In the early morning of March 8, the war unleashed upon Iran by the United States (US) and Israel took a dangerous new turn. The US launched a deadly attack upon Iran’s oil refineries and associated facilities around Tehran and the neighbouring city of Karaj that turned the air over the region into poison. The Iranian government warned its people to wear masks, throw away the food in their refrigerators and change the filters in their drinking water systems immediately. Then, within hours, it gave the Gulf Arab states a warning that it was going to destroy the oil facilities in their countries in four hours, and launched a deadly attack upon Israel’s main oil refinery in Haifa Bay.

The Haifa Bay attack has dealt a severe blow to Israel’s economy and military capability because the refinery meets more than half of its oil consumption requirements. With these attacks, the US-Israel war on Iran has taken a dangerous turn towards total war. Were that to become a nuclear war, it could become the end of the world as we know it today.

I have two reasons for fearing this dire outcome: first, prior to the twelve-day war, Israel had never known the intensity of attack that it suffered in those few days, and is suffering now. It got its first shock when it found that Iran had a new generation of missiles that could penetrate its “Iron Dome” of interceptor missiles. The Israeli government has not officially revealed the full extent of the damage that the country suffered during those twelve days, but estimates concur that 33 or 34 persons were killed and 3,500 were injured.

In the current round of combat, Iran is not only sending a much larger number of missiles, but these are considerably more sophisticated than those it used last June. The Haifa refinery was attacked with a solid fuel rocket, labelled the “Khebar Shekan”, that is 11 metres long and carries a more than half-tonne warhead.

Video shots of the night sky over Tel Aviv taken by Al Jazeera show that Iran’s hypersonic missiles are finding little difficulty in evading Israeli interceptors, and that many not only have an independent manoeuvring capability that makes it very difficult to intercept them, but also “cluster” independently releasable warheads that deny the intercepting missiles a target and pose a serious danger to the civilian population, especially to children, in the daylight hours, if some of........

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