Israeli Officials Stress Readiness for Lone Strike on Iran

NYTimes.com — With Chuck Hagel scheduled to begin his first visit to Israel as secretary of defense on Sunday, Israeli defense and military officials issued explicit warnings this week that Israel was prepared and had the capability to carry out a lone military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also spoke of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat in an interview with the BBC broadcast on Thursday. Israel has “different vulnerabilities and different capabilities” than the United States,” he said. “We have to make our own calculations, when we lose the capacity to defend ourselves by ourselves.”

Israeli officials have been expressing growing frustration with what they view as ineffective international efforts to halt what Israel and the West see as an Iranian quest for nuclear weapons. Despite economic sanctions and rounds of diplomatic talks, the officials say, the Iranian centrifuges continue to spin.

Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, intelligence and international relations, said in an interview that Iran was abusing the diplomatic process to further its uranium enrichment program and that it was “high time” for the international community to issue Iran “a deadline or a timetable, or even a military threat.”

Iran, according to Mr. Steinitz, is about halfway to reaching the “red line” that Mr. Netanyahu drew on a cartoon-like diagram of a bomb before the United Nations last fall, representing the amount of medium-enriched uranium Iran would need to build a bomb. Iran has denied that it intends to build a nuclear weapon and has argued that it needs the enriched uranium for energy and medical uses.

The chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, on Thursday dismissed Israel’s threats as bluster that should not be taken seriously. Speaking on the sidelines of the Army Day parade in Tehran, he added that the United States, deterred by Iran’s military might, would not enter into war with Iran, according to the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency.

Though Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have continuously emphasized Israel’s right to defend itself by its own means, talk of possible action has been rare in recent months. Israel, during this time, has sought to lower tensions with the United States over Israel’s calls for red lines and in the face of vehement American opposition to an uncoordinated Israeli strike.

Israel’s former defense minister Ehud Barak quietly dropped his aggressive stance, focusing instead on the need for cooperation with Washington. President Shimon Peres spoke out openly against the idea of a lone Israeli strike, saying that the limited damage that Israel could inflict meant that it had to “proceed together with America.”

Secretary of State John Kerry sought to reassure the Israelis during a visit this month, pledging that the United States would stand with Israel against the Iranian threat “and as the president has said many times, he doesn’t bluff.”

Israel’s new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said in a speech marking Israel’s Independence Day on Tuesday that Israel should not lead the campaign against Iran, a role better left to the United States and the West. But he added that Israel could be the first target of a nuclear Iran, and that Israel “should prepare for the possibility that it will have to defend itself by its own means.”

Mr. Yaalon, a former military chief of staff who served in the last government as the minister of strategic affairs, is said by officials and experts to have been generally cautious on Iran. But Amos Yadlin, the former military intelligence chief who now directs the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, wrote of Mr. Yaalon in an article last month, “The defense minister is known to believe