The skies over Iran haven’t been quiet in days. And if Washington and Jerusalem have anything to say about it, they won’t be anytime soon.
In what President Trump is calling one of the most sweeping military campaigns in modern history, U.S. and Israeli forces have spent the past several days hammering targets across Iran in a coordinated offensive that has reshaped the region’s security landscape almost overnight. The operation — dubbed Operation Epic Fury — has left hundreds of sites destroyed, thousands of casualties in its wake, and at least two American diplomatic missions shuttered. The world is watching, and not everyone likes what they see.
A Campaign Built for Scale
Trump made no attempt to downplay the scope of what’s unfolded. declared the president: “Over the past 36 hours, the United States and its partners have launched Operation Epic Fury, one of the largest, most complex, most overwhelming military offensives the world has ever seen.” That’s a statement that invites scrutiny — but the numbers on the ground are hard to dismiss. Hundreds of Iranian targets were struck within a single 36-hour window, an operational tempo that military analysts say is extraordinary by any measure.
U.S. Central Command has been equally blunt about American involvement. Forces are maintaining air superiority through naval-launched operations, with CENTCOM noting that U.S. forces “control the skies by launching from the sea.” It’s a deliberate message — part military briefing, part warning to Tehran.
Israel Moves Fast, Strikes Deep
The Israeli Air Force, meanwhile, has been operating with a precision that’s drawn attention even from critics. In one of the most dramatic episodes of the conflict, the IAF destroyed six Iranian ballistic missile launchers “just minutes before they were intended to be launched toward” Israel, along with three advanced Iranian air defense systems. Minutes. That’s not a comfortable margin.
Israeli strikes also reached into the heart of Tehran itself — specifically, a sprawling underground military bunker linked to Ayatollah Khamenei. The complex, which reportedly spanned multiple city blocks and included numerous entrances and dedicated meeting rooms for senior regime officials, was described by Israeli officials as a nerve center for hostile operations. “The underground compound was created by the regime as a base for advancing military activities and its extremist ideologies against the State of Israel and the Western world,” the IDF stated. Whether Khamenei was inside at the time has not been confirmed.
The Naval Dimension
It’s not just airstrikes. CENTCOM released footage this week of a strike on what it described as an Iranian drone carrier — roughly the size of a World War II aircraft carrier — that was hit and set ablaze. The statement accompanying the footage was pointed: “U.S. forces aren’t holding back on the mission to sink the entire Iranian Navy. Today, an Iranian drone carrier, roughly the size of a WWII aircraft carrier, was struck and is now on fire.” The Pentagon has confirmed the vessel was part of Iran’s asymmetric naval strategy, designed to deploy swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles across contested waterways.
The Human Cost
How bad is it on the ground? By the latest counts from officials in the affected countries, at least 1,230 people have been killed in Iran, more than 70 in Lebanon, and roughly a dozen in Israel since fighting began. Those numbers are almost certainly undercounts — they always are in the early days of a conflict this chaotic. The civilian toll inside Iran remains difficult to verify independently, given the near-total disruption to communications infrastructure in several targeted cities.
Iran has not absorbed all of this passively. Retaliatory strikes have forced the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait — the second American diplomatic mission to fully halt operations during the conflict — signaling that Tehran still has enough capability to project force beyond its borders, even as its military absorbs devastating blows at home.
Washington Divided, But Holding
Back in Washington, the political fight over this war is very much alive. The House of Representatives voted 212 to 219 to reject a war powers resolution that would have halted Trump’s military operations against Iran — a narrow defeat for the anti-war effort, following a similar rejection in the Senate. The margins are tight enough to suggest genuine unease in Congress, even among members who aren’t prepared to force a formal confrontation with the White House.
Still, the resolution’s failure gives the administration room to keep going. For now, at least, the legal and political architecture supporting Operation Epic Fury remains intact — however uncomfortably.
As John F. Kennedy once observed, “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” Whether anyone in the situation rooms of Washington or Tel Aviv is thinking about that right now is another question entirely.
