Here’s a look at everything we know about the potential Israeli military action against Iran, and the events that have brought the countries to this point.

When will the strikes take place?

We don’t know.

During an earlier exchange of airstrikes in April, Israel only waited about five days to respond to a similar Iranian attack.

But various factors may have dictated a longer lead-up to a response this time around, including talks between Israel and the Biden administration, the arrival of a US air defence system and the Jewish holidays. The upcoming US election could also have an impact on Israeli timing.

Two classified US intelligence documents that were leaked last week describe satellite images of Israeli military preparations for a potential strike on Iran, and offer an insight into American concern about those plans. One document described recent exercises that appeared to rehearse elements of a strike, while the second details how Israel is shifting the placement of its missiles and weapons in case Iran responds to another strike. (The FBI said Tuesday that it was investigating the document leak.)

What are the potential Israeli targets?

Analysts say there are several categories of targets. Israel could try to balance its strategic goals after severely weakening Iran’s proxy forces – Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip – with concerns from its allies, particularly the United States, that a new attack could set off a wider regional war.

The Israeli Government has told the Biden administration that it will avoid striking Iran’s nuclear enrichment and oil production sites, two officials said. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that Israel had agreed to focus its attack on military targets in Iran.

Avoiding nuclear or oil infrastructure sites would reduce the likelihood of an all-out war between the two adversaries, amid concerns in Washington over being dragged into a bigger Middle East confrontation with the presidential election less than two weeks away.

What are Israel’s military capabilities?

If Israel wants to use its powerful air force to retaliate, its planes would have to fly long distances. But it has recently shown that it could do so.

In assaults against the Houthis in Yemen at the end of September, Israeli forces flew more than 1600km to attack power plants and shipping infrastructure, using reconnaissance aircraft and dozens of fighter jets that had to be refuelled midflight. An attack on Iran would require similar range.

Iran has much stronger air defences than Lebanon and Yemen, but Israel has showed that it may have an edge.

In April, in retaliation for Iran’s first missile barrage, an Israeli airstrike damaged an S-300 anti-aircraft system near Natanz, a city in central Iran critical to the country’s nuclear weapons programme. Western and Iranian officials said that Israel had deployed aerial drones and at least one missile fired from a warplane in that attack.

That strike showed that Israel could bypass Iran’s defensive systems and paralyse them.

“I think it’s likely they’ll mimic the April operation and try to take out Iran’s early warning systems and air defences to make way for an air attack,” Grant Rumley, a former Pentagon official and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said in an earlier interview. “The question will be how extensive and whether they’ll go into Iranian airspace.”

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, Israel also has other options: Jericho 2 medium-range ballistic missiles that can fly about 2000 miles, and Jericho 3 intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can reach targets more than 6400km away.

What is the US government’s stance?

President Joe Biden said this month that he would not support an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Biden replied in the affirmative last week when asked whether he knew when Israel would strike and what kind of targets it had chosen. He gave no details, but his response implied that the United States and Israel may have reached an agreement on the matter. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a lengthy meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

Some analysts argue that the looming US presidential election makes it harder for the United States to influence and potentially limit any possible Israeli action. They say that the fact that Biden is not seeking a second term could also weaken his hand in terms of influencing Israeli action.

How have Israel and Iran arrived at this point?

For decades, Iran and Israel engaged in what amounted to a secret war. Iran has used proxy forces including Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israeli interests and Israel has assassinated senior Iranian officials and nuclear scientists, as well as staging cyberattacks. That conflict burst into the open this year.

In April, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, attacking the country directly for the first time in retaliation for a strike by Israel on an embassy compound in the Syrian capital, Damascus, that killed three top Iranian commanders. Israel mainly thwarted the Iranian missile barrage using its air defences, assisted by the United States and other allies, and then responded with an attack of its own.

Then, in late July, Israeli jets killed a top commander of the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, in retaliation for a rocket attack that killed at least 12 people. One day later, Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an explosion in Iran’s capital, Tehran.

The Iranian Government and Hezbollah vowed to retaliate but, to the surprise of many, Iran took no immediate action.

When it launched its missile barrage October 1, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it was retaliating for the assassination of Haniyeh and also for the killing in late September of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as for the killing of an Iranian commander.

Days after Nasrallah’s death, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, pummelling Hezbollah, Iran’s most important proxy.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Photographs by: Avishag Shaar-Yashuva and Arash Khamooshi

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Both are true. But more fundamental decisions and problems stand in the way of a trial.

The government wanted to try the men together

The five men were charged together, meaning an issue involving one would dictate the pace of the trial for the others. The lead defendant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is accused of being the mastermind of the plot and proposing it to Osama bin Laden. Two other men are accused of helping some of the hijackers with finances and wire transfers.

For years, prosecutors were devoted to the idea of a one-and-done trial rather than trying the men separately. In 2023, however, a medical panel concluded that one defendant, Ramzi Binalshibh, was not competent to stand, and a judge severed his case.

Now the case has four defendants, each with his own team of lawyers.

Three of them, Mohammed, Mustafa al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash, negotiated an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences. But Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin rescinded it.

Now the judge has to sort out whether Austin’s action was lawful, and whether the four will be tried together.

Torture has dominated the hearings

After the men were captured in Pakistan in 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration held them in secret overseas prisons run by the CIA, where they were tortured.

The United States was trying to find bin Laden and uncover other terrorist plots, and it put interrogating the men ahead of their basic rights.

They were denied access to lawyers, the International Red Cross and US courts while they were held – at times in dungeonlike conditions – and brutally interrogated while held naked, beaten and deprived of sleep. Two were waterboarded.

Pretrial hearings in the early years focused on what information and which witnesses the defence lawyers could question from that programme, and which evidence could be made public. Those questions have not been entirely resolved, but lawyers for both sides have been calling witnesses on a crucial overarching question: are the interrogations of the defendants in 2007, the Government’s best evidence in the case, too tainted by torture to be used at their trial?

President George W. Bush sent the defendants to Guantanamo Bay

The Bush administration chose to put the defendants on trial at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba, which the United States has leased as an offshore facility for more than a century.

The Pentagon built a new national security court there, with military judges presiding and military officers mobilised from around the globe to serve on juries.

The CIA and the Government control the details of the defendants’ first years of detention and their interrogations and keep some of them from the defendants’ lawyers, who obtain sensitive, high-level security clearances to represent them.

The intelligence community has changed the rules repeatedly on how to handle classified information, causing court closures, confusion and delays.

The public listens to the open court on a 40-second audio delay, to prevent state secrets from slipping out. Even after that, censors protecting the interests of both the CIA and the Defence Department redact portions of transcripts of open hearings that they believe the public should not have heard. Both processes have slowed progress.

It’s a commuter court, requiring special flights

Only the defendants live at Guantanamo. For each hearing, the Pentagon charters a plane to fly everyone else, including the judge, to the base. The commuters routinely include prosecutors, defence lawyers, witnesses, stenographers, court security officers and translators – as well as relatives of people who were killed in the September 11 attacks, who watch the proceedings as guests of the prosecution. Journalists are required to commute to the court that way too, but pay their own way.

Travel to Guantanamo requires a special document, something akin to a visa, a government identification card or passport – and a ferry ride across the bay to reach the court complex. Weather can be a hindrance to the flights and the ferry.

Every time they arrive, the travellers must check in at a security zone, which is called Camp Justice. They are issued room keys, often to trailer park housing, and security identification cards and vehicles for those on the government payroll.

Staffing constantly changes at the court and prison

The guards who work at the court and prison are mostly National Guard troops mobilised from civilian life. They serve nine-month stints. The prison commanders change every year. The rules can change with military staff rotations, causing more court delays and other disruptions.

A new commander recently reinstated a rule requiring prison guards to shackle each prisoner by the ankle to the floor of the cells used for legal meetings. The judge ordered the prisoners unshackled at the court compound during weeks of pretrial hearings, absent emergency circumstances.

The current judge, Colonel Matthew N. McCall, is the fourth military judge to preside in hearings in the case at Guantánamo Bay. But at least seven have been assigned to it since arraignment in 2012, because, unlike in federal court, military judges typically serve stints on the bench and then move on to other legal assignments. Some have served as caretaker judges during the suspension of hearings. One stepped down after discovering he had conflicts of interest.

McCall will retire before any trial begins next year. The next judge will have to review more than 50,000 pages of transcripts, some of them classified, and tens of thousands of pages of court filings.

Floods and noise contribute to delays

The courthouse facilities have been built in stages since 2007 on a cracked tarmac on an abandoned airfield. When it rains, the court compound floods, and noise on the metal roof of the courtroom has drowned out the proceedings, forcing delays. Mould and other infestations are a constant concern in the sticky Caribbean climate.

Hurricanes, communications failures and the coronavirus have also forced cancellations and postponements.

One morning this summer, the court’s water, phone lines and classified computer network all went down. The air conditioning malfunctioned, and mould could be seen spreading across a vent in a new jumbo trailer containing a media centre. By afternoon, residents on the base were told to boil tap water they wanted to consume because of low line pressure possibly contaminating the water supply. Court was then cancelled for the next two days because the lead defendant had the coronavirus.

Health care is a constant concern

Guantánamo has limited health care, and anyone with a serious issue must be medically evacuated. In 2019, a hearing abruptly ended when doctors at the base’s hospital discovered that the judge’s retina was detaching; he was taken by medevac to Miami.

Progress was often derailed for years by outbursts by one defendant, Binalshibh, who was severed from the case in 2023. He is still technically charged, but a military medical panel ruled him unfit to face trial because of his post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments, which his lawyers say are triggered by memories of mistreatment in CIA custody.

The coronavirus forced suspensions

All hearings were suspended for about 500 days from the start of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. They did not effectively restart until September 2023 for two reasons. Experts appointed by the judge were assessing Binalshibh’s capacity to participate in his defence. And during the same period, in March 2022, prosecutors initiated plea talks with the defendants, prompting the judge to suspend the hearings to allow talks to take place in the courtroom.

It’s a capital case

Capital cases take longer to prepare because, if the defendants are convicted, a mini-trial follows to decide whether a death sentence is appropriate. Factors such as a defendant’s background, upbringing and conditions of custody all figure into trial preparation.

Defence lawyers have pursued the most graphic details of the prisoners’ time in CIA custody to present to a jury if the case reaches sentencing. The defence also continues to seek testimony from CIA employees; the Government has declared that their identities are protected by a national security privilege.

“All we have to do is persuade one juror that one piece of information is sufficient for them to vote for life,” Rita Radostitz, a defence lawyer, told the judge on September 11, 2019.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Carol Rosenberg

Photographs by: Marisa Schwartz Taylor

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES