‘This war, in an evolutionary way, gave us increasing courage as we progressed, and in the end, we had enough courage to strike in Iran,’ says former Navy Chief Maj. Gen. (res.) Eliezer (Chayni) Marom.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Eliezer (Chayni) Marom, former commander of the Israeli Navy, summarized Operation Rising Lion (Am K’Lavie) and the strikes in Iran, in an interview with 103FM.
“I completely agree that we overestimated not only Iran, but also Hezbollah. In the end, we took the intelligence assessment, analyzed it, and always forgot that Israel also has an offensive capability,” said Marom.
He continued: “Take Hezbollah as an example. When we say Hezbollah has 160,000 rockets and will launch 3,000 rockets a day at us, with a certain percentage hitting power stations, it sounds terrifying. But we must remember that we have significant power and excellent intelligence – we operate both defensively and offensively. That means we strike missile bases and launchers, and this essentially reduces the impact of those 3,000 rockets to nearly nothing.”
Maj. Gen. (res.) Marom added, “This war, in an evolutionary way, gave us increasing courage as we progressed, and in the end, we had enough courage to strike in Iran. Ultimately, with all due respect to the ministers, the one who made the decision was the Prime Minister—no one else. And really, there was no choice. What do you want, to leave us exposed to a barrage of 500 to 1,000 ballistic missiles fired at the State of Israel? Let’s say they launch 800, and we intercept 70-80 percent depending on the day, dozens of missiles still fall here. We’ve seen what those missiles can do.”
Asked whether Israel would regret halting the operation at its current stage, Marom replied: “No, I don’t think so. Let’s look at what we’ve achieved in these twelve days—I don’t think any of us could have imagined the scale of the achievement. It is enormous.”
Regarding Iran’s military capability, he explained: “We have absolute technological superiority. We use mostly Western and American weapons, along with some Israeli systems, and this weaponry is significantly superior to anything the Iranians could get from the Russians. We’ve known this for many years. We struck freely in Syria, even when there were S-300 and S-400 systems—we knew how to neutralize them and achieve air superiority. After the October 2024 strikes, it was clear we had near-total control of the skies because we destroyed all of their anti-aircraft batteries.”
“This is also the first networked war,” he said. “A UAV or loitering munition hovers over Tehran, spots a launcher vehicle, feeds it into a command and control system, and suddenly everyone on the system sees the same image. This happens in seconds. This should make everyone understand the level of achievement we’ve reached.”
“The technology we use compared to theirs is like heaven and earth. The difference is in intelligence, in the quality of personnel, in motivation, in everything combined,” he concluded.
