Weekly Commentary: Temple Mount Movement Thwarted The Boiling Frog Plot
Dr. Aaron Lerner 3 July 2025

#1 If not for Jewish activity on the Temple Mount, Sinwar would have followed the recommendation of Hamas intelligence and the Hamas invasion would have taken place under dramatically more devastating circumstances in coordination with Hezbollah and Iran.

#2. If not for the developments which followed in Lebanon, Iran's pace of weaponization would have remained at a level which would not have drawn an Israeli response.

It is said that If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately leap out. But if you put a frog into cold water and gradually raise the temperature, it will stay there until it is boiled alive.

That aptly describes our situation before 7 October 7 2024.

Iran was progressing at a pace in its nuclear weapons program as well as ballistic missiles production program which, in the view of decision makers, did not justify radical action.

While we were aware that Hezbollah continued to build up its massive stores of guided missiles and rockets as well as preparations to invade, those guided missiles and rockets effectively deterred us from confronting these challenges. We frequently bombed inside Syria but the moment weapons crossed into Lebanon they safe.

As for the Gaza Strip, we found it convenient to ignore the ongoing, large scale, preparations of Hamas.

So what went wrong with what was essentially a boiling frog plot?

Haniyah and the Temple Mount.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center recently published details of the July 2023 Hamas intelligence report whose main recommendation was not to initiate a military confrontation but rather to wait for the crisis inside Israel to worsen.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was intimately familiar with Israel

The intelligence report didn't tell him something he wasn't aware of.

But Sinwar was also a religious fanatic.

And as a fanatic, the ever-increasing Jewish activity on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem blew his fuses.

So instead of following the recommendations of Hamas intelligence, Hamas, without proper coordination with either Iran or Hezbollah, invaded Israel.

Hezbollah, instead of invading with full force at the same moment, engaged in a prolonged and ever-increasing series of tit for tat.

And Iran basically remained at the sidelines.

As a message to an intransigent Hamas leadership, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh on 31 July 2024 in Teheran.

Iran didn't budge.

And most of both the Israeli defense establishment and political leadership wanted to remain in the pot, hoping that the tit for tat would resolve itself.

So much so that in early September 2024, most of the Israeli defense establishment and political leadership advocated forfeiting the exploding beeper/walkie talkie project when Hamas began to detect the devices.

On 17 September 2024 Prime Minister Netanyahu opted to support the Mossad's minority recommendation and the thousands of pagers detonated simultaneously.

This turning point ultimately led to killing Hezbollah’s Secretary‑General Hassan Nasrallah in a major airstrike on 27 September 2024.

It was only at this point that Iran directly entered the fray with a major missile attack against the Jewish State on 1 October 2024.

While Israel's 26 October 2024 on Iran showed impressive abilities this was by no means part of some master plan to remove the Iranian nuclear threat.

As Treasury Minister Smotrich, who participated in the secret planning of the war against Iran, explained in an interview in the 26 June 2025 edition of Makor Rishon:

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"...somewhere in last November-December we begin to gather again for intensive discussions regarding Iran.

This happens because reliable intelligence arrives regarding two dimensions

- also in the nuclear (program), that Iran is approaching the bomb and begins to engage in weaponization, something that did not happen for many years.

Also in missiles - we understand very quickly that no less dangerous than the nuclear is Iran’s striving, which planned to triple its missile production rate from 100 per month to 300. That means 3,600 per year.

The meaning is that if we started the campaign now when Iran has about 2,500 missiles capable of reaching the State of Israel, in another two years it will have ten thousand. This would create a balance of terror and give it a protective umbrella to pursue the nuclear, because who can attack it when it has such a quantity of missiles.

After we saw what one such missile can cause, it is clear what the meaning could be of ten thousand missiles.

Within a year, it was clarified in those confidential discussions, Iran would already have 6,000 missiles, and an attack would be almost impossible.

Therefore, the time to act was pressing.

In November Trump won, and we understand that there is here a window of opportunity and begin to work in a very intensive way with the army."
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Jewish activity on the Temple Mount didn't endanger Israel - it saved it.


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