( Middle East Monitor ) – The dawn following 13 June brought no victory for Israel. The twelve-day war between Iran and Israel did not culminate in an Israeli triumph or an “Iranian eclipse.” Instead, evidence suggests both sides concluded the first round in a strategic, fifty-fifty stalemate. This analysis examines four fundamental gaps in the “decisive Israeli victory” narrative: the nuclear programme data gap, the missile capacity optimism gap, the command structure recognition gap and the flawed social response data gap.
The victory narrative gap
The analysis of the recent war is profoundly divided. Iranian official media claims victory, while international media and Western analytical centres generally assume a decisive Israeli victory based on downgraded Iranian capabilities. Thomas Juneau (2025) of Chatham House, emphasises this asymmetry: “The current confrontation between Iran and Israel … confirms and entrenches this trend: while Israel is causing major damage to Iran’s nuclear programme, its military capabilities and (to a lesser extent, so far at least) its energy infrastructure, Iran is again consistently failing to cause more than limited damage in Israel.” (Juneau, 2025).
This prevailing narrative, framed as an “Israeli strike and Iranian retaliation” (Levitt et al., 2025), is often reductionist, suffering from a lack of complete battlefield evidence and relying on a one-sided (Israeli) narrative. Based on the fifty-fifty strategic conclusion, this text demonstrates, using Western analyses, why claims of an absolute Israeli victory lack sufficient logic.
Declared objectives vs. actual outcomes
Why is it crucial to enumerate Israel’s objectives? We cannot measure a war’s success merely by the number of troops deployed or targets hit; we must assess it against its declared aims. Based on field data and media statements, we can summarize Israel’s declared objectives for initiating this war. Chatham House analysts (Vakil et al., 2025) have articulated these goals clearly: “The Israeli government has launched a highly provocative and strategically timed strike against Iran … aiming to achieve three primary objectives: to eliminate senior commanders and disrupt Iran’s operational leadership; to inflict damage on its nuclear program; and to weaken its defensive capabilities.” (Vakil et al., 2025).
Therefore, Israel’s objectives were:
- To strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
- To strike Iran’s missile programme and weaken its defensive capabilities.
- To create a power vacuum in the core leadership body by assassinating commanders.
- To lay the groundwork for sparking social street protests, combining aerial warfare with social unrest to achieve a form of system collapse.
Assessing the success in these four domains reveals four fundamental gaps in the “absolute victory” narrative.
The data and context gap
Can even the most optimistic analysts confirm, with unassailable certainty, the total destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities? It seems unlikely. Undoubtedly, Israel inflicted severe damage. Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) (2025a) confirms that “its nuclear program has been significantly set back” and specifically notes that “the elimination of more than ten senior nuclear scientists will either prevent or, at least, seriously hamper Iran’s ability to break out toward nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.” (INSS, 2025a).
However, a “setback” does not mean “destruction.” Evidence shows the destruction was incomplete. Dan Byman (2025) of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in the US offers a more cautious assessment, consistent with a narrative of “partial destruction”: “So far, it has been pretty good from an Israeli point of view. … If you look at the immediate results in Iran, Israel appears to have hit some of Iran’s nuclear sites, but certainly not all. And it has done significant damage, it appears, to Natanz … But Fordow … seems largely intact, and a lot of the more dispersed sites have not been hit.” (Byman, 2025).
More important than the survival of previous sites is the evidence of the programme’s continuity and adaptation post-war. Data emerging in the conflict’s aftermath clearly shows that Iran is not only reconstructing but is actively working on deeply buried facilities that are more resilient to future attacks. CSIS satellite imagery analysis (2025) conducted post-war confirms this claim: “While direct progress on the most sensitive aspects of Iran’s nuclear program has been minimal, Iran has continued construction at Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried facility just one mile south of the Natanz uranium enrichment site.” (CSIS, 2025). The report also notes that this is a long-term survival strategy for Iran: “While these efforts [sabotage and assassinations] have set back Iran’s program, Iran has historically found a way to rebuild facilities and recruit new scientists.” (CSIS, 2025).
This gap between “damage” and “destruction” is even reflected in Israeli public opinion. An INSS survey (2025b) shows that the majority of Israelis do not believe in the “complete removal” of the threat: “Only nine per cent believes the Iranian nuclear threat will be fully removed; 49.5 per cent thinks it will be mostly removed; 27.5 per cent believes it will only be slightly reduced.” (INSS, 2025b).
The optimism gap
Another Israeli objective was the neutralisation of Iran’s offensive missile programme (Vakil et al., 2025). Claiming that Iran’s long-range ballistic missile arsenal exceeded 2,000 units, Israel attempted to damage this missile chain. In the first 24 hours of the attack, Israel inflicted crippling blows on Iran’s underground missile bases. These strikes were so severe that, until the final hours of the war, Iran was practically unable to launch missiles from its most strategic bases in the west of the country.
Dan Byman (2025) confirms this tactical success: “Israel has, however, done significant short-term damage to the Iranian military. … Israel has also rendered the missile response of Iran less effective. … It appears that as Iran tries to take missiles from storage to launch areas, Israel is disrupting that process.” (Byman, 2025). However, Byman’s description of this as “significant short-term damage” is the precise evidence supporting this text’s thesis. The damage was “short-term,” not “permanent.” New estimates of reconstruction and the revelation of new facilities suggest that one of Israel’s most fragile claims regarding the war may be the claim of damaging the core of Iran’s missile programme. Iran’s indigenous production capacity and infrastructure resilience was far greater than what was factored into Israel’s “short-term” calculations.
The Recognition Gap
It seems perplexing that Israel would count on the collapse of Iran’s command structure following assassinations. The objective, as Chatham House’s (Vakil et al., 2025) noted, was to “eliminate senior commanders and disrupt Iran’s operational leadership.” It appears there is a significant gap between Israel’s understanding of Iran’s command structure and its high-level intelligence on this institution.
Not only Iran’s military institutions but even Hezbollah, as a local militia, has survived and demonstrated its ability to survive extensive assassinations. The command structure in Iran, while deeply institutionalised, operates with extreme fluidity. Given its experience in the eight-year war against Iraq, it is highly resilient to sudden shocks. The battlefield experience also showed that Iran replaced nearly all commanders assassinated on the first night of the war in under 24 hours. Israel succeeded in “disrupting” but failed in “collapsing” the leadership.
This survival of the command structure allowed Iran to seek pathways out of the crisis. Mona Yacoubian (2025) of CSIS notes that despite the damage, Iran still has a coherent strategy: “Iran is looking for a path back to the negotiating table … What we have seen in the past, the Iranian playbook, is the use of proxies, though currently they are vastly diminished.” (Yacoubian, 2025). That a country under the most severe attacks is still capable of strategically calculating a “return to the negotiating table” is itself evidence of the failure of the “command collapse” objective.
“Fordow,” based on an 17th century lithograph, Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
The flawed data gap
While it may seem simplistic to posit that Israel was counting on flawed analysis from parts of the Iranian opposition—analysis that predicted street protests in the event of a war—it appears Israel fell victim to this intelligence hubris and was deceived. This part of Israel’s objective (combining war with social collapse) has the least evidence of success.
None of the analyses provided (CSIS, Chatham House, INSS) offer any evidence of anti-regime protests occurring during the 12 days of war. On the contrary, in the initial moments, the Iranian people showed profound solidarity against the aggression. The war even became a catalyst for a temporary forgetting of previous political grievances with the Islamic Republic’s governance. We can attribute this miscalculation to a lack of historical understanding of the Iranian nation.
Conclusion: A peace that remains “unresolved”
Assessing the war based on Israel’s four primary objectives reveals that the “absolute victory” narrative is highly unstable. This situation is precisely the fifty-fifty outcome mentioned at the outset. Israel inflicted painful tactical blows, but Iran succeeded in its own strategic objectives: preserving its command structure, the core of its nuclear and missile programmes and its internal cohesion.
Perhaps the best description of this war’s conclusion comes from Israel’s own INSS (2025a), which called the ceasefire “Concluded but not Resolved.” This “unresolved” status signifies the survival of the conflict and the absence of a decisive victory for either side. This war, in the end, has bequeathed a Middle East that is, in the words of Mona Yacoubian (2025), “a very, very chaotic and very dangerous” one.
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