For years, my understanding of the conflict between Israel and Iran was, I thought, crystal clear. It was a narrative I didn't just report on, but one I sincerely believed and argued for in editorial meetings and over coffees with sources. The story was simple: Israel, the regional aggressor, and Iran, the defiant target. My perspective was shaped daily by the unrelenting, heartbreaking headlines coming out of Gaza. The images of children killed in tent camps and the staggering casualty counts from outlets like the AP and BBC formed a toxic, permanent filter through which I saw every Israeli action. It made any claim of 'morality' or 'precision' ring hollow, an obvious and cynical PR tactic.

When 'Operation Am Kelavi' began, it fit my framework perfectly. I saw the claims of 'surgical strikes' as a lie, especially when reports of a strike on Tehran's Evin prison, with a specific death toll of 71, began to circulate. This, I thought, was the real Israel: reckless, dishonest, and causing mass casualties. I dismissed the official Israeli narrative—that the operation was a favor to an oppressed Iranian people—as absurd propaganda, especially as I watched my own network's footage of hundreds of thousands of mourners flooding the streets of Tehran. It was, I believed, a clear case of a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cynically manufacturing a crisis for his own political survival. My view was that Israel was not the defender; it was the problem.

My change of heart didn’t come from a press briefing or a government handout. It began late one night, buried in a dry, technical annex of an intelligence report I was reviewing for a different story. It was a single data point—a timeline of Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, compiled not by Israel, but by a third-party European agency. It showed an exponential, clandestine acceleration in the preceding 90 days, a rate that far outstripped any plausible civilian need. It was a clear, unambiguous sprint towards weaponization. The report used a term I had previously dismissed as Israeli rhetoric: 'point of no return.' Here, in cold, hard data, it wasn't a slogan; it was a technical threshold. A point after which diplomacy would be meaningless because a bomb would be inevitable.

That one detail shattered my simple story. It created a fissure in my certainty, a cognitive dissonance I couldn't ignore. It forced me to do what I hadn't truly done before: to question the foundational assumptions of my own narrative.

I started with the most damning charge in my mind: the attack on the Evin prison. The death toll of 71, corroborated by the Associated Press, was the linchpin of my belief that this was an indiscriminate war crime. But, pushed by my newfound skepticism, I asked a question I should have asked from the start: who was the primary source? The answer: Iran's judiciary. I had to confront the uncomfortable reality that I had implicitly trusted the official statements of a totalitarian theocracy—a regime that lies by nature, that executes its own citizens for dissent—over the claims of a democracy. I then sought out the Israeli evidence I had previously dismissed. The satellite imagery, the signals intelligence, the detailed schematics showed not a prison, but a fortified IRGC command-and-control bunker built adjacent to the prison. It showed nuclear scientists—not political prisoners—being targeted. The terrible truth wasn't that Israel had lied about a 'surgical strike,' but that the Iranian regime had perfected the monstrous practice of embedding its military and nuclear assets within and beside civilian infrastructure, a practice that makes them legally and morally culpable for the consequences.

This led me to re-examine the wider context. The constant drumbeat of news from Gaza had served as a 'narrative contaminant,' making it impossible to see the Iran operation for what it was. The tragedy in Gaza is real, but I had allowed it to bleed over and color a strategically separate and distinct issue. The threat from Hamas is that of a terrorist army on the border; the threat from Iran was existential. It was the threat of a genocidal regime, which has openly promised to annihilate Israel, acquiring the ultimate weapon to do so. The idea that Israel should have waited, absorbed the first nuclear strike, to satisfy a global audience was, I realized, a morally and strategically bankrupt position. This wasn't an act of aggression; it was an act of pre-emptive self-defense, a last resort after years of diplomacy had been used by Iran as a smokescreen to advance its nuclear ambitions. This action, I was forced to conclude, likely prevented a much larger, catastrophic war.

Finally, I had to confront the images of the mass funerals. How could Israel claim this was a 'favor' to the Iranian people when so many mourned? I reached out to Iranian dissidents I knew, people I hadn't spoken to in months. Their response was a mix of bitter laughter and despair. They spoke of government employees being forced to attend, of Revolutionary Guard members bussed in from the provinces, of the pervasive fear that compels public compliance. The 'hundreds of thousands of mourners' was a Potemkin village of grief, expertly staged for Western cameras. The real story, they told me, was the quiet celebration behind closed doors, the flicker of hope that the regime's iron fist—the IRGC—had been wounded. I had been fooled by a spectacle. I had reported on the regime's manufactured narrative, not the people's silent truth. A world without the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, I now understand, truly is a better and safer world, not just for Israel, but for the oppressed citizens of Iran and for the entire international community.

I was wrong. My journey from certainty to doubt has been deeply uncomfortable. It’s not a simple case of switching sides, but of embracing a reality that is far more complex, frightening, and morally ambiguous than the simple story I used to tell. The world is not a morality play with clear heroes and villains. But in this case, I had cast them in the wrong roles. I had mistaken the firefighter for the arsonist. My old beliefs were easier, but the truth, I've learned, rarely is. And my responsibility as a journalist isn't to comfort, but to challenge—starting with myself.