COMMENTARY
One American-Israeli Battle After Another
Eli Lake
April 2026

….Six days before Trump gave the order to commence combat operations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided the president and his senior advisers with intelligence gold. He told them that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be meeting with his top military advisers on February 28. The CIA confirmed the intelligence with its own sources. Negotiations over disarming Iran were deadlocking in Geneva. So Trump seized the moment. The Iranian regime could be decapitated by hitting that February 28 meeting. And that is exactly what happened in the first strikes. Netanyahu’s tip, which led to the righteous undoing of the man who had ruled Iran since 1989, was just one element in a mosaic of information Israel provided to Trump that demonstrated just how thoroughly it had succeeded in penetrating Iran’s closed society (and the inner workings of its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere). READ MORE