The rumors weren’t rumors. They typically aren’t when the subject’s IDF war plans. Israel doesn’t usually bluff.

In a brazen, albeit not entirely surprising, move, Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government struck Iran early Friday local time, raising the regional temperature anew and likely derailing Donald Trump’s fraught efforts to ink a new nuclear deal with the theocracy.

Late last month, reports indicated Israel was considering strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities despite the Trump administration’s halting progress towards an accord that would’ve found the regime agreeing to enrichment limits in exchange for sanctions relief.

Those talks fell apart in recent days as Tehran chafed at the notion it should give up its right to enrichment altogether. On Thursday, the situation took a decisive turn for the worst when Tehran, in response to a rebuke from the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced the existence of a third enrichment facility. And threatened to activate it.

That was apparently the last straw for what it’s probably fair to call the most hawkish Israeli government in history. The IDF’s finger was already on the trigger amid report after report indicating Iran was rapidly advancing its nuclear program even as it entertained diplomatic overtures from Trump.

According to an Israeli military official who spoke to reporters Friday, Mossad believed Iran was approaching “the point of no return” on a clandestine initiative to build a bomb. We’ve heard that from Israel before. That’s not to say I doubt the assessment. But it’s always important to consider the source.

This may be the end for Khamenei. He lost nearly everything last year when Israel ran roughshod over Hezbollah, decimating the group’s leadership ranks in an astonishingly efficient campaign that killed both Hassan Nasrallah and his cousin and heir. Two months later, Tehran lost its client state in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad was finally overthrown.

When you tally up Hamas’s dead, Hezbollah’s military demise, the fall of Damascus to Sunni extremists and the very long list of assassinated Quds commanders and associates, Khamenei’s losses are nothing short of staggering. There’s nothing left of the late Qassem Soleimani’s “Axis of Resistance.”

Khamenei braved two retaliatory missile volleys against Israel last year (one in April, one in October), but they were both intercepted and widely understood to be face-saving exercises, intended mostly for Khamenei’s domestic audience.

Israel last bombed Iran in late October. Netanyahu spared the nuclear sites and the oil infrastructure in those strikes, but Israel damaged the regime’s air defenses, setting the stage for a run at the big targets later. Later is now, apparently.

Khamenei and the Guards have to respond, and so do the militias in Iraq and the remnants of Hezbollah’s offensive capacity. Needless to say, there are no good options. Tehran’s hopelessly outgunned. They can’t beat Israel’s air defenses, particularly if the US and the UK intervene as they did last year, and God forbid one of the IRGC’s missiles should make it though and kill a few Israelis. That’d be viewed as an intolerable outcome warranting an even more aggressive Israeli air campaign inside Iran.

Note also that Israel’s probably looking for an excuse to do more damage in Lebanon, and now what’s left of Hezbollah’s military wing pretty much has to give them one. It’s not far-fetched (at all) to suggest the IDF will operate in Iraq too given the likelihood of pot shots from Iran’s proxies there. The Houthis will invariably join in, prompting more IDF bombing runs in Yemen, and so on.

To state the obvious: This is very, very dicey, and it’s a bit difficult to understand how the regime in Tehran’s going to emerge intact. Khamenei’s surely in a bunker somewhere, and it sounds like it’ll be a while before he can come out.

That Netanyahu’s doing this while re-escalating in Gaza is a testament to the notion that an Israel beholden to the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir is basically a rogue state. A rogue nuclear state. “Takes one to know one,” Tehran might joke, if it weren’t ablaze.

The Iranian capital wasn’t the only thing on fire Friday. So too were Trump’s plans for regional peace. There’s no love lost between the Sunni powers and Khamenei, but the spectacle of Israeli warplanes bombing Tehran isn’t something that’ll go over especially well with sundry royals and emirs, who’ve had just about enough of Yahweh by now.

On May 21, when CNN suggested Israel was planning strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, I said, “My guess is that Netanyahu’s bluffing.” Then, in the very next sentence, I reminded readers that “the first (and only) rule of Israeli bluffs is that you don’t call them.” This is what I meant.