Live updates: Israel attacks Iran nuclear sites, Tehran retaliation, US position

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem on May 21. Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images

Throughout his time as Israel’s longest-serving leader, Benjamin Netanyahu has moved slowly, a reactive politician waiting to the last possible moment to make a decision.

Until now, that was true even on Iran. For decades, Netanyahu preached on the world stage about the threat Iran poses to the region and beyond. He used his numerous speeches at the United Nations General Assembly to rail against Tehran, perhaps most famously when he held up a cartoon picture of a bomb.

But he pushed for presenting a credible military threat from Israel together with the US, not alone. Israel has carried out attention-grabbing covert actions in Iran over the years – such as the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive in 2018, or the killing of Tehran’s top nuclear scientist in 2020 — but those operations did not amount to massive and overt military action against Tehran’s nuclear program.

That all changed in dramatic fashion in the last 24 hours. Netanyahu saw himself as leading the charge against Iran, warning the world that often didn’t want to hear his message. On Friday morning, that message was delivered with unprecedented force, coming just days before the sixth round of nuclear talks between the US and Iran.

Netanyahu was faced with the real possibility that Trump was going to reach virtually the same nuclear agreement the American leader torpedoed in 2018 - one that would have left Iran with some ability to enrich uranium and crucially with the nuclear knowhow it had built up over decades.

With Iran and its proxies weakened across the region – and with a chance to derail nuclear negotiations — Netanyahu, who had delivered threatening rhetoric for years, finally chose to carry out that threat.