Epic Fury: How Decades of Sabotage and Sunni Realignment Brought War to Iran

When the first missiles fell on Tehran before dawn on February 28, the mask had definitively slipped off in the three decade-old shadow war between Israel and Iran. Operation Epic Fury - a joint American-Israeli assault on missile batteries, command centres and suspected nuclear infrastructure - comes barely eight months after both allies had pounded Iran during ‘Midnight Hammer’ in 2025. As per reports, it has killed more than 700 people (including several Iranian civilians and children) in its opening wave.

Among them was Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who had ruled since 1989. His daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter died alongside him; his wife succumbed to her wounds soon after. Within hours, in fierce retaliatory mode, Iranian missiles were streaking towards key cities in American-aligned Gulf states like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Manama. In Lebanon, Israel widened its campaign against an atrophied Hezbollah, Iran’s chief proxy in the region.

While Iran’s Assembly of Experts moved swiftly to anoint Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as his successor, the immediate question in everybody’s minds has been why now? Why unleash a decapitation strike when nuclear talks, however desultory, were still sputtering on in Geneva between U.S. and Iranian officials?

Israeli authorities have described the strikes as “pre-emptive,” citing renewed nuclear activity after the collapse of talks. American leaders insisted they were forestalling imminent Iranian attacks on US forces.

Structural Rivalry

The deeper explanation lies in the structural rivalry between Israel and Iran that has simmered for more than three decades.

To grasp why ‘Epic Fury’ feels simultaneously shocking and inevitable, one must revisit a warehouse in Tehran. On the night of January 31, 2018, operatives from Mossad slipped into a drab industrial building in the Shirobad district and sliced open dozens of safes.

In one of the agency’s most astonishing operations in its fabled history, documented for the first time in the book ‘Target Tehran’ (2023) by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, Mossad operatives had, by morning, spirited away half a tonne of binders and compact discs which held the entire archive of Iran’s nuclear programme. The archive’s relocation to Shirobad had itself been a measure of paranoia. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the physicist who had steered Iran’s weaponisation research, had overseen the move along with Iran’s defence establishment.

In 2015, under the Obama administration, the United States and five other major powers had concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran after years of arduous negotiations. Following this, Tehran had agreed to cap uranium enrichment, reduce centrifuge numbers and submit to intrusive inspections in exchange for phased relief from UN sanctions imposed by Washington and its European allies.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who was Prime Minister at that time as well, had regarded the JCPOA as a major strategic blunder, while objecting most vehemently to its sunset clauses which stipulated that within ten years certain restrictions would begin to lapse, and by 2030 the core limits would expire, leaving Iran legally free to expand enrichment at industrial scale. More fundamentally, Netanyahu was intensely sceptical of Tehran’s willingness to honour its commitments.

For Netanyahu and then Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, it was clear that evidence would have to be secured to undermine the deal. Iran’s nuclear archive seized in 2018 did just that by proving Iran had systematically deceived the international community. The unveiling of the archive by a gleeful Netanyahu led to President Donald Trump (then in his first term) announcing America’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018.

Nuclear Threshold

Under the Shah, Israel and Iran had enjoyed discreet ties which were upended by the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had denounced Israel as an illegitimate “Little Satan” but had reportedly balked at pursuing nuclear arms even as Saddam Hussein gassed Iranian troops during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

Khomenei’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had proved more flexible. By the mid-1990s procurement trails had led to A. Q. Khan, lionised as the ‘father of Pakistan’s bomb’ who quietly operated the most brazen proliferation network of the nuclear age. From a web of front companies stretching across Dubai, Malaysia and Europe, Khan’s enterprise trafficked centrifuge blueprints, components and technical expertise siphoned from European designs. Iran was among his most consequential clients, acquiring P-1 and later P-2 centrifuge technology that would form the backbone of its enrichment programme. What followed was a ruthless campaign of sabotage and targeted assassinations on Israel’s part.

Between 2010 and 2012, several Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in operations of startling precision in which magnetic bombs attached to cars in Tehran traffic. The campaign reached its grim coda in November 2020 with the killing of Fakhrizadeh himself.

Then, in 2010, the malicious computer worm known as Stuxnet infected centrifuges at Natanz, subtly altering their spin speeds while feeding operators false data. It was the first known cyber-weapon to cause physical industrial damage.

Transformative Diplomacy

Yet Israel’s strategy did not rely solely on malware and explosives. A masterstroke of diplomacy – wherein Israel cultivated otherwise indifferent (or hostile) Sunni Arab Gulf states who felt threatened by a nuclear-armed Shia Iran – saw reordering of the Middle East over the last two decades. This culminated in the Abraham Accords of 2020 in which the Mossad played no mean role in its signing.

For years, many Gulf states had insisted that normalisation with Israel was conditional on progress toward a Palestinian settlement. But a nuclear-threshold Shia Iran, projecting power through proxies from Beirut to Sana’a, unsettled Riyadh and Abu Dhabi far more than the unresolved Palestinian question.

At the same time, Sunni Arab monarchies began to see in Israel not just a security partner but as an economic one, an incubator of technology in a region seeking to outgrow oil.

For Israel, the architect of this outward turn was ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who, under instructions from then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, cultivated ties in Arab capitals where Israel had no embassies and, officially, no friends.

Saudi Arabia, once an implacable Israeli foe, recalibrated as a revolutionary Iran threatened the Sunni order. During the 2006 Lebanon war, Saudi officials castigated Hezbollah rather than Israel for sparking the conflict. Intelligence exchanges among Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt rapidly accelerated.

This clandestine convergence ripened into the Abraham Accords that normalised Israel’s relations with the UAE and Bahrain, later joined by Morocco and Sudan. The accords were underwritten by a shared apprehension that a nuclear-armed Iran would recalibrate the Gulf’s balance irreversibly.

Operation ‘Epic Fury’ is the most violent expression yet of that struggle.

Critics argue that Israel’s relentless campaign against Iran is self-defeating. If Israel, a small and diplomatically isolated state in its early decades, managed to build a nuclear deterrent despite American opposition, they contend that a far larger Iran will inevitably do the same. Others suggest Israel’s own undeclared arsenal paradoxically incentivises proliferation.

For two decades, Iran has been the central preoccupation of Israeli intelligence, particularly the Mossad whose brief it has been to decapitate Tehran’s leadership and prevent the latter’s dash towards the N-bomb.

Israel has repeatedly invoked against Iran the so-called ‘Begin Doctrine’ - the strategic principle that emerged after Menachem Begin authorised the 1981 pre-emptive strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor – which posits that no regional power hostile to Israel must not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons capability, whatever the diplomatic cost.

But Israel itself has never confirmed or denied possessing nuclear weapons. It has declined to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to which Iran is a signatory, and has resisted calls for a regional WMD-free zone.

With Khamenei’s death, the Middle East now stands at an inflection point. It remains uncertain whether Operation Epic Fury can decisively end the nuclear contest between Israel and Iran. What is certain is that the covert war that began decades ago in the shadows has entered its most dangerous act.