Israel's early morning attack on Iran compared to Tehran's drone and missile strikes on the Jewish state last Saturday makes the Islamic regime look "quite weak," Erik Prince, the founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, told Newsmax on Friday.
"[Iran] launched off 320 different weapons and I think the only damage done in Israel was damage to a runway in the Negev [desert] and a wounded 7-year-old Arab-Israeli girl," Prince told "National Report." "So many of those missiles didn't even make it out of Iranian airspace because of a launch failure to guide. A lot of them were shot down and certainly detected significantly."
The details of Israel's air strikes on Iran haven't been released yet. Prince said he does not think they will continue to directly attack each other.
"I think they'll go back to striking each other's surrogates," Prince said.
He also said he does not think the Iranians "have the appetite" for a more drawn-out war.
"The big strikes a few days ago, the big attempt by Iran to Israel, was done because Israel had smacked effectively the Iranian IRGC officer who is in charge of all things in Lebanon," Prince said, referring an Israel airstrike on an Iranian compound in Damascus that killed Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi.
Iran has been complaining about the strike, which is "complete nonsense," he said.
"They blew up the U.S. embassy in Lebanon years ago," Prince said. "They have routinely sponsored attacks all over the world against U.S. or Israeli diplomatic facilities. So, for them to complain about this strike against effectively what was an annex containing these IRGC officers is nonsense."
Meanwhile, Israel is in a "bit of a pickle" in Gaza by never dealing with the Hamas tunnels effectively, Prince said.
"They do have hostages under Rafah, you know, sandwiched right up against the Egyptian border," Prince said. "The problem is you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who are not necessarily Hamas supporters trying to dig them out of those tunnels and not maul a lot of civilians. It is an exceedingly impossible task."
The Israel Defense Forces, he added, should have "taken an unconventional approach."
"I think they blundered and gave Hamas the exact fight that Hamas was looking for," he said. "[It] is looking to maximize their own civilian carnage to make themselves the victims."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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