Despite a Financial Times report, the IDF was not planning a strike on Iran on October 10, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
Over the past several months, since the April 7 Israel-Iran ceasefire, the IDF has been on a war footing a few times, ready for the eventuality that the Iranians would launch an attack or that US President Donald Trump would decide on a renewed joint US-Israel operation against the Islamic Republic.
One of those times was in the days surrounding October 7, with heightened concern in the IDF that Tehran would choose to initiate a new conflict with Israel around that anniversary date.
But neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, nor any other government official had told the IDF to prepare to attack in the way that such orders were handed down leading up to the June 2025 and early 2026 conflicts with Iran.
In that sense, sources have told the Post that the premise of the Financial Times report – that Trump blocked Israel from an attack on Iran while it was about to carry out – is wrong, because Israel was not about to do that.
Put simply, Trump could not block an attack that was not planned.
Sources have speculated that the so-called leak of a “potential attack” on Iran to the FT could have been designed to impact the Israeli election by pushing the idea that Netanyahu claimed he was ready to attack Iran a third time but that Trump then prevented him from doing so.
Such a story might assist Trump in the US midterm elections, as it would seem to present him as responsibly managing the conflict with Iran, which is extremely unpopular among both Democrats and Republicans.
The narrative of Netanyahu seeking to attack is also easy to support, particularly given that the IDF has been on high alert for a potential new round of conflict with Iran.
In other words, the narrative is not true, but is not far from the truth, according to sources.
More comprehensively, sources have told the Post and other Israeli and foreign media that the IDF has been prepared to take action against Iran for months in two main scenarios.
One is if the IDF sees that Iran is about to attack first. The second involves a situation where a joint US-Israel resumption of hostilities is back on the table.
Trump stated he backed out of attacking Iran in August
As a reminder, on August 2, Trump himself publicized that he had backed down from an attack on Iran that could have eventually involved the IDF.
In recent days, Trump has heightened his public threats against Iran, including specifically against Pickaxe Mountain, and sources have confirmed that if Washington had gone forward with a strike, this could have made Israeli participation far more likely.
Another issue with the FT report is the idea that a future attack by Israel and the United States would be larger in scale than the war earlier this year, when Iran has not repaired enough of what was bombed for that to be a likely scenario.
Sources have noted that top Israeli officials have publicly called for targeting Iran’s energy sector more robustly, something which was more limited in early 2026. But this in itself would not constitute a larger-scale attack, given that Israel and the US have already dropped around 30,000 bombs.
In addition, sources said that it was strange that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir was not invited to a meeting with US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the IDF Uvda Airbase this week.
Although US defense secretaries usually meet with their Israeli counterparts and often also with the prime minister, rare visits to Israel, such as the one Hegseth just made, invariably involve the IDF chief of staff because of the chief’s influence on matters of war and peace.
Sources speculated that Netanyahu may have been influenced by political considerations about how to portray Hegseth’s visit and what messages would be passed back and forth in his decision to keep Zamir and the IDF out of the meeting.
Hegseth has paid considerably fewer visits to Israel than his predecessor, and his visits – as well as Katz’s visits to the US – have been erratically shortened or canceled at times.