Biden Team Warned Trump: Israel Won't Miss Chance to Strike Iran

Several former Biden administration officials warned President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team that Israel would not miss an opportunity to escalate the Gaza war into direct strikes on Iran, according to a wide-ranging account published by The New Yorker.

The same officials alleged that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu share joint responsibility for allowing the conflict in Gaza to spread to Iranian territory, the Jerusalem Post reported Saturday, citing the New Yorker piece described as all-encompassing in its scope.

What the Warning Said

The phrase the officials used — that Israel “won’t miss the chance” — captured their assessment of Netanyahu’s posture during a period when the outgoing administration was still trying to negotiate a ceasefire and contain the war’s geographic footprint. Biden’s team had spent much of late 2024 calibrating military aid and diplomatic pressure to keep the conflict from crossing into Iran directly. Those efforts, several officials told The New Yorker, were ultimately undermined by decisions made by both the incoming administration and Israel’s government.

The timing of the disclosure is significant. It emerges as a formal post-mortem of the Biden-to-Trump transition is taking shape in the press, with officials who served in the outgoing administration speaking with greater candor about what they believed went wrong and what they tried to prevent.

Neither the Trump administration nor Israeli officials had publicly responded to the New Yorker account at the time of publication.

The Current Threat Environment

The warning now reads as a prelude to the present. A new assessment from the Alma Research and Education Center warns that a coordinated joint strike by Iran and Hezbollah could paralyze Israel’s critical energy infrastructure — targeting offshore natural gas rigs, desalination plants, and ports in a multi-domain assault.

The Alma Center’s analysis details Israel’s structural vulnerability: a small number of strategically concentrated energy nodes means that damage to even a few facilities could simultaneously disrupt electricity generation, freshwater supply, and maritime commerce. The assessment frames the threat as an integrated operation rather than isolated missile salvos, drawing on the combined precision-strike and drone capabilities that both Iran and Hezbollah have demonstrated in recent years.

The warning underlines a core tension in Israeli defense planning. The same offensive posture that allowed Israel to strike deep into Iranian territory has also created deterrence pressure that Iran and its partners are actively working to counter.

Hormuz Incident Adds Pressure

Separately, IRGC-linked Iranian media reported Saturday that an oil tanker exploded after striking a naval mine in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian authorities had not issued an official statement on the incident at time of publication, and no casualty figures were available.

The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical oil transit chokepoint, with roughly one-fifth of globally traded crude passing through its waters. Any sustained mining campaign in the strait would immediately affect energy markets worldwide and would draw a response from the United States Navy, which maintains a significant presence in the Persian Gulf.

The tanker incident follows a week of elevated activity along Persian Gulf and Caspian trade routes. Ukraine struck an Iranian arms vessel in the Caspian Sea, a move that prompted Tehran to summon Ukrainian diplomatic officials in an unusually direct diplomatic rebuke. Iran is simultaneously managing the fallout from that confrontation, sustaining weapons transfers to Russia, and maintaining pressure on Israel through its Hezbollah and Houthi partners.

The Broader Architecture

The New Yorker account fits into a pattern that analysts and former officials have described for months: the regional war that began with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel did not expand by accident. The expansion reflected deliberate decisions by multiple governments — and the failure of others to prevent them.

The Houthi campaign against shipping in the Red Sea and the Hormuz corridor continues to demonstrate the cost of that expansion in economic terms, with insurance premiums and rerouting costs borne by global supply chains. The Alma Center’s warning about Israel’s energy infrastructure suggests the next phase of escalation, if it comes, would be felt in electricity and water supply rather than shipping lane delays.

For the Trump administration, the Biden-era account creates a political and strategic problem: if former officials can credibly argue that they warned of the escalation trajectory and were ignored, the question of who bears responsibility for the current state of the Middle East will become a sharper line of political contention. That debate is now moving from private transition briefings into public record.

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