In the early hours of Friday morning, something impossible happened: The world’s most volatile secret turned into an open wound.

Tehran trembled. And the sky above Iran, usually an abstraction of threat and theory, bloomed with the unmistakable shape of consequences.

It wasn’t declared a war. No treaties were shredded, no Congresses summoned. But the facts did not wait for the semantics to catch up.

A hundred Israeli jets, a hundred drones, a handful of seconds drew a blood-red line across the future of the Middle East.

The official name was Operation Rising Lion.

Unofficially, it was the moment a state acted out the question everyone else had been whispering: “What happens if we don’t stop them?”

Diplomacy is a word that had already died quietly, somewhere between uranium enrichment and another IAEA noncompliance report.

The enrichment facility at Natanz had become the site of something more than centrifuges; it was a shrine to delay: Of inspections. Truth. Accountability.

So Israel answered. With warplanes.

What followed was sweeping. At least six senior nuclear scientists were killed, alongside high-ranking IRGC commanders. Among them, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.

Tehran called it assassination. Tel Aviv called it inevitability.

Iranian officials confirmed civilian casualties, including women and children. This part, always this part, is the bruise that never justifies itself.

But war, however “targeted,” doesn’t use tweezers. It uses blunt force and moral math.

The US disavowed participation while acknowledging foreknowledge.

Donald Trump offered his usual tightrope walk between bravado and backpedaling: “Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb,” he said. And yet talks in Oman are still on the schedule.

Oman called the strikes a “dangerous escalation.”

Saudi, not exactly in Tehran’s wedding guest list, still condemned the aggression. The market did what markets do: oil prices jumped. And Washington, sensing the tectonic shudder, braced for some future that may arrive in missiles, in negotiations, in both.

For all the bluster, one question remains uncomfortably unanswered: What do you do when your adversary builds toward a red line and dares you to cross it first?

Israel, a state born in existential precarity, has always chosen preemption over regret. You can call it aggression. You can call it survival. What you cannot call it is unexpected.

This wasn’t a lunge. It was a long breath finally released.

The question now is not whether Iran responds. It’s how. And whether anyone still remembers what diplomacy sounds like when the skies are quiet.