Former Israeli PM Bennett admits he ordered strikes against Iran, urges to ‘make ayatollahs pay’ in WSJ op-ed

As PM, Bennett twice ordered the IDF to strike inside Iranian territory

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Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed he ordered Israeli forces to strike targets inside Iran in retaliation against the regime’s activities two different times during his short term between 2021 and 2022.

Bennett made the statement in an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The column, “The U.S. and Israel Need to Take Iran On Directly,” detailed his view that Iran should be made to pay for its constant aggression.

“Iran constantly attacks Israel via its proxies,” Bennett wrote. “The most amazing part: Iran has largely gotten away with it… When I became prime minister in June 2021, I decided to change this.”

The former prime minister went on to describe two attacks on Iranian targets carried out on his orders. The first was the destruction of a vast drone production facility, including hundreds of drones in Kermanshah in February 2022.

This came as a response to an attempted attack against Israel just days earlier when Iran launched two drones that were shot down over Iraqi territory. Iran, on its part, reacted by bombing a compound in the Kurdish capital of Erbil in Iraq, which Iran claimed was a headquarters of Israel's Mossad.

The second attack Bennett ordered came one month later after the Iranian intelligence service attempted to assassinate Israeli tourists in Turkey.

Shortly after, the commander of the responsible unit in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, Hassan Siyad Hudairi, was killed in the capital Tehran by two gunmen on a motorbike.

“It turns out that Iran’s tyrants are softer than one might expect. They gleefully send others to die for them. But when they’re hit at home, suddenly they become timid,” Bennett wrote.

He explained that since the late 80s, Iran's strategy in the Middle East has been to create proxy forces and “let them do the dirty work of fighting and dying.”

The forces, Bennett says, are constantly at war with Israel, hitting it from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen – and Gaza.

Bennett’s op-ed also shows part of the strategy that has widely been dubbed in Israel as “the failed concept” from before the war, which ultimately led to the horrible failure of Oct. 7 and Hamas’ brutal assault on Israeli border communities.

“My goal was to avoid, if reasonably possible, local clashes with Hezbollah and Hamas,” he wrote. “Rather, Israel’s national-security resources must be focused on weakening our primary enemy—Iran.”

“Make the ayatollahs pay for sowing chaos through their Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies.”