier USS Carl Vinson, in place with a strike group and four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, plus (in all probability) a fast-attack submarine carrying land-attack cruise missiles.
Point five, in the past 24 hours more than two dozen KC-135R and KC-46A air-to-air refuelling tankers have deployed east over the Atlantic – an unmistakeable sign of major operations to come.
One of the many remarkable features of Israel’s military campaign thus far is that it is operating several hundred combat aircraft and long-range uncrewed platforms in repeated waves over Tehran and western Iran, over 2000km from Israel.
This takes a lot of air-to-air refuelling. The US is probably moving refuellers to support the Israeli effort. It also gives President Trump options for American military strikes.
By the weekend the US will have a major strike capability in place. Israel has already destroyed most of Iran’s air force and anti-aircraft batteries and they are making an intense effort to destroy remaining command and control, missile and defensive systems.
One thing left to do and uniquely within American military capability, is to destroy deeply buried nuclear facilities at Fordow. It is said this can only be done by a 30,000-pound GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator: a weapon that can only be carried by US long-range bombers.
The “bunker busters” can reach deep enough to destroy centrifuges at Fordow that are enriching uranium to weapons-grade level.
My view is that Israel has other means to destroy these centrifuges, including through cyber attacks on power supplies, but this is not a target to be left to chance.
Donald Trump has an opportunity to deliver on his Truth Social declaration that “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”
He can do so in a way that does not commit ground forces and in a theatre where enemy air defences are destroyed.
Trump’s willingness to act is enabled by Israeli capability and strategic smarts. This could also lead – for good or ill – to regime change in Iran, cement Israeli military dominance in the region and Sunni dominance over Iran.
Trump can choose not to strike if Iran says it will openly give up its nuclear program, but it’s years too late for that to be believable.
As distressing as military operations may be, helping Israel complete the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program is the right move for longer-term stability in the Middle East.
Against these momentous changes in the Middle East, it is almost trivial to turn to Anthony Albanese being denied his G7 side meeting with Trump.
If the President wanted to, he could have found 20 minutes to meet Albanese. An ally in good standing might have been invited to join Trump on the Air Force One flight to Washington.
Sadly, Albanese has brought the alliance to such a place in the White House’s estimation that he is not being afforded that chance.
Contrast that with Sir Keir Starmer’s skill to build a friendship with Trump.
Australia is left to apply Kremlinology – studying how other leaders interact – to deduce from the Starmer-Trump meeting that AUKUS is “OK.”
AUKUS might be, but the Pentagon is reviewing the arrangements having clearly said that Australia must spend a lot more on defence. Trump’s departure means we lose the chance for Albanese to make the case for the alliance.
Amid the Iran crisis Albanese might have offered to deploy a ship (belatedly) to the Red Sea, send an airborne early warning aircraft back to Europe to relieve pressure on US planes, or offered to backfill US ships leaving the Pacific.
But nothing like that. Here’s the sad truth: Trump has sized up Albanese and found Labor’s defence effort wanting. The President’s hand-picked Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, made it plain: advising Richard Marles on June 1 that we should lift defence spending to 3.5 per cent.
We have been relegated to the status of a third-tier ally. Britain and Japan are standing up by comparison, significantly lifting defence spending and defence equipment production.
No aspiring statesman should aim for Australia to punch below our weight in the alliance. But Albanese seems content with this outcome. After his thumping election win, he sees no domestic political threat on defence policy he needs to worry about.
Albanese wants to mute our international role; to be the earnest but ineffective partner of ASEAN and the Pacific Islands; not raising hackles in Beijing and flying below Trump’s radar. He maintains that Australians voted “to change the way we engaged with the world.” This is what he means to deliver.
The Pentagon review of AUKUS will conclude we need to do more but Albanese seems set against strengthening defence.
If that’s the case, don’t expect Trump to spend time fixing a problem Albanese won’t acknowledge.
Peter Jennings is director of Strategic Analysis Australia and an adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. He is a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department.
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US dilemma as Israel tries to hit underground nukes
IDF has killed most Iranian military leaders, isolating the ayatollah
The Australian | Editorial | 18 June 2025
Back in the White House Situation Room with the US National Security Council after leaving the G7 summit in Canada, Donald Trump faces a decision that could shape the future of the Middle East and the world for decades. On social media on Tuesday morning, Australian time, his focus was on the goal of Israel’s Rising Lion operation: “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” Most of the world, including Arab nations, agree. So does the G7, which affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself and its insistence that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon”. Iran “should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign. What a shame, and waste of human life,” the US President posted on social media. His warning that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran” either was meant to increase panic or indicative of a seismic attack to come.
Israel’s forces have wiped out the top ranks of Iran’s army and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The theocracy’s grip weakened further on Tuesday when the Israel Defence Forces announced it had killed Iran’s top military commander, Ali Shadmani, the closest figure to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The IDF said it had “eliminated Iran’s wartime chief of staff”, leaving Khamenei increasingly isolated as regime change emerges as a possibility. The longer it takes Iran to regroup, the more of its ballistic missile and nuclear programs will be lost.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says it believes centrifuges at Iran’s underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz have been “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether”. But if Iran’s underground stock of highly enriched uranium and nuclear bomb components – some of which are buried about 800m inside a mountain at Fordow, south of Tehran – is to be destroyed, the only effective known weapons, apart from nuclear warheads, are bunker-buster bombs. The US has them, Israel does not. As The Times reports: “The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which is 6m long and about 13,600kg … was developed to destroy bunkers that other weapons could not reach.” Its fuse is designed to delay detonation until maximum penetration has been achieved, with a chance to destroy what is beneath it.
Military analysts say a single MOP could not do the job; several strikes could be needed. The US reportedly has about 20 MOPs. Any operation would be helped by Israel’s F-35s carving a relatively invulnerable aerial pathway towards Iran’s four nuclear facilities by destroying Iran’s air defences. The US has been reluctant to join Israel’s attack and risk a wider war, although it has helped defend Israel against incoming missiles. China already has accused Mr Trump of “pouring oil” on the conflict. He is keeping his options open, approving the dispatch of a second aircraft carrier to the region. The USS Carl Vinson is operating alongside the USS Nimitz with accompanying warships in the Red Sea and eastern Mediterranean. The Nimitz was redeployed from the South China Sea, an indication of dangers faced by the West on several fronts. But if Israel, with US help, is able to smash Iran’s nuclear weapons it will remove a grave threat, not only to Israel but also to millions of people the West. In 2023, Khamenei told followers: “When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan, it is a policy.”
Both sides are suffering casualties and destruction. But Iran’s death toll on Tuesday was 10 times higher than the 24 people killed in Israel, thanks to the Jewish state’s superior defence systems. Tehran, in a sign of desperation, reportedly has sent messages to Israel and the US via Arab intermediaries that it would be open to return to negotiations provided the US does not join the attack. But with IDF warplanes able to fly relatively freely over Tehran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has little incentive to give up on his main objective that he sees as central to Israel’s survival: destroying Iran’s nuclear program.
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Mid-East foes should ponder costly futility of endless war of hate
The Australian | Letters | 18 June 2025
So many lies are said about the Middle East, and Israel in particular.
Unfortunately, our Foreign Minister definitely does not have a truth detector and cannot fathom who the “bad guys” are in this battle.
I was thrilled to read Alexander Downer (“This is Bibi’s chance to break the status quo”, 16/6) expressing the view that Israel had no choice in this action.
He also recognises that the Iranian people are distinct from their leaders and that the people do not support their evil, violent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. I have seen videos from Iran of civilians cheering Israel’s attack and, with Israel’s help, there might be a possibility of overthrowing the IRGC and returning to a more moderate life in Iran. Just Google “Tehran in the 1970s” to see what a wonderful cosmopolitan place it was before Khomeini took over.
Israel and Iran cohabited in a civil manner in the Middle East back then, and could do so again.
Corinne Haber, Caulfield, Vic
I often think what the conversation would be like if warring sides in the Middle East actually sat down together primarily to discuss: Why are we doing this? Killing people, destroying homes, and costing each nation billions to take part in the theatre of war, and really, for what end? Whatever happens, there will still be anger and dissent, not to mention the lives and homes never to be seen again.
Helen Mahoney, Greenslopes, Qld
It’s pretty obvious that Iran’s extreme religious mullah leadership isn’t paying any attention to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s limp call for Iran and Israel to de-escalate their hostilities.
Why doesn’t she make a statement telling Iran to publicly withdraw its offensive claim that Israel has no right to exist and it would wipe Israel off the map? This just may be a positive and serious step to possible de-escalation.
However, noting that Iran has been belligerent against Israel for decades, one cannot be hopeful.
Coke Tomyn, Camberwell, Vic
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Military chief killed as deadly barrages rage
Daily Telegraph (Hobart Mercury) | Zoe Smith | 18 June 2025
Israel and Iran continued to trade deadly fire for a fifth day in their most intense confrontation in history, fuelling fears of a drawn-out conflict that could engulf the Middle East.
Israel struck an Iranian state TV building — forcing a presenter to flee mid-broadcast — in the latest dramatic escalation of the major aerial campaign, in which nuclear and military sites in Iran have been hit, as well as residential areas and fuel depots.
Israel claimed it had killed Iran’s top military commander, Ali Shadmani, in an overnight strike, calling him the closest figure to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Israeli military said following “a sudden opportunity overnight, the (Israeli air force) struck a staffed command centre in the heart of Tehran and eliminated Ali Shadmani, the war-time Chief of Staff, the most senior military commander, and the closest figure to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”
The Israeli military said Shadmani had commanded both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Iranian armed forces.
Iran’s health ministry said at least 224 people have been killed and more than 1200 wounded.
Tehran has responded with barrages of missiles and drones that hit Israeli cities and towns, killing at least 24 people and wounding 592 others, according to the prime minister’s office.
As Donald Trump left the G7 summit early to return to the White House amid the crisis, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed the US president had proposed a ceasefire to Iran and Israel.
However, the US president took to social media to dismiss the claim as “wrong”.
“Publicity seeking President Emmanuel Macron, of France, mistakenly said that I left the G7 Summit, in Canada, to go back to D.C. to work on a ‘cease fire’ between Israel and Iran. Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Having killed many top military commanders and atomic scientists in Iran, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel was eliminating Iran’s security leadership “one after the other”.
He said Israel was “pursuing three main objectives: the elimination of the nuclear program, the elimination of ballistic missile production capability, and the elimination of the axis of terrorism”, referring to Iranian-backed militant groups in the Middle East.
“We will do what is necessary to achieve these goals, and we are well co-ordinated with the United States,” he said.
He also did not rule out killing Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
As the crisis mounted, Israel continued its bombing offensive against Iran, striking the TV building in Tehran.
The presenter was in the midst of lambasting Israel when an explosion rocked the building, causing the monitors behind her to cut out and sending debris raining from the ceiling. Video later showed the building in flames.
Iran condemned Israel’s attack as a “wicked act” and a “war crime”, calling on the UN to take action.
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Right approach to Iran
Daily Telegraph | Letters | 18 June 2025
Alan Sexton could not be more wrong about Penny Wong (“Wong’s wrong on Iran”, Letters, 17/6).
Penny Wong presents Australia’s view which is not to get involved in the Israel-Iran conflict. Even Donald Trump says they need to fight it out for a while.
However, Netanyahu knows Trump will follow wherever he goes.
To Mr Sexton and many millions in the West, Jews are God’s chosen people. The Old Testament takes that view. The followers of Jesus and the apostle Paul had a different view.
Access to information and propaganda have exploded due to the internet. Putin, Xi, Trump and Netanyahu use the latter in the expectation we will follow like sheep.
Peter Egan, Mosman
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World’s a safer place if Iran doesn’t have nukes
Daily Telegraph (Courier-Mail) | Oved Lobel | 18 June 2025
One raison d’être of the Islamic Revolution that conquered Iran in 1979 was the destruction of Israel. In both word and deed, every Iranian official for decades has stressed this priority, and constantly trying to orchestrate a multi-front war via Arab branches and clients of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to eventually destroy the Jewish State.
The Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and subsequent attacks by the Houthis, Hezbollah, Iraqi and Syrian militias and Iran itself, were the culmination of this strategy, but Iran has been trying to conduct this multi-front war since at least the 1990s.
It’s more than understandable why Jerusalem believes such a regime, so implacably and openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons or even the potential to rapidly develop them.
Israel has long had a doctrine of preventive strikes to ensure its enemies could not build nuclear weapons. The so-called Begin Doctrine was most famously demonstrated in 1981, when Iraq’s Osirak reactor was bombed. Then-prime minister Menachem Begin declared, “We chose this moment: now, not later, because later may be too late, perhaps forever,” later publicly announcing, “This attack will be a precedent for every future government in Israel.”
Israel demonstrated this resolve again when it destroyed Syria’s plutonium reactor at Al Kibar in 2007.
After more than a month of warnings that Israel was gearing up for an imminent campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, Operation Rising Lion began on June 13, targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and assassinating senior military officials and nuclear scientists.
These include Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp chief Hossein Salami and former chief of Iran’s enrichment program Fereydoon Abbasi, among several others.
Iran had an active, organised nuclear weapons program from the 1980s through 2003. Even though it was subsequently officially “halted” that year, research continued under various guises.
The Iranian enrichment program was allowed to expand exponentially as the US and its European allies tried a combination of sanctions pressure and diplomacy to negotiate constraints and oversight of the program, culminating in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.
The deal was deeply flawed, but worse, it didn’t address the fact that Iran could weaponise whenever it wanted, having been permitted to maintain enrichment facilities. The deal was essentially a bribe to Iran not to pursue weaponisation, and to put as large a gap as possible between a decision to weaponise and actual nuclear capability.
In May 2018, President Donald Trump repudiated the deal and implemented a “maximum pressure” campaign of crushing sanctions to force the Iranian regime to renegotiate a more comprehensive and stronger deal.
Subsequently, Iran began to gradually violate its JCPOA commitments at an accelerating rate. Following Israel’s assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the previous chief of the nuclear weapons program, in November 2020, Iran upped enrichment to 20%.
Then, after an Israeli sabotage operation severely damaged Iran’s Natanz enrichment site, Iran retaliated by beginning to enrich uranium to 60%, just a short technical step away from the 90% “weapons-grade” needed in a bomb.
In 2021, to pressure the Biden Administration, Iran also ceased fully co-operating with the IAEA and suspended its implementation of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, removing almost any visibility into the enrichment program.
The most recent IAEA report, in June, said Iran had accumulated more than 400kg of 60% enriched uranium, an increase of nearly 50% since the IAEA’s February assessment and potentially enough for at least nine nuclear weapons.
For the first time in about 20 years, the IAEA declared Iran to have breached its non-proliferation obligations. Meanwhile, renewed negotiations between the US and Iran were deadlocked over Iran’s red line: that it be allowed to continue enriching uranium.
The JCPOA was the result of the Obama Administration conceding on that issue, but the Trump Administration refused. So the day after a two-month deadline set by Donald Trump for a new deal passed, Israel struck.
In February this year, the New York Times reported that a secret team of Iranian scientists were working on cruder options for faster nuclear weaponisation if a decision was made. Israeli intelligence also says Iran has a covert plan for its scientists to “ to secretly develop all components needed for developing a nuclear weapon.”
Despite the current uncertainty, the world will be a better and safer place if Israel succeeds in defanging, or at least substantially setting back, Iran’s rapidly maturing nuclear program.
Oved Lobel is a Policy Analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
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Carnage at aid centre
Herald-Sun (Courier-Mail, Hobart Mercury) / The Times | 18 June 2025
GAZA CITY: At least 50 Palestinians were shot dead near aid distribution centres in Gaza on Monday, the Hamas-run health ministry said, after witnesses said Israeli troops had opened fire.
According to the ministry, at least 23 of the victims were killed near an aid site in Rafah, in the south of the strip. About 200 others were wounded in the same incident.
Hamas civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that “the (Israeli) occupation forces opened fire” near the Al-Alam roundabout in the southern city of Rafah, where many were waiting to reach an aid distribution centre.
Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks near the centres, with witnesses saying they had come under fire from Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s military did not comment immediately on the latest incident, but has acknowledged in the past that its troops had fired warning shots against “suspicious” people heading to the aid centres, while blaming militants for provoking the violence.
The killings had added pressure on Israel to allow more aid into the territory after a three-month siege brought it to the brink of famine, according to the UN.
The UN has begun bringing in much-needed supplies, but it complains that the amount allowed in by Israel is insufficient. It has also been critical of a new US and Israeli-backed organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), that has employed armed contractors to hand out aid at several distribution sites, close to where the shootings have taken place.
The GHF said in a statement that it has distributed more than three million meals at its four distribution sites without incident.
The group has been mired in controversy after two top executives quit, citing the constraints on their work. A leading American consultancy also cancelled its contract with the group and suspended its lead employee on the project.
The Hamas-run health ministry said the shootings on Monday took place in southern Gaza, where the GHF had set up its centres. If confirmed, it would be the deadliest such incident yet.
After ceasefire talks with Hamas unravelled last month, Israel launched a new operation aimed at destroying Hamas, freeing the hostages it still holds, and “encouraging” Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants to leave the territory.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said Israel was “inflicting horrifying, unconscionable suffering on Palestinians in Gaza.”
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Iran not listening
Herald-Sun | Letters | 18 June 2025
It’s pretty obvious that Iran’s extreme religious mullah leadership isn’t paying any attention to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s limp call for Iran and Israel to de-escalate their conflict (“Wong’s ‘words’ won’t stop war”, HS, 16/6).
Why doesn’t she make a statement telling Iran to publicly withdraw its offensive claim that Israel has no right to exist and it will wipe Israel off the map?
This just may be a positive and serious step to possible de-escalation.
However, noting that Iran has been belligerent against Israel for decades, one cannot be hopeful.
Coke Tomyn, Camberwell
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Trump says US won’t kill Khamenei amid Israeli strikes
Canberra Times / AAP | 18 June 2025
US President Donald Trump says US patience is wearing thin but it has no immediate intention to “take out” Iran’s leader while indicating he could dispatch diplomatic envoys as the Israel-Iran air war rages for a fifth day.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said meanwhile that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could face the same fate as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who was toppled in a US-led invasion and eventually hanged after a trial.
“I warn the Iranian dictator against continuing to commit war crimes and fire missiles at Israeli citizens,” Katz told top Israeli military officials.
Explosions were reported in Tehran and in the city of Isfahan in central Iran, while Israel said Iran had fired more missiles towards it and air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and southern Israel.
The Israeli military said it had conducted strikes on 12 missile launch sites and storage facilities in Tehran.
Trump predicted on Monday that Israel would not be easing its attacks on Iran launched on Friday.
But he also said he might send US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff or Vice President JD Vance to meet Iranian officials.
Trump had said his early departure from a G7 summit in Canada had “nothing to do with” working on a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, and that something “much bigger” than that was expected.
In a further post on Tuesday, the US president said Khamenei’s whereabouts were known but “we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” while adding: “Our patience is wearing thin.”
Vance said the decision on whether to take further action to end Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which some countries suspect is aimed at developing a nuclear bomb, “ultimately belongs to the president”.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there was no indication that the US was about to enter the conflict.
Trump had not yet decided whether the US military will intervene on Israel’s side, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said.
Trump met for 90 minutes with his National Security Council on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the conflict, a White House official said.
Details were not immediately available.
Khamenei’s main military and security advisers have been killed by Israeli strikes, leaving major holes in his inner circle and raising the risk of strategic errors, according to five people familiar with his decision-making process.
The Israeli military said Iran’s military leadership was “on the run” and that it had killed Iran’s wartime chief of staff Ali Shadmani overnight, four days after he had replaced another top commander killed in the strikes.
With Iranian leaders suffering their most dangerous security breach since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled a US-backed monarch and led to clerical rule, the country’s cyber security command banned officials from using communications devices and mobile phones, Fars news agency reported.
Israel had launched a “massive cyber war” against Iran’s digital infrastructure, Iranian media reported.
Israel launched its air war after saying it had concluded that Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.
Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons and has pointed to its right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, including enrichment, as a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Israel, which is not a party to the NPT, is the only country in the Middle East widely believed to have nuclear weapons.
Israel does not deny or confirm that.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed that he will not back down until Iran’s nuclear development is disabled, while Trump says the Israeli assault could end if Iran agrees to strict curbs on enrichment.
Israel says it now has control of Iranian air space and intends to escalate the campaign in the coming days.
Iran has so far fired nearly 400 ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones towards Israel, with about 35 missiles penetrating Israel’s defensive shield and making impact, Israeli officials say.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had hit Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate and foreign intelligence service Mossad’s operational centre early on Tuesday.
There was no Israeli confirmation of such attacks.
Iranian officials have reported 224 deaths, mostly civilians, while Israel said 24 civilians had been killed.
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