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

….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). Nothing in recent history can compare to Israel’s efforts to look inside Iran as though it had its enemy country in an MRI machine. The world first got some sense of this in 2024, when former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged in an interview with CNN that the man whom Iran’s counterintelligence bureau had placed in charge of a mole hunt for Israeli spies was himself Israel’s mole. Even despite this amazing bit of detail, and despite Israel’s history of inventive operations against Iran and its proxy networks since the October 7 attacks in 2023, Trump himself was not fully aware of the extent of its capabilities until they were demonstrated in June 2025. The 12-day war Israel launched against Iran culminated in a series of devastating American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in a 37-hour mission called Operation Midnight Hammer. READ MORE