According to reporting by The Washington Post, Israel has been quietly sending messages to Iran assuring its leadership that it does not intend to strike, so long as Iran does not strike first. On its face, that sounds like de-escalation but it’s not. At the very moment those assurances were being delivered through back channels, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on his way to Washington to pressure President Donald Trump to launch military action against Iran. You see what is happening here? Israel is pretending it won’t initiate the war on its own so long as it can get the U.S. to do it for them. This is not diplomacy. It is double-dealing at the highest level. Why would Israel bother with this trickery? Because they are already suffering from bad press over the utter destruction of Gaza and they want to, according to the Post, “avoid being perceived as escalating tensions.” But they really do want to escalate those tensions. They just want to get their loyal dog, the U.S. army to start it for them. Would Iran fall for that? Especially after the same game was played last summer when the U.S. sought a peace treaty and then struck Tehran anyway? According to the Post, they’re not. “Although Iranian officials responded positively to the Israeli outreach, they were wary of Israel’s intentions, said two officials with knowledge of the message exchange. Iran believed that even if the Israeli assurances were genuine, they left open the possibility that the U.S. military would carry out attacks on Iran as part of a campaign coordinated by the two allies, while Israel was training its firepower strictly on Hezbollah, the officials said.” What makes this especially alarming is that these are not abstract maneuvers. They involve real missiles, real cities, and real civilian populations. If the U.S. were to strike Iran under these conditions, Iran would almost certainly respond against U.S. assets, and Israel would be pulled into the very conflict it is pretending to be trying to prevent. The public would be told the escalation was inevitable, when in reality it was quietly engineered. If any other government were caught privately urging war while publicly signaling peace, it would be treated as a major scandal. Instead, this is being framed as normal geopolitics. It shouldn’t be. This is war chess played behind closed doors, with millions of lives as the pieces, and American voters kept deliberately in the dark about who is pushing whom toward the brink. The post Israel Promised Iran ‘No Strike’—While Urging the U.S. to Strike appeared first on Redacted.