If true, this certainly hastens the prophetic timeline:
Iran has what it needs to to build a nuclear bomb in a matter of four to six months, Amos Yadlin, the head of the Institute for National Security Studies, said Monday.
“Iran has completed in the last two years two components that… give it all of the necessary means to manufacture a nuclear weapons as soon as it chooses to do so,” Yadlin, a former Israeli army intelligence chief, told journalists at a presentation of the INSS annual report on Israel’s strategic status.
Yadlin noted, however, that despite the narrow window of opportunity to thwart Iran before it breaks out toward a weaponized nuclear capability, there was still time for diplomatic and/or military action.
An Israeli attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, he assessed, would elicit an Iranian response, but not of a magnitude that would precipitate a regional war.
“It may be that they’ll decide to act in 2013, and then we’ll require Israeli and perhaps also American action,” he said. “If Iran is attacked, there’ll be a military conflagration in the Middle East. But our assessment is that the Middle East won’t be enveloped in all-out war and the Iranians will respond in a calculated, limited fashion.”
Israel will regret its latest "aggression against Syria", a top Iranian official visiting Damascus told reporters on Monday.
"Just like it regretted all its wars... the Zionist entity will regret its aggression against Syria," said National Security Council head Said Jalili, a day after Israel implicitly confirmed it staged an air strike near Damascus last week.
Any actions Iran decides to attempt against Israel are more likely to be carried out indirectly, through terrorists, than through direct military action.
"Just like it regretted all its wars... the Zionist entity will regret its aggression against Syria," said National Security Council head Said Jalili, a day after Israel implicitly confirmed it staged an air strike near Damascus last week.
Any actions Iran decides to attempt against Israel are more likely to be carried out indirectly, through terrorists, than through direct military action.
Iran is intensifying a campaign to destabilize the Middle East by smuggling anti-aircraft weapons to militant allies through its international paramilitary force, according to Leon Panetta, the outgoing US defense secretary.
Israel is reportedly considering launching an air strike against an Iranian listening post near Syria’s border with the Golan Heights, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.
According to the report, based on a single unnamed military source, should Israel launch a new strike against Syria, one of the targets would be a heavily fortified Iranian intelligence station near the town of Daraa, which it places as some seven miles from the border with Israel.
“We know they [the Iranians] are monitoring our army communication, gathering intelligence and trying to log into our military computers,” the unnamed Israeli source told The Sunday Times. “This is a serious problem for our forces.”
Last week, Israeli planes launched a strike against Syria, hitting a weapons convoy headed for Lebanon, according to foreign media reports. Syria’s state news agency reported a “research complex” north of Damascus had been hit, broadcasting images of the damage on Saturday.
Syrian ruler Bashar Assad has ordered the resumption of weapons transfers to the Lebanese Hizballah, DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources report. This was agreed with Iran’s National Security Director Saeed Jalilee, who arrived in Damascus after Israel’s reported air strike last Wednesday, Jan. 30, inter alia, on Syrian trucks preparing to ferry to Lebanon for Hizballah the sophisticated Iran-supplied arms stored at the Jamraya military complex north of Damascus.
The Syrian ruler assured the Iranian official that he would not be deterred by what he called acts of “aggression.” It was up to Syria and Iran to put their heads together to find a safe method of getting the hardware across to Hizballah without exposing it to Israeli attack in truck convoys on the open road.
According to our sources, Israeli military tacticians believe that as winter weather starts clearing up, Syria and Iran will devise crafty methods for outwitting Israel and getting the weapons to Lebanon – for example, disassembling the missiles and launchers and disguising them as non-lethal merchandize. They could then be spirited across from Syria to Lebanon in small packages by the smuggling rings regularly operating on their common border.
In anticipation of such tricks, the Israeli Air Force has in recent days thrown a round-the-clock blanket over the border area. It is constantly monitoring the traffic moving across and is ready to prevent any arms traffic. Without going through any formalities, Israel has thus effectively imposed a no-fly regime over a buffer zone straddling the Syrian-Lebanese border and placed it under the control of its air force.
Israeli officials have been warning for months that the IDF will not allow the transfer of advanced Syrian weapons – including chemical and biological weapons – to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front and Hezbollah.
Israel intends to declare a buffer zone inside the Syrian border to prevent terrorists from getting too close to its territory when the embattled Damascus regime topples, security sources quoted by the AFP news agency said on Sunday.
"There's a plan in the military's northern command for the 'day after'according to which, when Bashar Assad is no longer president of Syria, there's a fear that terror elements will try to approach the fence," the sources told AFP. "So they want to create some sort of buffer zone within Syrian territory, and let everyone know. This is to prevent a situation where terror reaches the fence without us being able to prevent it, by allowing us to see it," the sources explained.
"This will be a buffer zone belonging to Syria. We are not invading Syrian land," the sources said, stressing these were initial plans, and not providing specifics on how
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We have to always remember that the EU, as the revived Roman Empire is still on the rise. We also have to remember that the revived Roman Empire will morph into "10 kings" and this stage of development will give rise to the antichrist. We see much needed perspective in this next link - just as a reminder (video link included below): This is highly prophetic and highly expected:
From Margaret Thatcher's original (now extremely prescient) warning of the European Union's structure creating "insecurity, unemployment, national resentment, and ethnic conflict" to Nigel Farage's recent clarifications on the agonizing direction in which the unelected leadership of the Union are pulling Europe, this brief 3 minute clip draws some significantly eery similarities between the former Soviet Union and the current European Union. Every now and again, a step back to look for context in history is important - as while the Soviet Union was created by armed force, the European Union is being forced by political coercion and economic bullying. Perhaps Churchill summed up best how it should be, "We are with Europe, but not of it; we are linked but not combined; we are interested and associated but not absorbed."
