The Israel-Iran War of 2025: Inside the Twelve-Day War That Remade the Middle East

In the span of just twelve days, the future of the entire Middle East was rewritten. The dust has only just begun to settle from a crisis that many already call the Twelve-Day War, and there are no guarantees, even now, that the ceasefire that ended the fighting will hold for good. Yet it is already clear that between the devastation of Iran’s military and its nuclear program, the emboldened posture of Israel, and the drastically altered balance of power across the region, the modern Middle East will be defined by this conflict for decades to come.

This is an attempt to write a first draft of history: to understand the Israel-Iran War of 2025 the way it will be understood in the years ahead. The account that follows moves from the cascade of circumstance that drew the region to this brink, through the tactics and arsenals each side brought to bear, and on to the ways the Middle East has been permanently reshaped by what happened between June 13 and June 25, 2025. Every figure, name, and date below reflects the situation as it stood by the morning of June 25, 2025, local time in Jerusalem and Tehran—the point at which the guns fell quiet and a ceasefire, however precarious, took hold.

The thesis is simple: the Twelve-Day War was the violent culmination of decades of cold conflict between Israel and Iran, and its outcome—an Iran gravely degraded but not defeated, an Israel ascendant, and a nuclear question left unsettled—will govern the strategic logic of the Middle East for a generation.

Key Takeaways

Between June 13 and June 25, 2025, Israel and Iran fought their first direct, large-scale war, exchanging airstrikes and ballistic missiles after years of shadow conflict through proxies.
Israel opened with Operation Rising Lion on June 13, combining stealth airstrikes with a years-long Mossad sabotage and assassination campaign that decapitated much of Iran’s military command and crippled its air defenses.
The United States entered the conflict on June 22 with Operation Midnight Hammer, sending seven B-2 bombers to drop GBU-57 bunker-busters on the deeply buried Fordo enrichment site, alongside Tomahawk strikes on Natanz and Isfahan.
Iran’s retaliation was severely constrained by its shattered command-and-control; its largest response was a pre-warned, near-bloodless strike on the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, and its proxies and allies declined to intervene.
A Trump-brokered ceasefire survived a chaotic final night of last-minute strikes; all sides claimed victory, but the damage to Iran’s nuclear program and the future of the region remain genuinely contested.

Decades in the Making: The Road to Direct War

To understand how Israel and Iran arrived at open war, one can reach back as far as 1979, when Iran’s Western-backed Pahlavi monarchy fell in the Islamic Revolution. Or to 2015, when Iran and the United States signed a nuclear deal trading constraints on Iranian enrichment for sanctions relief. Or to 2018, when President Donald Trump, in his first term, withdrew from that deal and imposed maximum-pressure sanctions. That withdrawal pushed Iran away from rapprochement with the West and toward two parallel projects: expanding its capacity to enrich uranium, and building up the proxy paramilitary forces that became its self-styled Axis of Resistance—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, and others.

But at the latest, the road to this war begins on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its attack from the Gaza Strip and provoked the massive Israeli response that still continues. Hamas never fully articulated the strategic reasoning behind that operation, and its leaders certainly cannot do so now. Yet October 7 came against a backdrop of rapid diplomatic change. Israel had normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, ending decades of policy that had isolated it in support of the Palestinians, and was on the cusp of normalizing with the biggest prize of all: Saudi Arabia.

That prospect was, for Iran’s network, an existential threat. Saudi Arabia had itself restored diplomatic relations with Iran after a long cold war for dominance of the Arab world. A Middle East in which Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all pursued shared economic prosperity would be a Middle East with no room for Iranian-sponsored attacks on Israel—and one in which Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the rest might become more convenient for Tehran to discard than to fund. For groups rooted ideologically in fanatical opposition to Israel, regional alignment on security was a death sentence.

In the aftermath of October 7, normalization had to wait. Israel’s all-out campaign in Gaza forced the question of Palestine back to the front of global consciousness and made it impossible for capitals like Riyadh to deepen ties with Jerusalem. Western intelligence has since indicated that Iran knew Hamas was planning an October 7-style attack and endorsed the idea in principle, but did not know Hamas would act when it did—and had in fact urged Hamas to wait. In retrospect, the attack reads as a deliberate effort to make normalization impossible, and in that narrow aim it succeeded.

Proxies Degraded, Deterrence Eroded

What followed was a methodical dismantling of Iran’s defensive architecture. Hamas drew Israel into escalating operations in Gaza far past the point where anything resembling victory was achievable, using the territory’s civilian population as involuntary martyrs and making engagement with Israel unthinkable for the Arab world. Then Hezbollah, after months of rocket fire, came into far greater conflict with Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon directly and killed or incapacitated thousands of its fighters. In Yemen, the Houthis launched a missile and drone campaign against Red Sea shipping and were opposed first by a Western coalition and then by Israel directly.

Each blow to a proxy left Iran more exposed. Those organizations were never only offensive tools; they were also a defensive guarantee, a promise that any direct Israeli attack on Iran would bring overwhelming retaliation from every direction at once. That promise had long made a direct strike on Iran too costly to contemplate. But with each group Israel degraded, Iran’s ability to deter such a strike quietly diminished, even as Tehran grew more directly enmeshed in the fighting, supplying weapons and aid wherever it could and settling back into the role of Israel’s mortal adversary.

The cold war turned hot in 2024, which saw not one but two direct armed exchanges between the two states—the first time in history they had struck each other’s territory with such ferocity. In April, an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria killed sixteen people, including several senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran answered with a massive combined wave of kamikaze drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles; Israel volleyed back with airstrikes before diplomacy drew the crisis down.

Then in October, Israel assassinated the leader of Hamas in Tehran, killed the leader of Hezbollah and a deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and invaded southern Lebanon. Iran responded with two waves of strikes involving roughly 200 ballistic missiles, and Israel retaliated with airstrikes across the country.

Both exchanges left each side feeling emboldened. In April, Iran’s barrage had begun to expose gaps in Israeli air defense—systems that are robust, but that can only intercept as many projectiles as they have interceptors at the moment of attack. Iran gathered hard data on what had worked and concluded it could one day calibrate an attack to overwhelm those defenses.

In October, by contrast, Israel devastated Iran’s air-defense network, destroying most of Iran’s modern systems and a critical share of its ballistic-missile production lines, taking that production offline for years. As 2024 turned to 2025, both Iran and Israel had reason for confidence in their own capabilities—and that mutual confidence made escalation far more likely.

The Nuclear Angle: Enrichment by Design

Running parallel to the regional tensions was Iran’s nuclear program, which by international accounts had begun to evolve very quickly. It is a familiar refrain that Iran has been on the verge of a bomb for forty-odd years, and the truth is more complicated. But Iran has genuinely been on the cusp of possessing highly enriched uranium for several years—and that, crucially, has been by design rather than the product of Western fearmongering.

Iran’s approach rested on two assumptions. The first was that Israel and the West are deeply invested in ensuring Iran never builds a nuclear weapon. The second was that if Iran enriched to weapons-grade and tried to build a working warhead, it would almost certainly trigger an all-out war—likely a combined US and Israeli campaign, potentially joined by much of the world—at the end of which Iran would have neither a functioning bomb nor much of a country left.

So Tehran chose to enrich to levels that approach weapons-grade without crossing the line, maintaining a credible “breakout” capability while denying the world quite enough justification to strike. Building a stockpile of partially enriched uranium did not cross the line; producing weapons-grade material, building warhead components, or mounting a warhead on a missile would.

That logic ultimately failed under pressure. In the weeks before the war, observers sounded the alarm over how much uranium Iran was enriching. A late-May report from the IAEA found Iran holding around 900 pounds—over 400 kilograms—of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. That is short of the 90 percent weapons-grade threshold, but it is a gap Iran could cross in weeks, and that quantity, if fully enriched, could fuel some ten nuclear warheads.

The figure had risen from just over 600 pounds barely three months earlier, suggesting a rapid and unexplained buildup. Even so, weapons-grade uranium is not a weapon; building a warhead and mating it to a delivery system was still expected to take months.

A One-Two Punch from the IAEA

The timing of the IAEA report could hardly have been worse for de-escalation. When it landed, Iran was deep in a new round of nuclear negotiations with the United States, coming off a fifth round of talks that had left both sides optimistic. Washington had largely brushed off Israeli objections, insisting diplomacy still had room and that Israeli strikes were unnecessary. US intelligence assessed that Iran had not yet started a weapons program, only the production of materials that would allow one later—an assessment the report did not technically overturn.

Watch on WarFronts

Watch the full video analysis on the WarFronts YouTube channel, presented by Simon Whistler.

But the enrichment report arrived alongside a second one, accusing Iran of having concealed a nuclear program in the past. Together, from the world’s gold-standard nuclear authority, the two documents were a serious problem. They amplified Israel’s insistence that Iran was a nefarious actor, delivered a rude awakening to officials in Washington who had believed Iran fully engaged, and handed the Republican Party’s hawks all the ammunition they needed to argue across the Trump administration that America was being played.

Israel pushed the reports further in the global press, calling for decisive international action. The IAEA’s own director-general was careful to note there was no “proof of a systemic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.” It did not matter.

In the days that followed, Washington’s mood shifted dramatically. Days earlier, Trump had insisted there was no reason for Israeli intervention; now, asked about a possible attack, he offered, “I don’t want to say imminent, but it looks like something that could very well happen. Look, it’s very simple, not complicated.

Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Officials with a record of advocating force pushed harder inside the White House to greenlight an Israeli strike—something Israel was judged unlikely to attempt without American sign-off. Iran did not help itself, announcing on June 12 that it had built a third enrichment facility beyond the two known to inspectors and planned to activate it imminently, replace old centrifuges with new ones, and weigh further escalatory steps.

That announcement came just after the IAEA censured Iran over the prior reports. Any question of whether it might give the West pause was answered hours later, when the first Israeli bombs began falling.

Operation Rising Lion: The Opening Salvo

On June 13, 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a coordinated campaign of airstrikes and sabotage designed to incapacitate Iran’s nuclear facilities and its military command-and-control. It was meant to be a surprise, and it was. According to Israeli officials, the United States had known of the coming strikes for days and deliberately misled Iran by allowing leakers to suggest Trump had forbidden any attack until nuclear talks failed.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, meanwhile, signaled progress in hostage talks with Hamas, and Netanyahu was scheduled to attend his son’s wedding—hardly the moment, it seemed, to start a war. Right up to the first strike, Israeli and American actions worked to lull Iran into a false sense of security, ensuring its leaders were not in hiding and its nuclear assets had not been moved.

Current and former Israeli officials have since indicated, anonymously, that Israel had been preparing Rising Lion—and coordinating with Washington—since the previous autumn, before Trump even won a second term. When the attack opened in the pre-dawn hours, the scale of the planning was immediately evident. The initial air assault came in successive waves built around stealthy modified F-35s, upgraded F-16s, and the decidedly non-stealthy F-15, carrying bunker-busting bombs, precision-guided munitions, and advanced air-to-ground missiles, refueled in flight by Israeli tankers.

First, stealth fighters slipped through Iranian air defenses and destroyed the defensive batteries, clearing the way for less stealthy aircraft. Then heavily armed warplanes devastated Iranian ballistic-missile launchers, struck military leaders, and began hitting nuclear facilities—above all the enrichment site at Natanz. In the process Israel destroyed many of Iran’s warplanes, including some of its antique but flyable American-made F-14s and F-4s, on the way to establishing air superiority.

Mossad’s War from Within

Warplanes were only part of the opening salvo. Reports quickly emerged from Tehran of a substantial ground component informed by years of covert espionage. According to Israeli intelligence sources, Mossad had been laying the foundations of the attack inside Iran for at least three years—cultivating assets, targeting key personnel and equipment, and preparing assassinations and sabotage operations to be triggered on command. As part of that effort, Mossad smuggled large numbers of small explosive drones into the country, along with other close-range weapons, including small, remotely operated Spike precision-guided missiles that could be launched at a moment’s notice.

Those weapons targeted Iranian surface-to-air batteries, eliminated to clear paths for Israeli jets; military and intelligence officials who would otherwise have coordinated Iran’s response; and the vehicles that would launch ballistic missiles back toward Israel, pre-emptively gutting Iran’s ability to retaliate. When the operators surged into motion, the results were stunning. The attacks killed several of the most important figures in Iran’s military, including Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s highest commander under the Supreme Leader, and Hossein Salami, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Israel killed the men in charge of Iran’s combat air fleet, its air defenses, and its military intelligence, along with several key deputies, more than a dozen nuclear scientists, and Ali Shamkhani, who had been leading Iran’s side of the nuclear talks.

So much command-and-control was destroyed that Iran’s military response could not be quickly coordinated, ending up both more delayed and more limited than its leaders intended. Israeli intelligence guided the country’s air power in real time. In one instance, Israel pinpointed eight elite Revolutionary Guard members—including the head of Iran’s missile programs—in an underground bunker and struck their position.

In another, when an effort to kill ten nuclear scientists left one alive, the survivor was tracked to a second location and eliminated. In all, Israel’s first five waves hit roughly 100 targets from the air, on top of the sabotage and assassinations on the ground. Iran claimed to have downed several Israeli warplanes, and some crude AI-generated images circulated online purporting to prove it, but there is no evidence Iran scored any hits against manned aircraft.

Iran’s Constrained Reply

Within hours, an Iranian response was on its way—well over a hundred ballistic missiles, followed by slower Shahed drones, aimed at overwhelming Israeli air defenses. Most missiles were intercepted, but some struck populated areas, including a hit in Tel Aviv near a critical defense building known as The Kirya. One person was killed in Israel in that initial barrage and more than sixty injured, though most people in the hardest-hit areas reached bomb shelters in time.

Over the full course of the war, Israeli officials counted 24 people killed in the country by Iranian strikes, all of them in the earliest days of retaliation. Israel’s defenses proved capable of mostly nullifying the attack.

As the first exchange settled, governments around the world took their positions. Iran vowed full-force retaliation, including strikes on Israeli nuclear facilities, and condemnations poured in from China and Russia. Yet neither those allies nor Iran’s proxies moved—except Yemen’s Houthis, who launched a single long-range missile and threatened a return to Red Sea attacks.

The United States vowed to punish any Iranian strike on American assets, but the Trump administration declined to join the war directly. With American air power already forward-deployed across the region, that threat was credible, and Iran did not broaden its retaliation toward Israel’s main backer.

Crucially, Israel’s first salvo left a great many Iranian targets untouched. The most prominent was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who was not directly targeted, nor were Iran’s president, foreign minister, or defense minister. Iran’s crude-oil production was spared, as was Kharg Island, where Iran loads over 90 percent of its oil exports. Other major economic targets went unhit, and the hardened underground enrichment complex at Fordo was largely ignored.

Iran’s response, too, left openings to de-escalate: the Strait of Hormuz stayed open, and Iran left it unobstructed for the entire war.

In Iran’s case, however, restraint was not a choice. The combination of shattered command-and-control, destroyed missile launchers, and the sheer immediacy of Israel’s attack produced a far smaller reply than Iran would have planned. It did not have eight to ten hours to fly thousands of kamikaze drones the more than 1,500 kilometers from Tehran to Jerusalem to clear a path for its missiles.

It did not have the volume of ballistic missiles it had counted on—both because many could no longer be launched and because the officers meant to give the order were dead. The strike Iran did assemble, pairing over a hundred Shahed drones with about 150 ballistic missiles by Israel’s count, hinted at what Iran might have done under ideal conditions. But it was a shadow of what Tehran had promised just hours earlier.

Not a Brief Affair: The Daily Rhythm of War

When Israel justified its strikes to the world, it leaned hard on the nuclear case. Israeli officials argued that internal intelligence suggested Iran might have had enough uranium to fuel fifteen warheads if enriched to weapons-grade, and that it could enrich that material in days. Israel did not deny that building an actual warhead would take far longer; its argument was that the strikes were needed to ensure Iran never reached the point of no return.

In a letter to the UN Security Council, Israel said its operation “aimed to neutralize the existential and imminent threat from Iran’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.” Despite earlier US assessments, Trump threw his weight behind Israel’s claims within days, declaring that his own director of national intelligence had been wrong, and the White House judged Iran able to have a weapon ready within weeks—roughly the timeline officials had previously assigned to producing weapons-grade uranium, which would still take months to fashion into a warhead.

After the first night, the exchanges continued for nearly two weeks. Israel shifted from nationwide attacks to a fast-paced but more targeted campaign of precision airstrikes, using aerial intelligence and ground reports to hunt Iranian missile launchers, radar installations, and air-defense assets wherever they appeared. Israel’s remaining warplanes and long-range drone stockpiles were targeted thoroughly, pressure on the nuclear sites was sustained, and Israel operated in essentially uncontested airspace.

Iran clearly lost potency as the days passed. Its forward-deployed launchers were identified and destroyed, its manned aircraft never attempted an attack, and its long-range drones were used sparingly compared with past Iranian and proxy behavior. Iran also seemed to expend its older missiles first, rather than its faster, more sophisticated munitions.

The waning pace appears to have been a direct product of Israel’s ability to find and destroy launch capability in real time: to fire dozens or hundreds of missiles at once, Iran would have had to move its remaining launchers, exposing them to immediate strikes. With Israel commanding the skies, mounting advanced missiles only to see them destroyed before launch made little sense. Iran was often launching missiles in the single digits, especially later, and those small barrages were usually intercepted with ease.

Striking the Program: Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, and Bushehr

The most consequential strikes targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Israel severely damaged the Natanz enrichment facility across multiple bombing runs, making it the focal point of its efforts before the United States got involved. Open-source satellite imagery showed extensive damage to the surface facility, while the IAEA confirmed direct bunker-buster hits on the underground halls where enrichment actually takes place. Israel mostly avoided the important complex at Isfahan but did target specific laboratories that convert gaseous uranium into solid form after high enrichment—a sign that Israel was focused on interrupting the production chain to a bomb rather than simply destroying everything labeled “nuclear.”

Fordo, by contrast, remained largely untouched. Global coverage explained that the deeply buried facility was a major reason Israel so badly wanted the United States in the fight: America’s bunker-busters are the only Western weapons capable of reaching the depths where Fordo’s halls are buried. Two targets Israel did not spare were a heavy-water facility under development at Arak, which had clear potential to produce plutonium for some types of bomb, and Bushehr, the country’s only functioning nuclear power plant.

Israel also struck Iranian oil and gas infrastructure, including the Shahran oil depot in Tehran—with at least eleven storage tanks—plus a pair of gas fields and a crude-oil refinery. Those strikes were not enough to meaningfully disrupt Iran’s energy sector and read more like warning shots, demonstrating willingness to escalate. Military strikes only intensified.

By Tuesday, June 17, Israel declared it had destroyed a third of Iran’s missile launchers and gained complete air superiority over Tehran. Elsewhere, Israel struck the notorious Evin Prison, known for holding political dissidents and journalists, drawing criticism for endangering detainees, and in one symbolic act bombed a state news channel live on air, leaving the anchor first to ignore the strikes and then to end the broadcast early.

Iran’s Strikes and the Soroka Hospital Hit

Coming the other way, Iran was largely unable to hit well-defended Israeli military targets, where air defenses are most concentrated. It did strike civilian areas repeatedly: nine people were killed and around 200 injured on June 15, and eight killed and more than ninety injured on June 16. Iran came close to hitting an oil refinery in Haifa, which it targeted several times, and destroyed numerous buildings, though most stood empty thanks to air-raid alerts. One strike drew global headlines when a ballistic missile destroyed much of Israel’s Soroka Hospital, injuring forty people; no one was killed, as patients had already been moved below ground.

Iran did achieve one objective: forcing Israel to expend missile interceptors in numbers large enough that some Israeli defense sources warned of looming shortages. The defenses did not run out before the ceasefire, though it remains unclear whether some successful Iranian hits owed to individual batteries running low.

A central question throughout was the status of the Supreme Leader, who disappeared quickly once the fighting began. According to Iranian sources, Khamenei moved to a heavily fortified bunker outside Tehran within hours of the first strikes, reportedly joined by family, and became very hard to reach for fear that Israel could use electronic-signals data to find him. Israel and the United States claimed precise knowledge of his location and the ability to kill him at any time, though Washington repeatedly insisted it was not seeking regime change. Khamenei reportedly granted his commanders direct, complete control over Iran’s wartime conduct—both to avoid communicating with the outside world and to insulate himself from the command structure Israel was destroying—and set about replacing officials rapidly while selecting three senior clerics he considered fit to succeed him.

Those potential successors were not named publicly, but one was expected to be elevated almost immediately if Khamenei died. Among those said to be in contention were Khamenei’s own son—a choice the Supreme Leader himself opposed—and a respected reformist cleric, Hassan Khomeini. With Khamenei having survived the war, succession again became a problem for another day; at 86, and reportedly still receiving cancer treatment, the question may yet resolve itself soon enough.

The War That Stayed in the Air

One thing did not happen across nearly two weeks of undeclared war: a ground battle. Aside from the sabotage and assassinations run by Israeli intelligence, Iranian and Israeli fighters are not known to have crossed paths on the ground at any point. Iran took precautions against potential Israeli commando raids, sealing off the deeply buried Fordo site to deny access to special forces, and worked—with limited success—to identify Israeli operatives inside the country.

Internally, officials repeatedly cut or slowed internet service, threw up security checkpoints, and hunted for Mossad collaborators. Hundreds were arrested nationwide, including many accused of sharing pro-Israel content online and others accused of plotting attacks on Israel’s behalf. But Israeli and Iranian soldiers never faced off, their tanks and artillery never exchanged fire, and the states caught in between—particularly Iraq and Syria—were spared a land war.

Equally notable was the absence of Iran’s international allies. Its proxy forces in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere chose not to take part, with only very limited exceptions. Nor did Russia, China, or North Korea—three states observed strengthening ties with Iran—come to the regime’s aid. None judged intervention to be in its interest.

For the proxies, joining would have invited intense Israeli reprisals while doing little to improve Iran’s position. For Russia and China, direct intervention was neither worth the resources nor aligned with their interests. Iran was left to weather Israel’s assault alone—and by every outward indicator, it was Israel that got the better of the twelve-day exchange.

Enter the Americans: Operation Midnight Hammer

By the end of the first week, the question of American military involvement loomed largest of all. The United States is not only Israel’s chief backer; it is the only one of Israel’s allies that possesses the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-buster with a 5,000-pound conventional warhead built to burrow deep into reinforced concrete before detonating. America is the only state to field that weapon, and the only one with the aircraft to deliver it—the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. So for Israel, bringing America in meant access to specific hardware for a specific purpose: the destruction of Fordo, the enrichment facility most vital to Iran’s program.

In the days before the strike, Washington—and Trump personally—fueled a highly visible game of will-he-or-won’t-he. The US moved nonessential personnel out of the region, issued travel warnings, and repositioned military assets near Iran, shifting more than thirty air-to-air refueling tankers to Europe. Trump hinted on social media that a strike could come, then said he was not yet convinced and would take up to two weeks to decide—a deadline that implied Iran could breathe easy for a few days.

In hindsight, that statement was part of a larger head-fake. Hours before the strike, the US sent several B-2s flying across the Pacific toward Guam with their transponders on, making their movement highly visible, while a larger B-2 force readied the actual mission, already agreed days in advance. Iran suspected an attack was coming eventually—indicating it had moved nuclear material out of Fordo and Natanz—but did not anticipate the timing.

The airstrikes came on June 22, using seven B-2 bombers and a single nuclear-powered submarine, believed in retrospect to have been the USS Georgia. Dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, the raid involved roughly 125 aircraft in total, with the B-2s escorted by advanced fighters, refueled in midair multiple times, and supported by intelligence planes. The bombers flew nonstop from the American heartland—about thirty-seven hours in the air, with B-2 crews relying on a small onboard bathroom and galley despite a cramped cockpit.

Six bombers targeted Fordo, the seventh targeted Natanz, and the submarine launched thirty Tomahawk cruise missiles at Natanz and a second site at Isfahan. It was the single largest stealth-bomber strike in history and the second-longest-duration B-2 mission ever flown.

Inside the Strike: Double-Tap Bunker-Busters

At Fordo, the B-2s dropped twelve GBU-57s. As satellite imagery later confirmed, those weapons struck and burrowed into the mountain above Fordo without detonating, dropped in pairs in so-called “double-tap” strikes designed to overcome the limits of even the most powerful bunker-buster. In a double-tap, a first bomb hits and burrows as far as it can before detonating, even though its target remains too well-insulated for a single weapon to reach.

Then, using fine precision guidance, a second bomb drops through the same entry chasm the first created, traveling down through rock or reinforced concrete already loosened by the first blast to explode deeper, on target. Satellite imagery from Fordo showed only six entry points despite twelve bombs—suggesting the double-tap worked exactly as intended in all six attempts.

Elsewhere, the remaining B-2 dropped its pair of bunker-busters on Natanz, reportedly with their intended effect, while Tomahawks devastated what was left of Natanz’s surface facilities and much of Isfahan’s. A large underground complex at Isfahan was not substantively damaged, for unclear reasons; the absence of a bunker-buster attempt there indicated either that it was not a US target of interest or that even a double-tap was not expected to reach it. While the B-2s were over Iran, fourth-generation US fighters offered their un-stealthy airframes as decoys for any surviving Iranian defenses, while fifth-generation stealth fighters prowled unseen for enemy aircraft or radar. No threats materialized, and every aircraft returned safely to base.

The strike’s actual effect became the subject of considerable debate. Iran reported no casualties, since the targeted facilities had been evacuated, but the real question was the extent of the damage. The Trump administration was not pleased when a classified intelligence report leaked, indicating the strikes had not achieved the full destruction Trump had claimed.

According to those assessments, Fordo and Isfahan sustained serious damage but were not taken out of commission, and the damage might only have set Iran’s program back by months—far from the “completely and fully obliterated” facilities Trump described. The White House rejected the leaked assessment outright, insisting the facilities were destroyed in their entirety, and later claimed new evidence supported Trump’s account, a claim received with understandable skepticism.

A Ceasefire in Staccato

After America’s strikes, the question was whether Iran would deliver on its promise of severe retaliation. Iran had made clear that if the United States joined the air campaign, American installations, assets, and citizens would be fair targets. It took only a day to make good: hours after the US ordered a shelter-in-place for personnel in Qatar, fourteen Iranian short- and medium-range ballistic missiles bore down on the Al-Udeid airbase. Thirteen were intercepted by US-made PATRIOT systems, while the last was allowed to crash where it was judged incapable of causing meaningful harm.

Far from a serious reprisal, the strike was a carefully managed affair that Iran had warned both the United States and Qatar about well in advance. Iranian state media hyped the attack at home, claiming to have devastated the base, but every detail was manicured to ensure near-zero risk of escalation. The base had been mostly vacated days earlier; the interceptors were handled by teams who had spent hours preparing for an attack everyone knew was coming.

Trump acknowledged the advance warning, and having struck the nuclear facilities it intended to, the United States made clear that Iran’s toothless counterattack would not lead to further hostilities. The worst fears of global experts—an attack on the Strait of Hormuz, a sprint to bomb-grade uranium, a major strike on the US—had all been avoided.

Once de-escalation began rolling, the United States refused to let the inertia of war set in. In a move profoundly uncharacteristic for a country that had only just been attacked, Trump called publicly for a ceasefire just hours after the Al-Udeid strike. He announced it was time to discuss peace, then declared via social media—without public confirmation from either side—that Israel and Iran had agreed to a total ceasefire, set to activate within six hours.

The announcement met bemused skepticism at first, given the lack of validation from either capital and a strange framing that seemed to give Israel a full twelve hours to strike however it wanted while Iran could not retaliate. Then Iranian officials indicated there really would be a ceasefire, and reports from Israeli sources confirmed agreement from Jerusalem’s side.

The Chaotic Final Hours

What followed over the next seven hours was near-total chaos, yet the ceasefire somehow held. First, Israel intensified its airstrikes in what appears to have been a rush to land as many last blows as possible before the deadline. Then came confusion over when the deadline actually was, with a consensus briefly forming that it would start three hours early.

When that hazy new deadline passed, Iran launched no fewer than six small waves of ballistic missiles, striking a residential building and killing four civilians—an act that seemed almost certain to doom the truce before anyone could agree it had begun. Worse, Iran’s last wave appeared to come after the original deadline Trump had set, and Israel responded by striking an Iranian radar installation in a limited retaliation.

Despite violations on both sides, the ceasefire held. According to sources in Washington, it took a last-minute phone call from Trump to Netanyahu to prevent a larger Israeli retaliation for Iran’s final missile strikes. Trump returned to social media with an all-caps warning to Jerusalem: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS.

IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Speaking to the press on the morning of June 24 as he left for a NATO summit, Trump said of the effort: “I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran either.

We basically have two countries that have been fighting for so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, you understand that?”

After what Israeli and American sources described as uncharacteristically strong pressure from Washington, Netanyahu chose not to pursue further strikes. From that point there were no further attacks by either side. Each nation has indicated it considers the war over, and none has shown signs of re-engagement. A series of drone strikes in Iraq during the final hours of fighting were not tied to Iran, and Iran has not been held responsible for any actions by its proxies in the aftermath.

Counting the Cost

Iran has stated that 610 people were killed and over 4,700 wounded, though the nonprofit Human Rights Activists in Iran put the toll above a thousand, including more than 400 civilians. Israeli officials have said at least 29 people were killed in Israel during the conflict, most of them civilians, with over 140 seriously injured.

In the aftermath, all sides claimed victory and let one another do the same. Israel said it achieved every objective of Operation Rising Lion and more, setting back Iran’s nuclear program as thoroughly as it had hoped. Iran claimed its strikes forced its adversaries to the table on Iranian terms. The United States lauded its military’s performance and emphasized its own role in both destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities—again, a disputed claim—and securing a quick peace.

Yet there is reason to believe each side felt it was nearing a breaking point. For Iran, the destruction was immense, and with so many launchers and air defenses gone, it had little hope of sustaining a long war. It could reveal its remaining missiles in one huge attack, but Israel would still stand and the retaliation would be far worse.

It could march its land army toward Israel, but never reach the border through unprotected airspace with America almost certain to intervene. It could shut the Strait of Hormuz or sprint to weapons-grade uranium, but either could easily have backfired and united the world against the regime. On Israel’s side, unconfirmed reports suggested air-defense interceptors were running low, and a large Iranian strike really could have caused mass devastation.

With Israel rapidly burning through American-made munitions, it was also losing leverage in Washington, where the White House could now dangle withheld arms shipments to secure Netanyahu’s compliance.

It is no surprise that neither side wished to dwell on those inconvenient realities when each could instead raise its fists, declare victory, and claim to have made its enemy tremble. And with both Israel and Iran making clear they would rather avoid total Armageddon, neither seemed to mind the other claiming the win.

A Middle East Re-Made

Whether or not this crisis is finally remembered as the Twelve-Day War, the impact of these twelve days will ripple across history for decades. This exchange was the culmination of decades of cold conflict between Iran and Israel, decades of fear over an Iranian bomb, and decades of diplomacy that had kept the region from this point. There is a reason it was delayed so long—and even after the dust settled, the world got lucky.

No nuclear weapons were used, no new ones developed, no oil blockade crashed the global economy, neither side assassinated the other’s national leader, and the crisis did not metastasize into a wider regional war. Tensions remain high, and it is too early to say the Middle East got away clean—but it got away cleaner than it might have.

The next task for Iran, Israel, and the world is to learn the rules of this new Middle East. Some old rules will be rewritten, others will hold, and neither side will fully grasp the new rules of engagement without trial and error. How Iran and Israel approach each other, how each approaches the world, and how the world approaches them will only be revealed in time.

Israel, which it now seems fair to say decisively won, has defeated the proverbial final boss it had been building toward across nearly two years of war in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond. Its campaign against Hamas continues, it is unlikely to be done with the Houthis soon, and Iran may threaten again in the future—but Israel has proven that none of the Middle Eastern forces willing to challenge it can stand up in a direct fight. That may finally open the door to the normalization that arguably set the whole thing in motion, letting Israel integrate with the region’s richest states.

Or it may do the opposite, if popular animosity toward Israel only grows after it bested a major regional power. Just as uncertain is the future of Benjamin Netanyahu—a man whose alleged crimes might be forgiven by a public that sees him as the slayer of the Iranian dragon, or might earn no such grace.

The Unsettled Nuclear Question and Iran’s Reconstruction

For the United States and Israel alike, the nuclear question lingers. Both have decided, for now, that enough is enough—but what if America’s early damage assessments are right, and Iran’s program was set back only months? Nuclear material and centrifuges are believed to remain in circulation, hidden or barricaded where they might be accessed before long.

The two nations may have to repeat the entire campaign before the year is out, and both Netanyahu and especially Trump risk paying a political price for declaring “Mission Accomplished” too soon. Then again, Trump also has the chance to re-engage Iran on far more favorable terms, with circumstances ideal for extracting major concessions—and perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize he appears to crave.

Iran has been seriously degraded but not defeated. Even if its nuclear program can be restored, its military is another matter: it must rebuild its air defenses, its missile-launch capability, and its Axis of Resistance from the ground up—if it chooses to at all. Iran was unusual in modern geopolitics for its intense focus on a proxy network and its reliance on missiles and drones, where most states simply build a strong conventional military.

The crush of Western sanctions forced that choice, but it did not have to be answered with ballistic missiles and foreign paramilitaries. Iran might rebuild in a new way, or its faltering economy might not sustain rearmament at all. There are many paths on which Iran never returns to its former potency.

Reconstruction will be made harder still by a tangle of domestic factors. It will be long and expensive, and Iran must somehow stay economically viable. The Trump administration seems eager to offer lifelines, but those would tie Iran to Western financial interests in ways that make pursuing its larger ambitions riskier.

The regime already faces strong internal opposition; growing too cozy with the West after such a beating could cost it the support of its hardliners, and in that world the Iranian people could bring about the very regime change Israel and the United States declined to force. With the military leadership gutted and the Supreme Leader contemplating succession, every personnel decision must now account for Israeli intelligence. How much does Tehran want to bet that Israel has not ensured its own cultivated assets, informants, and secret supporters are precisely the figures now rising to assume command?

The Trumpian Olive Branch

It does appear Iran may receive an olive branch from the West, particularly the United States. The second-term geopolitics of Donald Trump can be summed up by the reasonable assumption that world leaders, whoever they are, would rather get rich than get shot at. Trump has signaled a similar approach to Iran, emphasizing its potential to sell oil to global markets again and highlighting its historical status as a leader in trade. In that framing, an Iran that re-integrates peacefully into the global economy would both reap financial rewards and grow more reluctant to risk them through future violence.

Whether Iran responds to such economic persuasion remains to be seen. But it is worth noting that the very change that drove Iran’s proxies to provoke the last few years of conflict was the prospect of Israel and Saudi Arabia opening their economies to each other while Iran and Saudi Arabia weighed doing the same. If Iran’s own proxies feared, years ago, that economic integration could rewrite regional relations, then they may have been on to something—and economic cooperation really could lead to strategic realignment.

That is an uncharacteristically optimistic note, and no matter what possibilities seem to be on the horizon, only history will reveal what comes true. For now, the world is back to the grand tectonic shifts of global geopolitics: Israel consolidating its power, Iran beginning to reconstitute its forces, and America walking away with its arms raised in victory. When that situation evolves—and when the next cycle of upheaval inevitably arrives—WarFronts will return to it.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the Israel-Iran war of 2025 take place?

The war ran from June 13 to June 25, 2025. Israel opened the conflict with Operation Rising Lion on June 13, the United States struck Iranian nuclear sites with Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, Iran retaliated against the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar on June 23, and a ceasefire took hold by the morning of June 25, after roughly twelve days of fighting that earned the conflict the name the Twelve-Day War.

What was Operation Rising Lion and how did it work?

Operation Rising Lion was Israel’s opening campaign, a coordinated mix of airstrikes and Mossad sabotage aimed at incapacitating Iran’s nuclear facilities and military command-and-control. It combined waves of F-35, F-16, and F-15 strikes with a years-long covert operation that smuggled explosive drones and Spike missiles into Iran, destroyed air defenses from within, and assassinated senior commanders—including the heads of Iran’s military and the IRGC—plus more than a dozen nuclear scientists. Israel’s first five waves hit roughly 100 aerial targets on the opening day alone.

Why did the United States strike Iran’s nuclear sites and what was the method?

The United States joined because it alone possessed the means to destroy Fordo, Iran’s most important enrichment facility, buried too deep for any other Western weapon to reach. Only America fields the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator and the B-2 Spirit bomber needed to deliver it. On June 22, seven B-2s dropped twelve GBU-57s on Fordo in double-tap strikes—where a first bomb burrows in and a second follows through the same opening to detonate deeper—with additional Tomahawk missiles hitting Natanz and Isfahan.

How did Iran retaliate against the United States, and why was it so limited?

Iran struck the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar on June 23 with fourteen ballistic missiles; thirteen were intercepted by PATRIOT systems and one was allowed to crash harmlessly. Iran had warned both Washington and Qatar in advance and the base had been evacuated. The muted response reflected Iran’s shattered command-and-control: so many missile launchers, commanders, and communications networks had been destroyed by Israel that Iran could not assemble the kind of overwhelming barrage it had planned.

What were the human and nuclear costs of the Twelve-Day War?

Iran reported 610 killed and over 4,700 wounded, while a human-rights organization put the toll above a thousand including more than 400 civilians; at least 29 people were killed in Israel, most in the earliest days of retaliation. The nuclear accounting remained contested: the Trump administration claimed Iran’s facilities were completely obliterated, but a leaked intelligence assessment indicated Fordo and Isfahan sustained serious damage yet were not fully destroyed, suggesting Iran’s program may have been set back only months rather than years.