Last month, Aslam Chowdhury, a high-ranking member of the Bangladeshi Nationalist party (BNP), the country’s largest opposition party, made an official visit to India where he met a Likud-affiliated Israeli Druze political consultant named Mendi Safadi. Photographs of the two shaking hands soon made their way into a Bangladeshi newspaper, leading to Chowdhurry’s arrest for sedition. Sebastian Bustle explains:

Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It is a country where Jews and the Israeli people are cursed in every Friday sermon, at more than 250,000 mosques. Imams across the country shout [in their sermons] that Jewish people are infidels. . . .

On May 15, police detectives arrested Chowdhury for alleged “involvement in a plot to oust the Bangladesh government with the support of Israeli intelligence Mossad [sic].” Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikha Hasina, accused two [major opposition] parties, BNP and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh, of being “so desperate that they are now conspiring with Israel to oust me. . . . They have joined hands with those who are frequently killing children and women in Palestine.”

The Bangladesh Nationalist party heavily depends on religious Muslim supporters, and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh is an Islamist political party that believes in Islamic revolution.

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.