Israel to decide on its own about Iran attack: Israeli army chief

“Israel is the central guarantor of its own security; this is our role as army, the State of Israel should defend itself,” Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Benny Gantz told Israeli state-run Channel One TV on Saturday.

He also asserted that the Tel Aviv regime must monitor the developments in Iran and take into consideration “what the world is doing, what Iran decided, what we will do or not do."

Gantz remarks come as the as US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon traveled to Israel on Saturday to discuss Iran with senior Israeli officials.

Meanwhile, Israelis have increasingly been invoking major concerns about the grave consequences of any Israeli attack against the Iranian nation.

“The whole region will go up in flames. Thousands of rockets will fall on Israel. In the initial days, hundreds of them will fall on Tel Aviv. Then we'll be in a war that goes on for months. The economy will crash. Tel Aviv will become a frontier town,” reported leading Israeli daily Ha’aretz on February 11, quoting a senior opposition member of the regime.

Israeli officials have ramped up their war rhetoric over the past few weeks, threatening Iran with military strikes in case the US-led Western sanctions against the country fail to force Tehran into abandoning its civilian nuclear program.

Despite the widely publicized claims by the US, Israel and some of their European allies that Iran's nuclear program may include a military aspect, Iran insists on its civilian nature, arguing that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to develop and acquire nuclear technology for peaceful objectives.

The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence indicating that Tehran's civilian nuclear program has been diverted towards nuclear weapons production.

This is while the Israeli regime is widely known to possess between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads. Furthermore, Tel Aviv refuses to allow its nuclear facilities to come under international regulatory inspectors and rejects any international nuclear regulatory agreements.