Last month, Israel briefly opened the Erez Crossing that leads into Israel from Gaza—which had been temporarily closed for the holiday of Sukkot—to allow employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to leave. The emergency evacuation was necessary because these non-Palestinian staffers had been receiving death threats ever since the U.S. withdrew its funding for the organization. Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky explain:

The majority of [UNRWA’s] approximately 30,000 employees are Palestinian. The few hundred others employed by the agency are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. It is rare that any employee has dared to break the code of silence regarding UNRWA’s alleged indispensability or its internal affairs. It is a demonstration of where the power lies that international employees have become the pawns that can be sacrificed.

To UNRWA’s Palestinian employees, their foreign coworkers are somehow representatives of the international system. The U.S., under this system, is simultaneously hated and expected to provide funding in perpetuity. . . .

UNRWA’s international employees, who were threatened by their local counterparts, were not going to speak publicly about its frequent hiring of terrorists and about Hamas’s use of UNRWA facilities. But they were driven out anyway, apparently because they had failed in their primary task: to ensure the continued flow of funds.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.