An IDF raid on Sunday uncovered a cache of weapons near the West Bank city of Tulkarm—the latest development in the ongoing fight to keep the area from becoming another Gaza. Even before the current war began, Iran has been supporting jihadists in the vicinity, in the hope of expanding Hamas’s war to Israel’s eastern front and creating chaos on both sides of the Jordan River. Despite its losses in Lebanon and Syria, and the pounding its proxies are now taking in Yemen, Tehran has not lost sight of what Oded Ailam terms “its long-term vision of jihadist expansion.”

The regime’s hardliners do not view these setbacks as a turning point but as temporary tactical challenges that must be navigated before resuming their broader objectives. . . . Iran is exploiting regional vulnerabilities to destabilize Jordan’s pro-Western monarchy and establish a contiguous anti-Israel network.

Ailam enumerates some of Iran’s methods:

• In the wake of the October 7 attacks, Iran has intensified its use of Iraqi militias to infiltrate Jordan, often under the guise of religious pilgrimages or commercial activity.
• Tehran is bolstering Palestinian factions, including small extremist groups in Jordan and Judea and Samaria, with weapons, financial support, and tactical training.
• Iran is reactivating dormant Islamist groups within Jordan, particularly factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, to weaken the government’s authority.
• Just as Iran has done in Lebanon with Hizballah and in Yemen with the Houthis, it is working to build grassroots support among disenfranchised populations in Jordan and Judea and Samaria, leveraging socioeconomic hardships to radicalize local elements and cultivate long-term proxies.
• Reports indicate that Iranian-backed operatives have established logistical hubs in Jordanian cities, laying the groundwork for future escalations.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.