At 3 a.m. this morning, June 13, 2025, my husband, Jonny, and I were catapulted out of our sleep by a jarring warning signal on our phones.

Then sirens sounded in a long wail, alerting Israelis across the country – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Circassians, Bedouins – to get ready for an Iranian missile attack.

At about the same time, Israel launched a strike deep inside Iran that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Hossein Salami who had called to annihilate Israel. This was the man who issued death threats against his own people who protested the death of Mahsa Amini. She died in Iranian custody on September 16, 2022, for violating Iran’s dress code for women.

Israel struck Iran the same calculated way it struck the beepers of Hezbollah operatives, which weakened the Iranian proxy terror group and helped bring an end to 13 months of Hezbollah rocket fire and missiles on Israel.

A few hours after Israel’s attack, I received an email from a PR person representing Justin Logan at the Cato Institute that the Middle East is bracing for potential fallout after Israel launched a “preemptive strike” against Iran. 

They put preemptive strike in quotes, as if Iran’s threats to wipe “the Zionist regime off the map weren’t really serious.

Logan said that Israel has “started a war with Iran that has no justification. The attack will destroy US diplomatic efforts to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon.”

The US diplomatic efforts with Iran were naive. Iran never planned to stop building its nuclear weapons. Its leaders were just bidding time.

I took this photo during a Hezbollah drone attack above our house in Western Galilee, Israel, on November 16, 2024.

As Jonny said, “I’d rather have everyone in the world hate us and still be alive.”

Just this past week, I wrote in The Times of Israel about Israeli innovations – a device that can recognize people’s identity just by their breathing “fingerprint,” and another study that discovered why the acetaminophen drug works.

We are survivors. This war was started by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 251 people into Gaza. There are still 20 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza and 31 confirmed dead.

Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. We are now in a fight for our survival. We are still on the map.