Israel may need to destroy parts of Lebanon and Gaza if Hezbollah and Hamas rain missiles upon the country in response to an Israeli attack on Iran, former Mossad head Danny Yatom said Monday.
Yatom, in an interview on Israel Radio, warned against presenting an apocalyptic picture of how Iran will respond if Israel takes military action against its nuclear program.
While acknowledging that Iran has a few hundred missiles that can reach Israel, and that the price would be horrible if those missiles were equipped with either nuclear or chemical warheads, Yatom said the central concern are the tens of thousands of rockets in Hezbollah and Hamas storehouses in Lebanon and Gaza.
Those rockets, he said, can "cover all of Israel, and that is the main problem."
Yatom said that the lesson Israel learned from the 2006 Second Lebanon War, when Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets on the north, was that "we will have to stop the firing of missiles, both from the north and the south, as quickly as possible."
To do this, he said, Israel would have to "act with great force against infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, and it is possible that the price that Lebanon and Gaza will pay will be horrible. We are liable to destroy, or likely to destroy, parts of Lebanon, and parts of Gaza, so that our citizens will not suffer and be killed."