Iran and Israel played their shadow war, mostly contained to Syria and the Golan Heights/Southern Lebanon for years.
Then after Oct7 Israel threw out the unspoken ‘rules of the game’ and started thwacking Iranian proxy force’s political and military leadership. A new tit-for-tat grew, with Hezbollah and the Houthis responding for Iran.
Israel strikes an Iranian embassy, killing Iranian diplomats and IRGC members. A new escalation.
Iran responds with their extremely telegraphed ‘show of force’ missile/drone attack, doing little damage to Israel, giving the IDF and IAF an easy PR win to shoot down all the Iranian missiles.
Israel quickly escalates again by killing Nasrallah and directly striking Hezbollah, before their ground invasion of Lebanon. Iran responds with a surprise missile attack, using the good missiles this time, and proves they can (and did) strike Israeli military facilities at will.
All of a sudden Israel delays a new escalation, but warns of severe consequences. Now that THAAD is deployed, Netanyahu approves strike plans as recently as last night purportedly.
The “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security” is directly enabling escalation in the region, and has a purported ally dog-walking the global leader. To quote Bill Clinton “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”.