A ceasefire between Iran, Israel, and the United States (US) on June 24 provided at least a temporary halt to nearly two weeks of war, with all sides claiming victory. While Israel and the U.S. boasted about crippling Iran’s nuclear programme, Iran trumpeted its ‘successful’ retaliation, claiming to have shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility. Yet these apparent victories mask an unresolved reality: the core tensions that sparked the conflict persist.
DR. AFTAB ALAM | PROFESSOR & HoD, STRATEGIC SECURITY STUDIES | AMU FOR NEWS ANALYTICS
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The current round of crisis started on June 8, 2025, when Israel launched coordinated air strikes deep inside Iran, reportedly crippling key military and nuclear installations and killing several top IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists. The strikes killed over 900 people—including 300 civilians, tragically many of them children—with thousands more wounded. Even residential areas and a children’s hospital were not spared.
Undeterred by this, and displaying both resilience and resolve, Iran retaliated swiftly and forcefully, unleashing waves of drones and ballistic missiles. While Israel’s sophisticated missile defences intercepted the majority, the salvo nonetheless inflicted notable damage.
In Tel Aviv, strikes shattered parts of a prominent biotechnology research centre and severely damaged a commercial high-rise that housed Microsoft’s Israeli offices. Most gravely, civilian areas bore the brunt of the assault, resulting in the deaths of at least 27 civilians, with scores more injured. Beyond the immediate physical destruction, these attacks critically punctured the long-held perception of Israeli military invincibility.
The crisis has reinforced a dangerous cycle of attack and retaliation, revealed the failure of deterrence and pushed the Middle East closer to a broader war.
HISTORICAL ROOTS
The roots of this confrontation run deep, shaped by decades of bitter hostility and strategic rivalry. Israel and Iran were once unlikely partners under the Shah, cooperating quietly on security and economic matters. But the 1979 Iranian Revolution transformed Iran into an avowedly anti-Israel theocracy, branding Israel the “Little Satan” and pledging unwavering support to militant groups like Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.
Over the decades, Tehran’s leaders, from Ayatollah Khomeini to Supreme Leader Khamenei, have repeatedly declared Israel an illegitimate state destined for collapse, with incendiary statements—such as former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s infamous call for Israel to be “wiped off the map”—reinforcing Israel’s sense of existential peril. In turn, Israel has pursued aggressive covert and overt campaigns to undermine Iran’s regional influence and nuclear programme, including the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and cyber operations like Stuxnet.
In recent years, Israel escalated its campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme and regional proxies—assassinating scientists, bombing Syria-bound arms shipments, and launching daring cyber-attacks. Iran retaliated with drone strikes on Israeli-linked tankers, enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels, and plotted attacks against Jewish targets abroad. The dam broke in April last year when Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior Quds Force commander, along with other high-ranking IRGC officials.
This brazen operation, widely condemned as a violation of diplomatic protections, triggered Tehran’s unprecedented direct missile barrage that fundamentally altered regional deterrence dynamics and set the stage for even broader confrontations. Finally, in June, a long-simmering conflict that once operated through proxies erupted into direct military confrontation between two of the Middle East’s most powerful and ideologically opposed states, with implications that could ignite a much wider war.
A HESITANT AMERICA STEPS IN
The U.S. entered this volatile crisis with visible reluctance. President Donald Trump, freshly returned to power on his ‘America First’ platform, had vowed to disentangle the country from costly overseas entanglements and focus on domestic revival under the “Make America Great Again” banner. Conscious of public fatigue with Middle Eastern conflicts and still harbouring ambitions of securing a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering international accords, Trump resisted being pulled into another regional confrontation.
However, under mounting pressure from military advisers, congressional hawks, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vigorous lobbying for strong U.S. action, Washington ultimately struck Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22—including the heavily fortified Fordow site with bunker-busting bombs that Israel could not penetrate, along with two other key installations at Natanz and Isfahan.
For Netanyahu, drawing Washington deeper into the confrontation served dual purposes: bolstering Israel’s deterrence posture and deflecting from intense domestic scrutiny over corruption trials and fractious coalition politics at home. Caught between allied pressure and hawkish demands from military advisers and Congress, Trump ultimately authorised the strikes. Thus, despite its initial reticence, the U.S. found itself pulled into the heart of another Middle Eastern escalation—precisely the scenario Trump had pledged to avoid.
As the fighting pauses, one big question remains: where will this dangerous cycle end, and how much more will it shake an already unstable region? What matters now is not who won—it is what happens next.
NUCLEAR DOUBLE STANDARDS
At its core, the friction between Israel and Iran has long centred on the spectre of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. For more than thirty years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has persistently warned that Iran is just “weeks away” from creating a nuclear weapon—deadlines that never arrived and predictions that never materialised. As far back as 2002, while appearing before a U.S. congressional committee, he advocated for the invasion of Iraq, suggesting that both Iraq and Iran were racing to obtain nuclear weapons. Later, in 2007, he compared Iran to Nazi Germany, warning it would “start a world war” if it got the bomb.
His doomsday rhetoric continues even today, despite the United Nations (UN) nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and U.S. intelligence confirming that Iran halted its weapons programme as far back as 2003. By weaponising the spectre of an Iranian nuke, Netanyahu successfully galvanised global support, pressuring allies to maintain sanctions and justifying covert sabotage (e.g., Stuxnet), targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists, and even pre-emptive strikes.
However, this persistent alarm over Iran’s nuclear ambitions also starkly exposes the selective anxieties and normative double standards that shape the global nuclear order. While Western powers demand that Iran forswear even the latent capacity for nuclear weapons, they remain largely silent on Israel’s undeclared but widely recognised nuclear arsenal.
These strikes likely violate international law. Their invocation of self-defence under the UN Charter fails to meet established legal thresholds: the Caroline Case standard (1837) of an ‘instant, overwhelming’ threat—reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua (1986) and Oil Platforms (2003). International law permits self-defence only against actual armed attacks or imminent threats, leaving no room for deliberation. Yet the U.S.-Israel operations were pre-emptive, targeting speculative future risks rather than responding to an imminent attack. Such preventive use of force lacks any basis in the UN Charter or customary law, creating a perilous precedent that could legitimise virtually any act of aggression under mere suspicion of threat.
BEYOND THE FRAGILE CALM
The implications of this confrontation extend well beyond Iran and Israel, casting a profound shadow over an already volatile Middle East and unsettling foundational tenets of the international order. At the regional level, it threatens to entrench the area in a perilous cycle of reprisals that could escalate into a broader conflict, drawing in proxies from Lebanon to Yemen and jeopardising global energy supplies. Strategically, the normalisation of pre-emptive force under the rubric of self-defence undermines the collective security framework enshrined in the UN Charter.
Most critically, it further marginalises the Palestinian question—the conflict’s original fault line—thereby pushing the prospect of a just resolution ever more distant and deepening the grievances that extremist actors readily exploit. In this manner, the crisis not only destabilises the Middle East and erodes global non-proliferation norms but also perpetuates the unresolved injustices at the core of the region’s enduring instability.
Ultimately, the uneasy calm now settling over the region constitutes little more than a reprieve. The underlying disputes—Iran’s contested nuclear aspirations, Israel’s existential insecurities, America’s evolving strategic priorities, and the long-neglected plight of the Palestinians—remain wholly unaddressed. Left to fester, these unresolved crises virtually ensure that today’s fragile pause will give way to tomorrow’s renewed conflagration.
What emerges most starkly from this latest standoff is that deterrence, far from ensuring stability, amounts to a brittle façade masking profound vulnerabilities. The international community is thus confronted with a sobering question: How many more cycles of conflict and tenuous peace must the world endure before we arrive at a just and lasting resolution to the protracted challenges confronting the region?
(Dr Aftab Alam is a Professor, teaching international law at Aligarh Muslim University and heads its Strategic and Security Studies Programme. The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The News Analytics Herald.)
Major Highlights
- June 24 halt is temporary; unresolved core issues may reignite future conflict.
- Israel’s strikes and Iran’s retaliation show deterrence failed, escalating regional war.
- S. intervention, despite reluctance, was shaped by Israeli pressure.
- The crisis underscores nuclear double standards and the erosion of international legal norms.
- There’s a deep-rooted hostility with decades of conflict since 1979, fueling instability.
