In yesterday’s edition of Israel’s staunchly left-wing paper Haaretz, the daily cartoon by Amos Biderman showed President Biden waiting patiently at a negotiating table, while a black-turbaned ayatollah affixes a warhead to the top of a ballistic missile and says “I’ll be right there.” Simon Henderson makes a similar point about the stalled negotiations to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal:

While Washington policy circles debate apparently endlessly about Iran’s nuclear intentions and its level of expertise, Tehran presses on remorselessly.

On October 10, Mohammad Eslami, the newly-appointed head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, announced that his country had produced more than 120kg of 20-percent-enriched uranium. This is a dramatic increase from the 84kg reported a month earlier by the nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the IAEA’s figure of around 63kg three months earlier.

Lost in the reporting was the [straightforward but technical] detail that such a level of production is getting tantalizingly close to the magic figure of 200kg. This is the amount of 20-percent-enriched uranium that, in the arcane code of nuclear weapons, when further enriched to 90 percent is one “significant quantity”—[that is], the amount needed to make one atomic bomb.

And as Henderson carefully explains, the distance between 20-percent and 90-percent enrichment is not nearly so great as one would hope.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.