National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, head of the National Security Council, on Thursday night became the first senior Israeli official to publicly confirm Israeli operations within Iranian territory in 2022.
“We have acted not infrequently over the last year... in Iran,” he said in an interview with Channel 13 in response to a series of questions about whether Jerusalem would act against Tehran directly even in the face of pressure from the US not to rock the boat too much while nuclear negotiations are ongoing.
"We have acted not infrequently over the last year...in Iran."
Eyala Hulata
Israel would act independently against the Islamic Republic regardless of Washington’s view on the issue, Hulata said, adding that this would just be a continuation of what it has already done for the last year.
Although multiple top officials have previously confirmed Mossad operations in Iran in 2022, and the Iranians themselves and sometimes US sources have made such attributions, Hulata was the first to go public.
Iranian targets
No fewer than seven top Iranian nuclear, aerospace, drone and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials were killed from late April to early June in a stunning wave of assassinations attributed by Iran to the Mossad, rivaling a wave of operations also attributed by foreign sources to the agency against Tehran in 2020 under former Mossad director Yossi Cohen and in the 2000s under Meir Dagan.
The operations all came after the US announced it would not delist the IRGC from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list and during a multi-month freeze in nuclear negotiations.