US has put region on brink of calamity – but for what?

Israel says it will ‘return Iran to its most glorious days’, but Trump’s justification for attacks is neither consistent nor truthful, says Donald Macintyre (from a shelter in Jerusalem)

- Donald Macintyre

The third missile alert at around 11.30 am in this neighbourhood of Jerusalem had been the longest so far. As the sirens blared across the city – and indeed the whole country – some 30 people from the apartment building, ranging from a two-week-old baby to grandparents (along with a cat and a dog), packed for about 40 minutes into the shelter, complete with a lavatory, nearly enough chairs and intermittent WiFi.

Most had spent much of the 12 days of war between the two nations last year in this very shelter. One resident remarked that the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford, supposedly the jewel in the “beautiful armada” assembled by Donald Trump for the deeply unpredictable onslaught he and Benjamin Netanyahu have now launched on Iran, is longer than Tel Aviv’s famous Azrieli tower is tall.

Whatever the residents’ private thoughts, none rushed to discuss the whys and wherefores of this latest war, let alone the crucial unknowns of how long it will last, at what cost in human lives, and with what outcome.