Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Tuesday that Israel will not stop fighting the war before it has damaged Iran’s Fordow (or Fordo) nuclear facility, which is buried deep within a mountain.
The Times of Israel reported:
Israel’s operation against Iran “will not end without damaging the Fordo nuclear facility,” promises National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi in an interview with Channel 12.
The site, 90 meters (295 feet) underground, houses thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium. Israel’s conventional munitions can’t reach that deep, and it would take the US joining the fight to knock it out from the air.
“I don’t know if the US will join,” says Hanegbi, adding that Israel is talking to the US continuously, but is not trying to convince them.
Conventional wisdom holds that Israel cannot, by itself, destroy Fordow, because doing so would require bunker-busting bombs that can penetrate and explode at depth. Only the U.S. has them — and Israel lacks strategic bombers that would be necessary to carry such bombs to their targets.
However, both Israel and the U.S. might prefer that the Americans stay out of the war — at least directly — and Israel has other means.
The Jerusalem Post reported:
The IDF on Tuesday said that it has a ready plan for striking Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear facility the moment that the political echelon gives the order.
…
Since the IDF lacks a mega 30,000 bunker buster bomb, which the US possesses, Israel has been trying to convince Washington to take out the facility.
However, despite lacking that bomb, the air force has other techniques for damaging or causing cave-ins at Fordow, such as repeatedly dropping 5,000-pound or 2,000-pound bombs over and over again in the same spots.
Israel has said that it expects to fight for one or two more weeks to achieve its objectives, which include destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, as well as its nuclear enrichment and weapons program.
There is little that Iran can do to stop Israel, since the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has knocked out Iran’s air defenses and its fighter jets are operating with complete freedom above Iranian airspace, around the clock.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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