They're arch-terrorists' Netanyahu invokes old debts to justify new war

It was in Beersheba, about 1,000km and 2,500 years from Babylon, that Benjamin Netanyahu suggested yesterday that the time had come for the Jews to repay their ancient debt to Cyrus the Great and bring liberation to Iran.

- Julian Borger

The Israeli prime minister had just made a tour of Soroka hospital, which a few hours earlier had sustained a direct hit from an Iranian ballistic missile on one of its buildings. It was, for that reason, the scene of an escape which was already being dubbed miraculous by Israel's leaders.

The hospital's director had only just ordered the evacuation from that particular building's upper floors, and the last of the patients had only been moved out hours before the missile struck. If he had not acted, Soroka could well have gone down in history as Israel's worst loss of life since the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu's long grip on power had looked irretrievably broken on that date 20 months ago, as his security forces had been powerless to save lives. But now, two wars on, with over 55,000 more people dead, the prime minister is carrying himself as a man of destiny.

Increasingly confident of fundamentally redrawing the map of the Middle East, he toyed with the idea of regime change in Iran - the leader of a 10-million-strong nation calling on a population almost 10 times bigger to overthrow the clerical regime that has ruled the country since the 1979 revolution.