Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Iran for a terror attack on an Israeli tour bus in Bulgaria today that has claimed the lives of seven Israeli civilians, vowing that Israel will respond. The attack comes on the eighteenth anniversary of a deadly Iranian terror attack against a Jewish community center in Argentina. Netanyahu promised to respond: “Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that Israel’s message had to be taken seriously, given that Netanyahu did not mention Hizbullah–an Iranian proxy with a presence near Bulgaria–but Iran itself. He predicted that Israel’s response could go beyond a simple response to the attack itself, and target Iranian defenses more broadly, perhaps even leading to an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Iran has already been in a proxy war of sorts with the west, through its backing of Bashar Assad’s collapsing regime in Syria, as well as through Hizbullah and other terror groups. Experts have long predicted that Iran could respond to an attack on its nuclear sites by deploying terror against civilian targets throughout the world, but few anticipated that such attacks would come in advance of any such pre-emptive strike. The latest attack follows a string of similar attempts against Israeli tourists throughout the world, all thought to be Iran’s work.