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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Why are people saying the attacks were a surprise? It was widely reported the day before that embassies were told to clear out “now!”

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The signs it was possibly soon were pretty strong it's the exact day that wasn't really known.

> US ambassador to Israel tells embassy staff if they want to leave they ‘should do so TODAY’

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/middleeast/us-embassy-israel-...

Friday ^^

That's definitely in the soon camp but I've also seen quite a few of those notices come and go without strikes happening too and rarely the day before, that's not really enough time to get out even if you wanted to.

Maybe slightly unrelated, Would this not heavily tip off Iran that an attack was coming?

Surely that’s easy for Iran to hear about.

It seems weird to know the attack was coming and yet their leader still gets killed.

And what could they do about it? Khamenei has been in hiding since we started moving our armada to centcom after maduro

If it was so obvious, how come you didn’t make a half milion dollars?

More generally, if it was so obvious how come the odds were so long?

If it were so obvious that winning required no insider knowledge the odds should be better.

I agree; exact day was predictable enough for people to place confident-enough bets on. Notices to evacuate non-essential personnel from US military bases, embassies, & consulates in the region also went out 1-2 days prior to Israel's strikes on Iran on June 13, 2025.

My social circle had largely expected that Iran was getting bombed on Saturday or Sunday once the evacuation notices went out Friday, and this intuition was merely from laymen who follow the news. I don't doubt that insider trading was involved as it's the norm with this Admin, but I also don't doubt that many savvy people could've legally placed successful bets.

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