In a report by i24NEWS on August 12, 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s recent military campaign marked the defeat of what he described as two of the nation’s greatest existential threats.
“We defeated Iran, which came to destroy Israel with atomic bomb, we eliminated two enormous existential dangers,” he said in an exclusive interview, framing the operation as a historic and strategic turning point in the country’s security landscape.
Netanyahu emphasized that the first of these dangers was Iran’s nuclear program, which he claimed had been significantly crippled by a decisive Israeli strike.
According to him, Tehran’s ambition to develop an atomic bomb posed a direct and immediate threat to Israel’s survival, and the mission’s success represented a major blow to those plans. By neutralizing this capability, he argued, Israel not only defended itself but also safeguarded the stability of the entire region.
The second threat, Netanyahu explained, came from the regional network of militant organizations aligned with Iran, most notably Hezbollah and Hamas.
He cited the targeted killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and senior Hamas commanders, including Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif, and the Sinwar brothers, as crucial elements of the broader operation. These eliminations, he said, struck at the core of the leadership structures that had long orchestrated attacks against Israel.
In Netanyahu’s account, the combination of dismantling Iran’s nuclear ambitions and eliminating its most prominent militant allies amounted to a strategic victory that few thought possible.
He portrayed the actions as part of a coordinated, multi-front campaign designed to break the spine of Israel’s most dangerous adversaries in one concentrated effort.
He described the achievement in almost historic terms, suggesting that the operation would be remembered as a defining moment in Israel’s defense strategy.
“This was not just another military action — it was the removal of threats that have loomed over us for years,” he said, underscoring that both dangers were capable of causing catastrophic harm if left unchecked.
Netanyahu also made it clear that he viewed these threats as intertwined. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, he argued, was not an isolated danger but one backed and reinforced by the militant groups it funded, armed, and directed. By striking both simultaneously, Israel, in his view, disrupted an entire axis of hostility aimed at its destruction.
The prime minister credited the success to a blend of intelligence precision, military preparedness, and political resolve. He stressed that such operations require unity of purpose within the government and armed forces, as well as the willingness to take risks that carry both strategic and diplomatic consequences.
In framing the results as the elimination of “existential dangers,” Netanyahu sought to convey that the stakes were nothing less than the survival of the Jewish state.
While acknowledging that challenges remain and adversaries will seek to rebuild, Netanyahu insisted that the blow dealt to Iran and its proxies has fundamentally altered the strategic equation.
“The threats have not disappeared, but their capacity to act decisively against us has been severely weakened,” he noted.
