The road to the February 28 airstrikes on Iran was paved over years, not days. For those watching the Middle East, the surprise attack by the United States and Israel was less a bolt from the blue and more the final, violent chapter of a story that has been building since 2023.
That year, a broader Middle Eastern crisis erupted. By 2024, Iran and Israel were exchanging missile strikes. Then came the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, which saw a US airstrike hit Iranian nuclear sites. The region was already a powder keg. The only question was who would light the match.
Iran gave the world an answer in January 2026. Security forces there cracked down on the largest protests since the 1979 revolution. The result was a massacre. Thousands of civilians were killed. The international community condemned it. US President Donald Trump went further. He threatened military action directly.
That threat was not empty. The United States began its largest military buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Troops, aircraft, and naval assets poured into the Persian Gulf. Tensions were ratcheted up, notch by notch. Meanwhile, negotiations between Iran and the US over Iran’s nuclear program were still ongoing. Diplomacy and military preparation ran on parallel tracks, right up until the moment the tracks collided.
On February 28, the US and Israel launched airstrikes. They hit military sites and government buildings. They also assassinated several high-ranking Iranian officials. Among the dead was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The strike on Iran’s top authority was a decapitation blow, the kind of operation that changes a conflict from a war of attrition to a fight for a regime’s survival.
Iran’s response was swift. It fired missiles and drones at Israel, at US bases, and at US-allied Arab countries across West Asia. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait did not stay on the sidelines. They launched their own strikes on Iran and its regional allies. The conflict was no longer a bilateral affair. It had become a regional war.
Perhaps the most consequential move came when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow waterway is a critical artery for global trade. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through it daily. Shutting it down is an economic weapon of mass disruption. Oil prices will spike. Supply chains will buckle. The effects will be felt in gas stations and factories far from any battlefield.
The internal chaos inside Iran leading up to this war cannot be separated from the external decision to strike. A regime that had just massacred its own people was seen as vulnerable. The protests of January 2026 revealed deep cracks in the foundation. The US and Israel exploited those cracks. They calculated that a weakened, distracted Iran could not coordinate an effective defense or a coherent retaliation.
That calculation may yet prove wrong. Iran’s missile and drone barrages show it retains significant offensive capability. But the loss of Khamenei creates a power vacuum at the top. Who speaks for Iran now? Who gives the order to escalate or to stand down? Those questions have no clear answers.
The war that has begun is the product of a long chain of provocations, crackdowns, and miscalculations. It did not start on February 28. It started in 2023, or in 2024, or in the summer of 2025. The airstrikes were just the moment the fuse reached the powder.
