For years, my perspective was unambiguous. I wrote columns, I argued with friends, and I viewed the world through a lens in which Israeli military action was the primary driver of instability in the Middle East. When the news broke of the strikes on Iran, my narrative was already written. I saw the reports of targeted hospitals, and my blood ran cold. I read about the 71 dead at Evin Prison and saw not a surgical strike, but a massacre. I listened to President Trump’s statements and concluded, alongside many of my colleagues, that this was Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cynical gambit for political survival. The constant, heartbreaking images from Gaza served as the emotional backdrop to it all, cementing a simple, powerful truth in my mind: Israel’s claims to a moral high ground were utterly bankrupt.

I believed this. I argued it. I saw Israel’s official justifications as little more than transparent propaganda, and the counter-narratives as prima facie evidence of war crimes. My certainty was absolute. And then, it shattered.

It didn’t happen in a briefing room or through a press release. It began with a late-night message from an old contact, a veteran intelligence analyst I’ve known for two decades—a man deeply cynical of politicians of every stripe. He didn’t send me talking points. He sent me a single, unadorned satellite image with a simple question: “What is a military-grade telemetry antenna doing on the roof of a Red Crescent clinic?”

That one question was a crack in the foundation of my certainty. It didn't excuse the outcome, but it complicated the narrative. It was the beginning of a deeply uncomfortable journey, one that forced me to revisit every single one of my firmly held convictions about this conflict, and to confront the chasm between the story being told and the evidence I was now seeing.

My first pillar of outrage was the reported attack on seven medical centers. I had seen the list of names from Middle East Eye; the stories of doctors and nurses killed were emotionally devastating and, to me, irrefutable proof of reckless disregard for human life. The phrase “war crime” was not one I used lightly, but it felt appropriate here. But that first satellite image led to others. I was shown classified but verifiable intelligence—signal intercepts, thermal imaging, and source reports—that painted a horrifyingly different picture. These facilities were not merely hospitals; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had systematically embedded command-and-control hubs, munitions storage, and communication nodes within them. The clinic with the antenna on its roof was a key node for coordinating drone attacks. Another hospital’s basement was being used to store components for advanced missile guidance systems. The tragedy of dead medical staff was no less real, but the culpability, I was forced to admit, was more complex. The war crime wasn't the strike itself, but the Iranian regime’s monstrous decision to use its most vulnerable citizens as human shields, turning places of healing into legitimate military targets under the laws of armed conflict. My outrage remained, but its target began to shift.

Then there was Evin Prison. The number—71 dead—was catastrophic. The victims included staff and even family members visiting. It seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of Israel’s “surgical precision” claim. But as I dug deeper, past the headlines, I learned that the strike was not on the prison complex as a whole. It was aimed at a newly constructed, heavily fortified command bunker built within the prison’s administrative wing—a primary command post for the IRGC’s external operations. The regime that imprisons dissidents for speaking their minds had no qualms about housing its top military commanders among them, knowing the world would see a prison, not a headquarters. I had to ask myself a sickening question: Who puts a military command center in a prison? The answer is a regime that holds not just its enemies, but its own people, in total contempt.

Perhaps the most compelling and cynical narrative was that this was “Bibi’s War,” a desperate act to cling to power. It made perfect sense on the surface. But the intelligence timeline I was eventually shown stripped that argument of its power. The phrase “point of no return,” which I had dismissed as a PR slogan, was, in fact, the consensus assessment of multiple Western intelligence agencies regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Covert enrichment had accelerated past every red line. Diplomatic channels were being used by Tehran as a smokescreen to buy time. The choice was no longer between action and diplomacy, but between a limited, preventative strike now or confronting a nuclear-armed, apocalyptic regime later. Israel acted at the eleventh hour, not as a political gambit, but as a last resort against an imminent, existential threat—a threat not just to Israel, but to the entire world. The political drama I had focused on was a sideshow; the real story was the ticking clock I had refused to hear.

This new understanding forced me to re-evaluate the powerful images that had shaped my worldview. The state funerals, with their seas of mourners, had seemed to be definitive proof that Israel’s action had unified the Iranian nation against it. It directly refuted the idea that this was a “favor” to the Iranian people. But I started looking closer, remembering similar scenes from North Korea or Soviet Russia. How many in that crowd were coerced to be there? How many were mourning a commander, and how many were mourning the son or daughter they lost in a protest crushed by that same commander’s forces? A world without the IRGC is, undeniably, a better world, and that truth is felt most acutely by the millions of Iranians who live under its thumb, whose grief is silent and whose funerals are not broadcast on state TV. The operation was not an attack on the people of Iran; it was an attack on their jailers.

This has not been an easy journey. Acknowledging the necessity of Israel’s actions does not erase the human cost, nor does it make me an apologist. The world is a complex and often tragic place. But I was wrong because I had chosen a simple, comfortable narrative over a complex and terrifying reality. I had allowed my justified horror at the suffering in Gaza to become a filter that blinded me to the far greater catastrophe that a nuclear-armed Iran would unleash upon the region and the world. I had mistaken the cynical theatrics of a murderous regime for the authentic voice of its people.

My view has changed not because I have abandoned my morals, but because I have been forced to apply them to a new, more difficult set of facts. Israel, in a single, reluctant act of self-preservation, did not drag the world into a new war. It may have just prevented a much larger, much more terrible one. It is a disquieting thought, and one I will continue to grapple with. But I can no longer, in good conscience, cling to the certainty of a narrative I now know to be profoundly, and dangerously, untrue.