Washington · Tel Aviv · Tehran · The Strait of Hormuz · May 10, 2026 | ForensicTimes.com | War Analysis · Forensic Intelligence · Nuclear
Table of Contents
- The 60 Minutes Interview: What Netanyahu Said and What It Means
- Operation Epic Fury: What the February 28 Strikes Actually Did
- The Nuclear Question: Underground, Buried and Still There
- The Strait of Hormuz: 72 Days and Still Closed
- Iran’s Surviving Capabilities: The Intelligence Picture
- Forensic Analysis: What “Taking Out” the Uranium Actually Requires
- Hezbollah, the Proxies and the Lebanon Front
- Law and Legal Implications: International Law, Civilian Casualties and the Accountability Record
- Global Context: The Economic and Geopolitical Fallout of a Closed Strait
- Investigation: What Remains Unknown
- The Distance Between “Degraded” and “Destroyed”
The 60 Minutes Interview: What Netanyahu Said and What It Means
On Sunday, May 10, 2026 — day 72 of the US-Israel war on Iran — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his first interview to an American television network since the conflict began. Speaking to CBS’s Major Garrett on 60 Minutes, Netanyahu offered the most detailed public statement yet from the Israeli side about the war’s objectives, its current status, and its conditions for ending.
“I think it accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over,” he said, when asked if the conflict was finished. He enumerated what remained: “There’s still nuclear material, enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce. Now, we’ve degraded a lot of it, but all of that is still there, and there’s work to be done.”
When Garrett pressed him on how the highly enriched uranium should actually be removed, Netanyahu’s answer was stark and unelaborated: “You go in, and you take it out.” He said it could be done physically, declined to specify whether he meant by military means, and stated that Trump had told him “I want to go in there” — suggesting alignment between the two leaders on the possibility of a physical extraction operation. He refused to provide a timeline.
Netanyahu also made a remark that drew immediate attention from foreign policy analysts: he said he wanted to reduce US military financial support to Israel from $3.8 billion annually “to zero,” saying “it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support.” He proposed doing it over the next decade. The statement — strategically unusual from a leader in the middle of a war that depends substantially on US military resupply — was widely interpreted as a signal of Israel’s intention to assert more independent strategic decision-making capacity as the conflict continues.
He described Iran’s support for Hezbollah as reduced to approximately 10 percent of its pre-war capacity after Israeli strikes on the group’s rocket arsenal, and said China had provided components to Iran’s missile manufacturing programme — a characterisation that CNN had previously reported based on US intelligence, and that China had denied.
Operation Epic Fury: What the February 28 Strikes Actually Did
The US-Israel war on Iran began on February 28, 2026, when nearly 900 coordinated airstrikes were launched in 12 hours against Iranian military facilities, nuclear enrichment sites, air defences, and leadership infrastructure — a campaign codenamed Operation Epic Fury by the United States and Operation Roaring Lion by Israel. The opening wave of strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of other officials, along with approximately 170 civilians when a missile struck a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab near Bandar Abbas.
The immediate stated objectives of the strikes were threefold: to eliminate or severely degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons-production capability, to destroy its ballistic missile programme, and to produce conditions for regime change. The context was a conflict that had been building across two years of failed nuclear negotiations, a 12-day air conflict in June 2025 that had already produced US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, a January 2026 Iranian government massacre of thousands of civilian protesters during the largest protests since 1979, and a US-Iranian intelligence environment in which Washington calculated Iran’s weakened position made military objectives achievable.
By mid-March, US Admiral Brad Cooper stated that the US military had struck more than 8,000 Iranian military targets including 130 vessels. On March 21, the US conducted specific strikes on the Natanz Nuclear Facility using bunker-buster bombs targeting the underground enrichment halls. Additional strikes were conducted on sites at Isfahan, Fordow, and other facilities across Iran’s nuclear infrastructure during the weeks that followed.
The operational results, assessed by US and allied intelligence services across subsequent weeks, presented a picture that diverged significantly from the maximalist objectives Netanyahu stated on May 10. The consensus from major think tanks including CSIS, CFR, and the Soufan Centre was that the US achieved tactical damage but could not reach the deepest underground infrastructure, could not eliminate the Strait of Hormuz threat, and could not produce the political outcome — regime change — it had sought. The Defence Intelligence Agency’s preliminary low-confidence assessment, described as a “political” leak by the Trump administration, found the strikes set Iran’s nuclear programme back by only months. CIA Director John Ratcliffe subsequently stated that new information indicated severe damage that would take years to rebuild. The two assessments were not reconciled publicly.
The Nuclear Question: Underground, Buried and Still There
The central forensic question in the Netanyahu interview — and in the US-Israel war’s strategic calculus — is the status of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile and the underground facilities where enrichment occurs. Netanyahu’s statement that the uranium “has to be taken out” implicitly acknowledges that it has not yet been taken out, and his description of the physical extraction option indicates that the diplomatic pathway to Iranian consent for removal has not succeeded.
Iran’s nuclear underground infrastructure is among the most hardened military construction in the world. The facilities at Fordow and the deeper enrichment halls at Natanz are buried at depths between 400 and 1,500 feet into granite bedrock, connected by more than 100 interconnected tunnel systems in the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges. These facilities feature redundant multiple exits, decoy entrances designed to absorb strikes, and missile launchers capable of emerging from tunnel exits, firing, and returning underground. The US’s most powerful conventional bunker-buster — the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator — was used at Natanz. Its effect on the deepest facilities remains disputed between the DIA’s preliminary assessment (months of setback) and the CIA’s subsequent characterisation (years of damage).
Before the strikes, Iran moved much of its enriched uranium stockpile, according to the DIA preliminary assessment. Iran had previously accumulated approximately 372 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium and smaller quantities of 90% enriched material — enough, by multiple expert estimates, for several nuclear devices if further enriched to weapons-grade. Where that material is now, and whether any of it was destroyed in the strikes or merely relocated within Iran’s underground network, is the central unresolved question of the conflict’s nuclear dimension. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iran’s nuclear programme before the conflict, has been unable to resume inspections and cannot verify the current status. IAEA head Rafael Grossi stated that any agreement which does not include provisions for such inspections “will be an illusion of an agreement.”
Oman’s foreign minister, in February 2026, stated that indirect US-Iran talks before the strikes had advanced substantially and that Iran had agreed to “zero stockpiling” of nuclear material as part of a possible deal. That deal was not concluded. The strikes began instead. Whether the “zero stockpiling” commitment was genuine, whether it could have been verified, and whether it would have been more effective than the military campaign in removing the enriched uranium from Iran are questions that the conflict’s subsequent trajectory has made impossible to answer definitively — but which the current stalemate keeps alive.
The Strait of Hormuz: 72 Days and Still Closed
On March 4, 2026, five days after the initial US-Israeli strikes, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. The closure was enforced through a combination of IRGC warnings to shipping, mine-laying operations, seizure and attack of vessels attempting to pass, and swarm boat activity by the IRGC Navy. Commercial traffic through the strait dropped more than 90 percent immediately. Pre-conflict, approximately 3,000 vessels used the strait each month. As of May 10, that number stands at approximately 5 percent of its pre-war level.
The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately 20 percent of global petroleum and 20 percent of global liquefied natural gas annually. Its closure has produced the largest sustained disruption to global energy markets since the 1973 oil crisis. Brent crude rose to $104.50 a barrel as of Sunday. Fuel shortages and rationing have occurred across parts of Asia east of the Gulf that rely heavily on Hormuz-transiting oil. The 32 members of the International Energy Agency released 400 million barrels from strategic reserves in an attempt to moderate prices. Iran has been the primary beneficiary — its oil revenues soared as the only major exporter with access to its own exit route.
On April 8, a conditional two-week ceasefire was announced, following which Trump stated the pause was subject to Iran’s “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the strait. Iran described the US counter-blockade — launched April 13, targeting all ships seeking to reach Iranian ports — as a potential “prelude to a violation of the ceasefire.” As of May 10, neither party has removed its blockade. Pakistan-mediated talks, the primary diplomatic channel, have not produced agreement on the strait’s status. Iran rejected a US proposal on May 10, describing it as a demand for “surrender” and counter-demanding reparations and control over the strait itself.
Netanyahu’s May 10 interview addressed the strait only obliquely, stating that the Iran ceasefire should be kept separate from the Israel-Hezbollah truce in Lebanon. He acknowledged Iran’s desire to link the two — “What Iran would like to do is to say, ‘No, you know, if we achieve a ceasefire here, we want a ceasefire there'” — and rejected that linkage. The reopening of the strait, which has no military solution that does not risk escalation beyond what any party currently seeks, is thus left to the diplomatic track — which, as of May 10, had produced a rejected US proposal and an Iranian counter-demand for reparations.
Iran’s Surviving Capabilities: The Intelligence Picture
The intelligence picture of Iran’s military situation 72 days into the conflict, as assembled from multiple US and allied assessments, is materially different from the maximalist objectives Netanyahu stated on 60 Minutes. The gap between what the strikes achieved and what Netanyahu says must still be achieved is the forensic core of his “not over” declaration.
On missiles: US intelligence assessed in April 2026 that approximately 50 percent of Iran’s missile launchers remained intact. Iran maintains approximately 30 underground missile bases in the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges. The underground missile city network — described in CNN’s investigation as the single most significant factor in determining the war’s strategic outcome — ensured that no air campaign could disarm Iran’s retaliatory capability. The Soufan Centre concluded that Iran’s remaining capabilities position Tehran to fight a war of attrition and threaten the region after any ceasefire.
On the IRGC Navy: the IRGC Navy retained roughly 50 percent of its pre-war assets according to US intelligence, including sufficient small boat and mine-laying capacity to maintain the Strait of Hormuz disruption. The US had struck 130 Iranian vessels, sunk the frigate IRIS Dena in a submarine engagement near Sri Lanka, and launched multiple strikes on IRGC Navy infrastructure. The remaining 50 percent continues to enforce the Hormuz closure.
On leadership: Khamenei’s death in the opening hours produced a successor regime drawn entirely from the IRGC hardline faction — his son Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed as the new supreme leader. US intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard assessed on March 18 that “the regime in Iran appears to be intact, but largely degraded” and that internal tensions would likely increase as Iran’s economy worsened. The regime change objective was not achieved. The regime that emerged from the decapitation of the previous leadership is, by most assessments, more ideologically hardline than the one it replaced.
Forensic Analysis: What “Taking Out” the Uranium Actually Requires
Netanyahu’s formulation — “you go in and you take it out” — is three words covering a forensic and military challenge of extraordinary complexity. A precise analysis of what “taking out” Iran’s highly enriched uranium actually requires is essential to understanding what Netanyahu is describing and why it has not been accomplished.
Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile — specifically the 90% enriched material that is closest to weapons-grade — is believed to be stored in hardened underground facilities at Isfahan and possibly dispersed to secondary locations that have not been publicly identified. The DIA’s preliminary assessment found that Iran moved much of its enriched material before the February 28 strikes. Where it is now is not publicly established.
A physical extraction operation — the option Netanyahu described as possible — would require precise intelligence on the current location of the material, access to those locations by either military or inspection personnel, the physical security to extract the material without Iranian forces preventing it, and a chain of custody that ensures the material reaches a destination outside Iran under verified control. Each of those requirements is either currently unmet or operationally contested.
The alternative — a negotiated agreement in which Iran consents to transfer its enriched uranium to a third country or to IAEA custody, verified by inspection — is the pathway that Oman’s foreign minister described as substantially advanced before the strikes began. The February 2026 “zero stockpiling” commitment, if genuine, would have addressed the enriched uranium issue through exactly this mechanism. The strikes ended that negotiation. Whether the same outcome is achievable post-conflict through diplomatic pressure and economic incentives, as Netanyahu and Trump both stated they prefer to military re-engagement, is the central question of the Pakistan-mediated talks.
Retired Navy Vice Admiral Robert Murrett’s assessment, cited in strategic analysis of the conflict, captures the forensic logic: if the objective is removal of the enriched uranium, the most feasible path is a monitored deal with inspection provisions. Force is the gamble. The DIA-CIA intelligence dispute — months versus years of nuclear setback — reflects genuine uncertainty about whether the strikes accomplished enough damage to the enrichment infrastructure to make reconstitution of the programme a multi-year project or a months-long one.
Hezbollah, the Proxies and the Lebanon Front
Netanyahu’s claim that Israel has destroyed more than 90 percent of Hezbollah’s pre-war rocket arsenal is among the most specific military claims in his 60 Minutes interview and one of the more verifiable ones, at least in principle. The Lebanese front opened formally on March 2, 2026, when Hezbollah launched a missile attack on Israel in response to Khamenei’s killing, and the IDF declared it “an official declaration of war.” Israel launched ground operations in border areas and declared its intention to establish a security zone extending to the Litani River.
Hezbollah’s pre-war rocket arsenal was assessed at approximately 150,000 rockets and missiles of various ranges — the most extensive non-state actor arsenal in history. If Netanyahu’s 90 percent figure is accurate, approximately 15,000 rockets and missiles remain. That remaining 10 percent includes, by most assessments, the longer-range precision munitions that pose the most serious threat to Israeli population centres and military infrastructure — and which Hezbollah has reportedly been preserving for scenarios where their use would be strategically decisive.
Iran’s support for Hezbollah — through weapons resupply channels that run primarily through Syria — has been severely disrupted by the conflict. The overland resupply routes through Iraq and Syria have been subjected to sustained Israeli airstrike interdiction. Hezbollah’s capacity to reconstitute its arsenal during the conflict is substantially limited. But the 10 percent that Netanyahu acknowledges remains is a force that, from a forensic military standpoint, still requires any ceasefire to address its neutralisation or disarmament — a question that has not been resolved in the Lebanon-specific ceasefire talks and that both Hamas and Hezbollah have reportedly rejected as a condition.
Law and Legal Implications: International Law, Civilian Casualties and the Accountability Record
The US-Israel war on Iran has produced a significant and still-accumulating record of potential international humanitarian law violations that no comprehensive accounting mechanism has yet addressed systematically.
The strikes on civilian infrastructure — including a girls’ school in Minab during the February 28 opening strikes, a medical clinic, a girls’ school in Khomein, and more than 30 universities hit by the time the April ceasefire was announced — represent a documented record of attacks on protected sites. Whether those strikes were proportionate military measures under international humanitarian law, whether they targeted military objectives within or adjacent to those sites, and whether the incidental civilian harm was assessed as excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage are legal questions that the conflict’s accountability frameworks have not yet formally addressed.
The UN Security Council met in emergency session on February 28 but passed no resolution before the strikes commenced. A subsequent resolution demanding the end of Iranian attacks and affirming the right of ships to traverse the Strait of Hormuz passed on March 11. A Bahraini-drafted resolution on Hormuz was vetoed on April 7 by Russia and China. The Security Council has not passed any resolution specifically addressing civilian casualties from US-Israeli strikes on Iran — a structural consequence of the permanent membership veto system that has historically paralysed the Council in major power conflicts.
Under international humanitarian law, the principle of distinction requires that parties to a conflict distinguish at all times between civilians and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives. The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks expected to cause incidental civilian harm excessive in relation to the military advantage. The attacks on universities, schools, and civilian hospitals are subject to those principles and will eventually be part of any post-conflict legal assessment — whether through the UN Human Rights Council, international courts, or national accountability mechanisms in countries whose nationals were affected.
Global Context: The Economic and Geopolitical Fallout of a Closed Strait
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has produced economic and geopolitical consequences whose full scope is still being calculated 72 days into the conflict. The strait carries approximately one-fifth of all seaborne oil trade and one-fifth of global LNG — a combined energy flow that no alternative route can fully replicate. The Red Sea was already disrupted by Houthi attacks during the Israel-Gaza war. The combination of Hormuz closure and Red Sea disruption has effectively isolated two of the world’s most critical energy transit chokepoints simultaneously.
Oil prices at $104.50 Brent represent a sustained economic shock that is being absorbed differently across the global economy. Russia — as Netanyahu himself acknowledged at the Kallas NB8 press conference in late April — has been the principal beneficiary, receiving a windfall from elevated oil prices that partially offsets the sanctions pressure applied in the Ukraine context. The EU’s 20th Russia sanctions package, adopted in part because Hungary’s Orbán veto was lifted, includes tightened oil price cap mechanisms that are under pressure from the Hormuz-driven price environment.
China’s role in the conflict is contested but significant. US intelligence indicated China was preparing to deliver new air defense systems to Iran; China denied it. Netanyahu stated on 60 Minutes that “China gave certain amount of support and particular components of missile manufacturing.” China and Russia vetoed the April 7 UN Security Council resolution on Hormuz. The conflict has thus created a geopolitical alignment in which the US and Israel are on one side, Iran and its proxies on another, and China and Russia in a position of strategic benefit from both the disruption of Western energy access and the diversion of US military and diplomatic attention from Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.
Investigation: What Remains Unknown
The current location and quantity of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile — the specific question that Netanyahu identified as the central unresolved issue of the conflict — is not publicly established. The DIA’s preliminary assessment that Iran moved the material before the strikes, and the CIA’s subsequent assessment of severe damage to the infrastructure, do not address where the material is now. The IAEA cannot verify it. No inspection regime is in place.
The intelligence dispute between the DIA’s preliminary low-confidence assessment (months of nuclear setback) and the CIA’s subsequent assessment (years of damage) has not been publicly resolved. The classified version of that dispute is presumably more specific, but its classified nature means that the public record of what the strikes actually accomplished against Iran’s nuclear programme remains genuinely uncertain.
The fate of the US aircrew whose F-15E was shot down on April 3 — the weapon systems officer who was missing for 48 hours before being rescued — and the full accounting of US military casualties across the 72-day conflict have not been publicly disclosed in detail. Six US service members killed in action were announced by CENTCOM by early March; subsequent casualty figures have not been publicly confirmed.
The Pakistan-mediated talks, which Iran described on May 10 as having received a US proposal it considered a demand for “surrender,” are at an impasse as of this report. Iran’s counter-demand for reparations and a new maritime arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz has not been publicly engaged by the US. Whether the talks will resume, on what basis, and on what timeline is not established. The ceasefire that has been nominally in place since April 8 is being tested daily by both parties’ continuing blockade operations.
The Distance Between “Degraded” and “Destroyed”
Netanyahu’s 60 Minutes interview is, in forensic terms, an evidentiary document. It establishes, on the record, what the war has and has not accomplished from the perspective of its principal architect. What has been accomplished: the killing of Khamenei, the severe degradation of Iran’s surface military infrastructure, the destruction of more than 8,000 military targets including 130 naval vessels, the elimination of roughly half of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal, and the forced succession crisis that replaced a theocratic government with one that is, by most assessments, more hardline and more dependent on IRGC institutional structures than its predecessor.
What has not been accomplished: the removal of Iran’s enriched uranium, the dismantlement of its enrichment sites, the elimination of its ballistic missile programme, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, the disarmament of its proxies, and the regime change that was at least partially among the stated objectives of the strikes. Approximately 50 percent of Iran’s missile launchers survived. The Strait remains closed at 5 percent of normal traffic. The uranium is underground, in a location that cannot be independently verified. The new supreme leader is Khamenei’s son, drawn from the IRGC’s hardline faction.
The distance between “degraded” and “destroyed” is where wars become indefinite. Netanyahu said the war “accomplished a great deal.” What the intelligence record says is that it accomplished what air power can accomplish — substantial visible damage to surface and some underground infrastructure — and ran into the limits that every strategic bombing campaign in modern history has encountered: that buried things stay buried, that dispersed capabilities survive attrition, and that the political outcome of killing a leader depends on who replaces him.
He said there is “work to be done.” That phrase, in the context of an enriched uranium stockpile whose location is uncertain, a strait that has been closed for 72 days, and a successor regime more hardline than the one the strikes were designed to remove, describes a war whose ending is not visible from where the parties currently stand.
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