This has been coming for some time, since April 24, when the Iranian embassy in Damascus was attacked by Israel. We are approaching the anniversary of the Re'im music festival on 7th October 2023, which set off the fuse on this latest sad round. The pager attack was not going to occur without upsetting those with a vested interest in Hezbollah. The latest attack on Hezbollah resulting in the demise of Hassan Nasrallah added additional weight to the less restrained Iranian response to their embassy attack.
Israel was aware an attack was likely, and Irans comments in the last week to Vlad the diminutive would have given Israel a heads up that things were going to get rowdy in the near future. The video of the attack on Israel resulted in a fair number of leakers, air defence appears to have been around 30% effective which will make for some uncomfortable times in the debrief in Israel. Hard to see that Benjamin Netanyahu will show any restraint in respect to a response against military targets in Iran, or oil/shipping infrastructure, assuming that Israel retains a large number of the F-15's and F-35's.
The intractability of the problem in the region without the desire for good will to prevail is not going away anytime soon. The decisions on the settlement expansions in the West Bank may not look to have been so helpful when this page of history gets a review in the cold light of day many years hence. In the absence of a will to discuss the issues that separate the 7 tribes, there will be more tears and little in the way of solutions, just the delight of radicals tearing down the tent and renting the fabric of civilisation, again.
We will get an idea how a true gen-5 aircraft goes against an early gen-4 air superiority aircraft with little updating. Not dull, but depressing.