This is no ordinary war. The world has entered a new age of impunity

On Thursday night, amid reports of an imminent attack on Iran by Israel, an emergency war meeting led by Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' aerospace unit, was held at a military base in Tehran.

- Steve Bloomfield

Hajizadeh and his senior officials had been told not to congregate in the same location, but they ignored the warning, assuming that any attack would be days off.

They were wrong. The bunker was one of 20 sites across Iran bombed by Israel in just 15 minutes. Other military leaders, including Hossein Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards, were killed in their homes. They, too, had been warned to move to safe houses; they, too, ignored the warning. In total, four senior military generals were killed, as well as two nuclear scientists. Radars and air defences were destroyed, while parts of a nuclear enrichment plant were damaged.

The attacks, which have sparked a new regional war, highlighted the vulnerability of the Iranian regime, the intelligence capabilities of Israel, and the impunity with which Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to operate.

Those three factors are at the heart of the new war and underline just how unpredictable the coming weeks and months will be. No one outside the Iranian regime itself knows just how vulnerable its supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his government truly are. It's possible Khamenei himself doesn't even know. A coup, a collapse, an uprising are all on the table.

Israeli intelligence, much maligned in the wake of 7 October when it failed to notice Hamas's war planning, has had far more success in the past year, from the pager attack on Hezbollah to the assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Iran and Lebanon, through to last week's attacks. Not only did they know where Iran's nuclear scientists and senior commanders would be, they were also aware of just how much progress the country was making with its nuclear programme.