The annual Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Military Intelligence assessment shared with decision-makers at the start of each year and presented to the public on Jan. 14 has never been vaguer. Even senior intelligence officials conceded the difficulties and virtual impossibility of issuing a sober threat and development assessment these days with any reasonable degree of accuracy. “The pace of events occurring in the region is dizzying, surprise follows surprise and decision-making is not rational the way it was in the past,” a former senior intelligence source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

Indeed, the past year has been marked by dramatic surprises, culminating in the reverberating Jan. 3 assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who engineered the expansion of the Shiite axis in the region. “The US willingness to assassinate a key figure such as Soleimani surprised the Iranians,” an Israeli intelligence official told Al-Monitor this week on condition of anonymity. “On the other hand, Iran’s September 2019 strike on the Saudi oil infrastructure, its magnitude and precision, surprised the Americans, the Saudis and everyone in the West. God only knows what surprises await us as 2020 proceeds.”

The headline of the official assessment by the Military Intelligence Directorate for 2020 still focuses on Iran’s nuclear arms race. By the end of the year, the intelligence experts believe, Iran will have sufficient enriched uranium to manufacture one nuclear bomb. According to Israel’s assessment, Iran continues to gradually withdraw from the nuclear agreement with world powers, which could result in its collapse. There is a possibility that the Europeans, too, will exit the agreement later this year, depriving it of any content, and Iran will be able to quickly resume its nuclear program at full speed, the report’s authors noted.

Having said that, the issue that mostly troubles Israeli security officials is not expressed publicly. Rather, it is shared with decision-makers at closed security Cabinet meetings. This unanswered question is whether Iran has a clandestine channel enabling it to install the nuclear warhead it manufactures on a missile and turn overnight into an immune nuclear power. Israel’s Mossad is intensely focused on locating and exposing such clandestine channels, of the type revealed in the past in what was known as Iran’s “weapons group” that devoted itself to developing the country’s nuclear infrastructure.