It was the most explicit assessment yet of how the government sees events unfolding in the aftermath of an Israeli attack.
Matan Vilnai, stepping down as the "home front" cabinet minister to become Israel's ambassador to China, described the scenarios to Israel's Maariv daily.
Vilnai, a retired general who was deputy military chief of staff, has spent the last five years overseeing upgrades of Israel's civil defense systems, including air-raid sirens, bomb shelters, and a public alert system.
"The home front is ready as never before," Vilnai said. Nonetheless, he said the country must be braced for heavy casualties in the case of conflict.
Vilnai said the government had prepared for the possibility of hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths.
"It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be there will be more," he said. ". . . The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts."
A sharper tone
Dozens of Israelis crowded in front of a storefront at a Jerusalem shopping mall this week to pick up new gas masks, part of civil defense preparations."Our leaders seem to have gotten very hawkish in their speeches, and this time it seems they mean what they say," said Yoram Lands, a professor of business administration, who was picking up new masks for himself and his wife.
"It seems that [top Israeli leaders] are making a special effort now to prepare the Israeli public for an attack on Iran," said Shlomo Brom, a former commander of the army's Strategic Planning Division. In the past, rhetoric was directed at pushing the international community to take stronger action against Iran, Brom said.
Israel is convinced Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, dismissing Tehran's claims that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. Israel considers nuclear-armed Iran to be a mortal danger. Iran backs anti-Israel extremists with funds and weapons, and its leaders often call for Israel's destruction.
'Religious duty'
In his latest pronouncement, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said Israel will disappear from "the scene of geography." Addressing war veterans in Tehran on Wednesday, he said Iran considered it its "religious duty to save this Islamic country [Palestine] from the clutches of the Zionist occupiers."Vilnai, who is being replaced by a former internal security service chief, Avi Dichter, did not elaborate on how he reached his casualty assessments, but his office relies on intelligence and other assessments about Iranian weapons capabilities and Israeli susceptibility.
At a news briefing in Washington on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta reaffirmed the U.S. assessment that Israel had not decided whether to strike.
At a breakfast in Washington on Wednesday, Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, also sounded a warning. "Diplomacy hasn't succeeded," he said. "We've come to a very critical juncture where important decisions do have to be made."
This article contains information from Bloomberg News.
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