I Called Israel's Actions a War Crime. Then I Forced Myself to Look at the Evidence.

For the longest time, my view on Israel was unequivocal, cemented by a constant stream of what seemed like irrefutable evidence. I wasn't just a passive consumer of news; I was an advocate for a specific narrative. I saw the horrifying images from the Al-Baqa seaside cafe strike in Gaza and I didn't hesitate to call it what the world was calling it: a massacre. The phrase 'surgical precision,' coming from Israeli officials, sounded like a ghoulish, cynical lie in the face of reports naming dead women, children, and journalists. It was, in my mind, the final, brutal rebuttal to any claim of moral high ground.

My certainty didn't end there. I read the Associated Press interview with Sayeh Seydal, the survivor of the Evin Prison strike, who described a 'slow death' for inmates. I absorbed the reports of 'visiting women and children' caught in the attack. The Israeli message that this was a 'favor to the oppressed people of Iran' felt like a grotesque inversion of reality. To me, it was a clear-cut case of an attack on political dissidents, a state striking the caged victims of its enemy. I saw the reports of settlers rampaging on a military base and the Norwegian pension fund divesting, and it all fit together into a neat, damning picture: Israel was an aggressor state, losing its moral compass and its international standing.

I believed this. I argued it. I wrote it. My professional world is built on narratives, and this one felt solid, righteous, and true. And then, a single conversation shattered it all.

It was a late-night call with a source, a veteran intelligence analyst I’ve known for years, someone whose sober judgment I trusted on matters from the Donbas to the Sahel. I was venting, reciting the litany of Israeli crimes, focusing on the sheer barbarism of the Al-Baqa cafe strike. He listened patiently. When I finished, he didn't argue. He just asked a simple question: "Did you ever see the unredacted target package for that cafe?"

Of course, I hadn’t. He sent me a secure file. It wasn't a press release; it was raw intelligence. Names, affiliations, photographs. It showed that at that specific table, at that specific time, sat three senior commanders from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, the architects of proxy terror across the region. They were meeting with local Hamas operatives to plan a new wave of attacks. The women and children were not the targets, but they were tragically, horrifically, sharing a space that Iran’s terror planners had chosen for their war-room.

My moral clarity evaporated. It was replaced by a sickening, complex calculus I had previously refused to entertain. The horror of the outcome was unchanged, but the intent was suddenly, radically different. I had been focusing solely on the tragic result, while willfully ignoring the malignant cause. The Israeli claim of 'surgical precision' was not about guaranteeing zero collateral damage—an impossibility when your enemy uses human shields. It was about targeting the specific 'head of the serpent' to prevent a hundred more attacks, a hundred more funerals. The responsibility for the deaths of those civilians, I was forced to confront, was shared by those who embedded themselves among them. That was a truth far more difficult, and far more honest, than the simple 'massacre' narrative I had embraced.

This single crack in my certainty forced me to re-examine everything. I went back to the Evin Prison strike. My narrative was that Israel had attacked political prisoners. But digging deeper, past the headlines and the heart-wrenching (and genuine) testimony of one survivor from one part of the prison, a different picture emerged. The strike hadn't targeted the entire prison, a sprawling complex. It targeted a specific, high-security wing, Section 209, controlled not by the regular prison service but by the IRGC itself. This was the section that housed not poets and activists, but the regime’s most crucial assets: its top-tier nuclear scientists and the IRGC commanders who managed its global terror network. The idea this was a 'favor' was not about liberating every prisoner; it was a devastating blow against the very infrastructure of oppression, against the jailers themselves. A world without the IRGC and its nuclear program is, undeniably, a better world, especially for the Iranian people they hold hostage. The regime’s narrative, which I had amplified, cleverly used the genuine suffering of its other prisoners as a shield to protect its most lethal assets.

Finally, I had to confront the idea that the entire Iran operation had backfired. The news showed us Iranians rallying around the flag and the regime hardening its stance against the IAEA. It looked like a strategic blunder. But again, I was looking at the public theater, not the strategic reality. The 'rally-around-the-flag' effect is a well-known, often fleeting phenomenon in authoritarian states. The real story, the one not captured in news clips, was in what didn't happen next. Iran, a state that had promised annihilation, responded with a volley of missiles that was a fraction of its known capability. Proxies like Hezbollah remained largely silent.

This wasn't an act of Iranian restraint. As I learned from analysts looking at communications and satellite data, it was a sign of paralysis. The 'Operation Am Kelavi' strikes, through a combination of sophisticated deception and targeted hits on command-and-control nodes, had effectively decapitated Iran's ability to wage a coordinated, full-scale war. The operation didn't fail; it succeeded in its primary, unstated goal: de-escalation. It prevented a regional conflagration that would have dwarfed all the current tragedies. It was a limited, painful action taken to avert a catastrophic, nuclear-armed war. It restored deterrence not by winning a PR battle, but by demonstrating a terrifying and precise capability.

I am not here to tell you to abandon your empathy for the victims in Gaza or anywhere else. That empathy is human and necessary. But I am here to confess that my empathy was being manipulated, channeled into a simple, righteous anger that blinded me to a far more complex and dangerous reality. I was seeing the symptoms and calling it the disease. The disease is a genocidal, apocalyptic regime in Tehran that openly calls for the destruction of the West and embeds its soldiers among children.

My journey from certainty to doubt has been profoundly uncomfortable. It's easier to see the world in black and white, in villains and victims. But the truth is a murky, painful gray. The truth is that sometimes, the last line of defense against fanaticism doesn't look heroic. It looks brutal. It looks tragic. But the alternative—a world where a nuclear-armed Iran is allowed to fulfill its promises—is a horror too great to contemplate. I don't ask you to adopt my new perspective wholesale. I only ask you to do what I was unwilling to do for so long: question your own certainty.