Israel’s caretaker cabinet meets on Iran today, and no institution in the chain has standing to stop it

The Sunday session was reported by Yedioth Ahronoth and the public broadcaster KAN, which had reported on the evening of 11 November that the security cabinet instructed the IDF to raise readiness for a possible strike on Iran without convening at all. That is a single-sourced report about a classified decision, not a confirmed order, and it should be read as such. Gadi Eisenkot, whom Herzog has tasked with forming the next government, wrote on X the same day that deploying security forces “in the absence of a direct and immediate threat that cannot be delayed” could have devastating consequences for Israeli democracy; the rendering is All Israel News’s, and Anadolu carries the same statement. Benjamin Netanyahu remains prime minister in a caretaker capacity, retaining the powers of the office, oversight of the defence establishment and direction of Iran policy. The Jerusalem Post’s explainer states the unresolved question directly: whether Israeli law permits a caretaker government to launch a new war. On Saturday evening Netanyahu asked Eisenkot into unity talks “without preconditions,” framing the appeal around Iran. Eisenkot called the offer “another spin.”

Nothing outside Israel is positioned to answer that question either. The IAEA circulated its confidential Iran report to member states on Friday 13 November; Reuters and AFP both saw it. On the Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant, an underground facility Iran declared in 2025 and has never opened to inspectors, the report says the Agency “does not know IFEP’s exact location, status for safeguards purposes or whether it contains nuclear material.” The Agency urged “incremental steps” toward restoring access, called such access “critical,” and said it is “fully prepared to resume its safeguards activities in Iran at short notice.” Iran’s recorded position is that nothing resolves “until the root causes of the present situation are addressed.” Hours earlier the Security Council held its 10271st meeting on the Gulf, requested by Bahrain on 3 November, briefed by GCC Secretary-General Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi and UN Assistant Secretary-General Mohamed Khaled Khiari. No outcome. Security Council Report notes the Council has agreed nothing further since April, when a measure to safeguard navigation through Hormuz was blocked by Chinese and Russian vetoes.

The cost of that vacuum is being paid somewhere other than Tehran. FDD’s Long War Journal, an advocacy-aligned tracker, reported on 14 November that Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia have been daily since 7 November, aimed at military installations, airports and energy infrastructure. The firmest physical datapoint in the sequence is Saudi-acknowledged: minor damage to an Aramco building in Riyadh on 8 November from falling debris. On 14 November the Jerusalem Post reported the Saudi-led coalition intercepting two drones headed for Riyadh and the southern region, and the US Embassy in Riyadh warning Americans across the region to exercise heightened caution, citing both the Houthi campaign and Iranian threats against US officials. Iran’s own contribution to the record is a string of mine claims — four tankers on 4 November, two on 13 November, one on 14 November — none independently verified, with UKMTO reporting no casualties. CBS News reported on 14 November, on one source familiar with the matter who did not confirm the subject of the talks, that the Mossad director met CIA Director John Ratcliffe in Washington this week.

Assessment: Distrust the symmetry. KAN’s readiness report, Eisenkot’s warning and the opposition’s charge that Netanyahu might strike Iran to stay in office are three different kinds of claim — a leak about a classified decision, an on-the-record political statement, and a partisan allegation — and only the second is a fact about the world. Distrust, too, the idea that the Council’s silence is neutral: the April vetoes mean the body with jurisdiction over navigation in a strait carrying a fifth of global oil has already decided not to decide, which leaves the field to whoever moves. The genuinely new thing this weekend is not a strike or a vote. It is that the IAEA has now put in writing, to member states, that it cannot locate a declared enrichment plant. That sentence removes the one argument a caretaker government would otherwise have to answer — that inspectors have eyes on the programme — at exactly the moment nobody in Jerusalem can say who is authorised to act on it.