They Say Israel Started This War. Here's the Part They Leave Out.
- Hananya Naftali
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Iran spent forty years building a machine designed to kill Israel. On February 28, 2026, Israel finally decided to break it. And somehow, Israel is the villain.
The Clock Didn't Start Last Week
Every narrative has a starting point, and the critics of Israel have chosen theirs very carefully. Start the story on February 28, 2026, the morning U.S. and Israeli jets lit up the skies over Tehran, and yes, Israel looks like the aggressor. But that's not journalism. That's editing. That's choosing to open a film at the final scene and pretending the previous forty years didn't happen.
Here is what they leave out.
Iran did not wake up one morning as a peaceful nation and find itself suddenly at war. Under Supreme Leader Khamenei, the Islamic Republic spent decades constructing the most sophisticated state-sponsored terror architecture in modern history. They called it the Axis of Resistance - a network of armed proxies stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen to Iraq, each one funded, trained, and directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps with a single strategic purpose: to encircle Israel, bleed it from every border simultaneously, and make it ungovernable. The U.S. government designates Iran as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, spending over a billion dollars annually on proxy violence. This was not deterrence. This was a slow siege, and it had been running for four decades before a single Israeli jet took off toward Tehran.
They Armed the Men Who Slaughtered 1,200 People
Let's talk about October 7, 2023, because the people who say Israel started this war would very much prefer you forget it.
That morning, Hamas gunmen poured across the border into southern Israel and committed the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Approximately 1,200 people were killed. 250+ were dragged back into Gaza as hostages. Babies, grandmothers, young people at a music festival, murdered or kidnapped in an act of organized savagery. The Wall Street Journal, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, reported that the IRGC helped plan the assault and gave the green light at a meeting in Beirut just days before. Iran built the weapon. Hamas pulled the trigger. And when Israel dared to respond, Iran called it aggression.
It didn't stop there. In April 2024, Iran launched a direct missile and drone attack on Israeli territory, the first open assault of its kind in history. In October 2024, it launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli cities. Not military targets. Cities. Both times, Israel struck back. By that point, there was no "proxy" left in this war. Iran was firing at Israel directly, openly, and repeatedly, and the world kept asking why Israel was so angry.
Israel Tried Diplomacy. Iran Tried to Run the Clock.
Before a single bomb dropped in 2026, there were months of negotiations. Beginning in April 2025, the United States and Iran held round after round of indirect nuclear talks, mediated by Oman, in Muscat, Rome, Geneva. Trump set deadlines. His envoys flew across the world. As recently as February 26, 2026, 48 hours before the strikes began, a third round of talks concluded in Geneva. They collapsed.
Iran's foreign minister had declared just one day earlier that a "historic" deal was "within reach." But Iran's actual position told a different story. Tehran refused to end uranium enrichment. It restricted IAEA inspectors from key sites. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Iran's negotiators "boasted about having deceived monitors." And on February 27, the IAEA reported that Iran had been hiding highly enriched uranium in an underground facility, and stated it could no longer provide any assurance that Iran's nuclear program was "exclusively peaceful."
This was not a country ambushed mid-handshake. This was a country that had spent years mastering the art of stalling, enriching uranium, rebuilding missiles, running down every clock while smiling across every negotiating table.
The 2025 War They Already Forgot
Here is something else the critics skip over: this is not even the first time.
In June 2025, after the IAEA declared Iran non-compliant with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years, Israel launched Operation 'Rising Lion'. For 12 days, Israeli and then American forces struck nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, ballistic missile infrastructure, and senior military commanders. Iran retaliated with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 drones aimed at Israeli population centers, hitting civilian neighborhoods, a hospital, and energy infrastructure. A ceasefire was reached on June 24.
Iran did not treat that ceasefire as a moment of reflection. It treated it as a construction deadline. By late 2025, American assessments indicated Iran had stockpiled more missiles than it had before the June war. Its enrichment program was recovering. The regime drew one lesson from the ceasefire: rebuild faster.
The most dishonest move in the "Israel started this" argument is how blithely it waves away the nuclear threat, as though a theocratic regime that openly calls for Israel's destruction acquiring nuclear weapons is a minor administrative concern.
By May 2025, the IAEA had documented that Iran possessed enough uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, near weapons-grade, for the fissile material of nine nuclear warheads. The agency had been denied access to key sites. Iran had announced yet another hardened enrichment facility. And in December 2024, a senior Iranian official named Kamal Kharrazi stated that Iran would reconsider its policy against nuclear armament if it faced an "existential threat", the very kind of threat Israel now posed by dismantling its proxy network.
A nuclear-armed Iran would not need to launch a bomb to win. It would need only to possess one. Once it does, every Iranian proxy becomes untouchable, every Israeli counterstrike becomes a nuclear gamble, and the slow siege that began four decades ago ends - not with a bang, but with permanent Iranian dominance over a region it has spent forty years trying to control. Netanyahu called it plainly: an "existential threat." He was not being dramatic. He was reading the math.
So Who Actually Started This War?
Iran funded and helped plan the group that massacred Israelis on October 7. Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israeli cities twice in 2024. Iran built and bankrolled the militias that have fired thousands of rockets at Israeli towns for years. Iran defied nuclear inspectors, enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade, and rejected every serious diplomatic framework, including one actively on the table the week the strikes began. Iran killed tens of thousands of its own protesters to keep a regime in power whose founding purpose is Israel's annihilation.
Israel absorbed two direct missile attacks. It buried the victims of October 7. It fought a 12-day war, accepted a ceasefire, watched Iran rebuild, endured more failed diplomacy, and then acted.
The people demanding that Israel absorb all of this indefinitely, while a nuclear clock ticks down, are not making a case for peace. They are making a case for Israeli paralysis, and quite frankly are acting against the free world. Because an Iran with an atomic bomb is a threat to us all.
Call it what you want. But don't call it Israel's war.