From The Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Christianamie. It's Monday, June sixteenth, twenty twenty five. Senators want Amazon to be banned from winning lucrative contracts for government work. It comes as Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi toured Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, prompting criticism of his government's links to the tech giant. The PM is expected to meet with Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G seven summit in
Canada this week. On the agenda is the future of the orcust Military Pact as the Trump administration throws defense and trade ties inted doubt. Those stories alive right now at the Australian dot com dot au. Civilian casualties, crumbling buildings and rockets raining down on Israel and Iran today, the new Middle East war over a nuclear ambitions, Why Israel is striking now and what happens next.
It was so surreal. You know, you can hear noises outside, You're not sure what they are. It was like nothing I've ever experienced, but it was something that people who live in Israel have experienced a lot.
This is Page Taylor, the Australian's correspondent in Jerusalem.
The bomb shelter I went to on Friday morning was on the same level of the hotel I'm staying at. What I hadn't realized at the time is that everywhere in Israel, building codes for more than thirty years have required a bomb shelter on every level, which says a lot about the conflicts that have been going on in Israel for a very long time. But I think some of the people who've been living in Israel for a long time are quite accustomed to what is a full
scale alert and what is a standby alert. So it wasn't until the second alarm rang that Israelis and other people who live in the region came into that bomb shelter with me. I'd been in there for quite some time, wondering if I was in the right place.
Actually, Paige isn't usually a war reporter. She's the Australian's Indigenous Affairs correspondent and was in Israel to report on a delegation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people led by former Olympian and former Labor Senator Novi Paris.
She was showing the delegates the parts of Israel that she had visited last year, and she had been very moved by that trip and wanted others to see what she saw. The Jewish people have an unbroken history to this land. They call Israel the epitome of decolonization is the Jewish people.
Is an extremely experienced reporter and she's not faced by much. So it's from this modest three x four meter space that she's pivoted to reporting on a major escalation in tensions between Israel and Iran. It began on Friday when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a coordinated attack on more
than one hundred Iranian military and nuclear sites. The Israeli Defense Force said in a statement that the air strikes on Iran's primary nuclear site, the Natan's facility on the Central Plateau, had been especially effective despite its protective underground construction. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net Nyahu said the operation was designed to curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
For decades, the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly openly called for Israel's destruction. They've backed up their genocidal rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons. This is a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival.
Iran has always maintained its nuclear program has nothing to do with making atomic bombs. It says it's designed to provide energy to its ninety million citizens. But just a day earlier, on Thursday, the Board of the International Atomic Energy Agency censured Iran for stonewalling its inspectors and Benjamin Nettanya, who says Israeli intelligence suggests Iran has enriched enough uranium to produce nine atomic bombs.
In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before, steps to weaponize this enriched uranium. If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time.
Within the day, Iran retaliated, motivated state media said by the deaths of civilians in the strikes what.
Iran Supreme leader Iatola Ali Hamane vowed a harsh punishment in retaliation for the at, saying Israel has brought a bitter and painful feat upon itself and it will certainly face it.
Explosions were reported over Israel's capital, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When I spoke to Page on Sunday afternoon Sydney time, the impact was already being felt.
People in Israel were woken up at three am Friday local time to alert from the Israeli government that they had attacked Iran's nuclear facilities and that people should be on high alert. And so that was the beginning. The number of mythols fired back has been somewhere around two hundred, and Israel has let some of those hit the ground because they were going to unpopulated areas. Three people are dead that we know of, it's dozens injured, and there's
quite a few people unaccounted for that. I think the death toll is going to rise.
Iran's leadership also issued a warning to the United States, Kingdom and France not to help Israel in its assault, or else it would target their military bases in the region. But with Israel's infamous Iron Dome defense system under pressure, the US has stepped in to shoot down the missiles raining down from the east. Caught in the middle, Iraq has asked its ally Iran not to target its strategic partner, the US. The reprisal hasn't deterred Israel.
This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove the threat.
We're not hearing any backdown in the rhetoric from the IDF. We're also not entirely sure whether their job is complete in Iran. In fact, they're talking about hitting more targets in Tehran. Their focus is to completely disable Iran's nuclear capabilities.
The Australians Foreign editor Greg Sheridan says this is a pivotal moment in the Middle East conflict.
I think it's very uncertain exactly how it's going to go. But Israel has widened its targets now to include Iran's energy infrastructure, and it says its political leadership could be targeted as well. So Iran will strike back in every way that it can. So Israel's taking more hits on its homeland than it's taken since the October seven terror atrocities. I don't know whether Iran will attack Americans in the
Middle East. If they strike Americans in the Middle East, they are likely to get a very very tough response from the Americans. So far, the Iranian proxies have been pretty quiet, as Ballah hasn't had much to say. There's not much sign of activity from the militias in Syria or Iraq. Israel has been striking the Hoodies again in Yemen as well. But it's just impossib well to know how long Israel's target list is and whether Iran has any other options for retaliation that we don't know about,
and whether other countries will get involved. I mean, one thing is that Iran is strongly supported by China, Russia and North Korea, and they all have nuclear weapons, so it may well be that they help Iran reconstitute its nuclear weapons program reasonably quickly, even if the Israelis do more or less destroy most of the Iranian capability. But we are drenched in uncertainty and danger at the moment.
Coming up is a bigger ambition driving Israel's fight against Iran. While I've got you, I wanted to let you know the monumental challenges facing Australia's defense force will be examined at the Defending Australia Summit in Canberra today. You can tune into a live stream at the Australian dot Com dot au from midday to hear our experts and key defense figures speak on everything from Orcus to the future of the Indo Pacific. And that's more of today's episode.
After this, in the aftermath of Israel's Operation Rising Lion, Iranian state media reported the head of its Revolutionary Guards, Major General Hussain Salami, had been killed in a strike on the capital Tehran. It points to a greater Israeli ambition toppling the brutal regime that seeks its destruction. Iran is a backer of the militant groups Hesblah, who operate largely in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthi rebels
in Yemen. All have attacked Israel since October seven, twenty twenty three, when Hamas militants massacred men, women and children live in southern Israel and took two hundred and fifty more people hostage. Israeli PM Benjamin Nettana, who said it was Israel's actions against Hesbela that brought about the end of the Assad regime in Syria and a new government was installed in Lebanon, and on Friday, he appealed directly to the Iranian people.
I believe that the day of your liberation is near. When that happens, the great friendship between our two ancient peoples will flourish once again.
Here's Greg Sheridan.
I think israel Is in favor of regime change, right, there's no doubt about that. But this is not a military attack designed through military means to affect regime change. The Israelis don't have a proxy force which they're backing within Iran. But the Israelis four years and the Americans too, have been appealing to the Iranian people to try to get rid of their despotic regime. Now, as far as we can tell, the Iranian people hate their despotic regime. Every year or two there is a wave of mass
protests in Iran. Protesters are routinely arrested and killed by the Iranian authorities, in some cases for something as trivial as not wearing the scarf with sufficient modesty. It's been remarkably easy for Israeli intelligence to penetrate Iran, both Iranian society, Iranian government, Iranian military, and even perhaps the Iranian intelligence services.
Now a lot of analysts think that itself is a sign that there are a lot of people inside Iran who don't believe in the regime, who are very unhappy with the economic misery and the repression and the human rights abuses and everything else that the Iranian regime has foisted on the Iranian people. However, dictatorships can last a long time. They're very strong until they're not. On the
other hand, some of them go on and on. I've been reporting on North Korea one way or another for more than forty years, and at every moment of that forty years, there's been an analyst somewhere saying the North Koreans are about to collapse, but here they still are. On the other hand, then you have something like the giant edifice of the Soviet Union. In the nineteen eighties, Australian intelligence was saying it's going to be a superpower forevermore and a minute later the fall of the Berlin
Waller collapse of Soviet Communism. So I think change in Iran is possible, but it's very hard to predict whether it will happen. But just at the technical level, this performance in Iran is quite remarkable, and it would look as though there are a lot of people in Iran who are willing to work against the regime, maybe for money, maybe for promise of escape, or maybe from a desire to get rid of the Iranian regime which oppresses all Iranians.
This is a story that has been building since nineteen seventy nine, when Iran made it quite clear that their focus was to destroy Israel and that was not ever going to be something that Israel could tolerate. So while I've been here, I've been listening to people who talk about the fact that this is a country that wants peace but is surrounded by terrorist organizations that wish it to be destroyed.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian's Foreign editor, and Page Taylor is our Indigenous affairs correspondent. For all the latest from our reporters on the ground in Israel, and to view the Defending Australia Summit live stream, visit the Australian dot Com dot au