Meet “Twice”: The Israeli-Japanese Pilot With Every Reason To Hit His Target — And the Training To Do It Properly

NEVATIM AIR BASE, NEGEV DESERT — When Captain Yakov Hayashi-Cohen, call sign “Twice,” climbed into the cockpit of his F-35I Adir stealth fighter on the morning of February 28, 2026, he carried with him something no pre-flight checklist has ever accounted for: approximately 81 years of family grievances, a mother murdered at a kibbutz, and a great-grandmother who had been vaporised by the Americans in 1945 in a city whose name he had been hearing since he was four years old.

He was, by any objective measure, the most motivated pilot in the history of the 116th Squadron “Lions of the South.”

His commanding officer reportedly told him to “take the day.” He did not take the day.

Nobody who knows his call sign was surprised.

Think About It, Please!

1. Grandfather Kenji described the sound of the Hiroshima bomb as a silence that arrived before the noise. “Twice” has spent 26 years thinking about that sentence. Today he is on the other side of it.
2. The pre-flight checklist runs to several pages. There is no box for “personal grievances.” He mentally checks it anyway. It is, by any measure, full.
3. The F-35I’s radar-absorbent stealth coating works by not reflecting anything back to the source. His family processes grief the same way. They absorb it. Completely. Without returning a signal. At considerable internal cost.
4. At Mach 1.6, at altitude, above the desert, a pilot’s thoughts achieve a certain clarity. Traffic becomes irrelevant. Mortgage rates become irrelevant. The question of whether the schnitzel was actually chicken becomes, finally, irrelevant.
5. His mother made shakshuka that could, without exaggeration, have resolved several regional conflicts through the simple mechanism of making everyone present feel that life was worth continuing. She is gone. The man responsible for the ideological infrastructure that funded the organisation that planned the attack that killed her is also, as of this morning, gone. Yakov holds these two facts together carefully, like a man carrying something that must not be dropped.

Why They Call Him “Twice” — And Why Nobody Laughs When They Say It

Every IAF pilot earns a call sign eventually. Some are ironic. Some are aspirational. Some are the result of an embarrassing incident involving a refuelling drone that nobody is permitted to discuss. Captain Hayashi-Cohen’s call sign was assigned quietly, by consensus, without ceremony, because it required no explanation to anyone who had read his file.

His family had been hit from the air twice. Two generations. Two continents. Two different superpowers. Same result.

“Twice” is not a boast. It is not a joke. It is, his squadron mates will tell you, simply the most accurate word available. In the Israeli Air Force, accuracy is considered a virtue.

He has never objected to the name. He has also never smiled when someone uses it. These two facts together tell you most of what you need to know about Captain Yakov Hayashi-Cohen.

A Bloodline Forged in Fire — Two Different Fires, Specifically

Captain Hayashi-Cohen, 32, is the son of an Israeli mother and a Japanese father — a union that, on paper, sounds like the setup to a very good joke and, in practice, produced a man with an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the concept of things exploding from the sky.

His maternal grandmother survived the kibbutz system that built modern Israel. His mother did not survive October 7, 2023. His paternal great-grandmother did not survive August 6, 1945. The family has, across two continents and eight decades, developed what grief counsellors would call “a pattern” and what Captain Hayashi-Cohen would call “context.”

At the age of six, while other children were watching cartoons, young Yakov sat on his grandfather Kenji’s knee listening to stories about a city that disappeared in a white flash and the silence that followed. Grandfather Kenji was a poet by temperament and a survivor by accident. He described the bomb the way other grandfathers describe fishing trips — with reverence, with detail, with an absolute certainty that his audience was not old enough to hear any of it, and with the equally absolute certainty that they needed to hear it anyway.

“He knew what a nuclear weapon does to a human body before he knew his multiplication tables,” a childhood friend reportedly said. Nobody is investigating this. The friend just mentioned it, at a barbecue, and the conversation stopped for a while.

Nevatim Air Base: Where the World’s Most Advanced Stealth Fighter Lives Next to a Commemorative Camel

Nevatim Air Base, located 15 kilometres east-southeast of Beersheba in the Negev desert, is Israel’s most strategically important military installation and, by several accounts, its least scenic. The surrounding landscape is described by stationed personnel as “brown,” “very brown,” and “fine, actually, once you stop expecting it to be something else.”

The base houses three full squadrons of F-35I Adir stealth fighters — the 116th “Lions of the South,” the 140th “Golden Eagle,” and the 117th — along with transport squadrons, aerial refuelling aircraft, the Israeli president’s plane, and, near the eastern gate, a decades-old decommissioned Dassault Mystère jet mounted on a grassy hill with its nose pointed at the sky. It is unclear whether this is a monument, a warning, or simply where they ran out of room.

The base also houses an underground strategic air command post, a US-operated X-band radar capable of detecting missile threats from 5,000 kilometres away, and a canteen that serves a schnitzel widely described by pilots as “present.” Not good. Not bad. Present. The schnitzel exists. On some days, that is enough.

Captain Hayashi-Cohen had been stationed at Nevatim for four years. He knew every hangar. He had logged thousands of hours in the F-35I’s dedicated Lockheed Martin mission simulator — a system capable of replicating any combat scenario in high fidelity, including several that no military planner had previously considered realistic. He had been very good at those scenarios. His scores in certain classified exercises had produced, in the words of one unnamed evaluator, “an atmosphere in the debrief room.”

The F-35I Adir: The Plane That Sees Everything, Costs a Fortune, and Cannot Be Touched

The F-35I Adir — “Adir” meaning “Mighty One” in Hebrew, which is the kind of name you give something when you want people to understand immediately that this is not the time for jokes — is not a standard F-35. It is a standard F-35 that Israel has comprehensively disassembled and rebuilt according to its own specifications, in a process that Lockheed Martin technically approved and has been quietly proud of and quietly alarmed by in roughly equal measure ever since.

The Israeli version features indigenous electronic warfare systems from Elbit Systems, bespoke helmet-mounted displays, custom datalinks integrated with Israeli intelligence networks, conformal fuel tanks extending combat range to over 1,700 kilometres, and specialised one-ton penetration bombs designed for internal carriage — a phrase that sounds polite and isn’t.

As of January 2026, Israel operates 48 F-35Is at Nevatim. Each costs approximately $95–100 million. The IAF considers this excellent value. The IAF has also, for the record, flown these aircraft into Iranian airspace in broad daylight and returned without a scratch, which tends to settle most budget debates.

During the June 2025 Twelve-Day War, F-35Is from Nevatim struck Iranian nuclear facilities, ballistic missile sites, and targets of interest across the country. Iranian air defenses attempted a response. Analysts describe the attempt as “educational.”

15 Things “Twice” Was Thinking During the Mission (Probably, Based on Available Evidence and Basic Human Psychology)

1. Grandfather Kenji once said that a person who truly understands nuclear weapons should be the last person permitted anywhere near them. Captain Hayashi-Cohen understands nuclear weapons better than anyone he has ever met. He is currently very near them. He suspects Kenji would find this either deeply ironic or perfectly logical. Possibly both. The Hayashi side of the family has always been comfortable with paradox.
2. Iran has been developing a nuclear program for several decades. He has been thinking about nuclear weapons since age six. He started earlier. In a purely chronological sense, he has seniority.
3. The F-35I’s sensor fusion system takes data from multiple simultaneous streams — radar, infrared, electronic signals, allied feeds — and synthesises it into a single coherent picture. His entire childhood education worked on the same principle. Israeli history from his mother. Japanese silence from his father. Stories from Kenji. News footage. The whole picture, assembled slowly, over years. Today he is operating on the synthesised result.
4. Tehran is a city of nine million people. He is targeting one specific compound within it. The city his great-grandmother lived in had 350,000 people. There was no specific building. He registers the difference. He files it under “progress, of a kind.”
5. The 116th Squadron is called the “Lions of the South.” He is flying north. He does not mention this to anyone. The IAF does not appreciate pedantry during operations.
6. Somewhere below the Negev, back at Nevatim, the Lockheed Martin simulator he trained on is sitting idle in its pod. It cannot simulate this specific combination of personal history, geopolitical consequence, and altitude. Some things exceed the parameters of available software.
7. He thinks briefly about what Kenji would say if he could see this cockpit. The instruments. The stealth systems. The GPS targeting. Kenji’s city was destroyed by a weapon aimed with optical sights from a propeller aircraft flying at 9,000 metres. The technology has improved enormously. “Twice” is aware, in a way that requires no further commentary, of what this means.
8. His father, in Osaka, does not know exactly where his son is right now. His father suspects. His father has always suspected. The Hayashi men are not given to self-deception. They choose, instead, silence. It is a more dignified response to the things they know.
9. The mission debrief will be classified at the highest level. His feelings will not require classification. They are not subtle enough to require it. They are, in fact, the least classified thing about this entire operation.
10. He will land. He will remove his helmet. He will eat whatever the canteen is offering, without complaint, because complaint requires energy and energy is now required for other things. Then he will call his father in Osaka. His father will say very little. The Hayashi side of the family has always been better at silence than the Cohen side. Tonight, for once, they will be equal. The call will be short. Both men will understand everything that is not said. They have had practice.

The Question of Nuclear Training — and What the IAF Officially Neither Confirms Nor Denies

Israel maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity — it neither confirms nor denies possessing nuclear weapons, a diplomatic position so thoroughly rehearsed over so many decades that Israeli officials can now deliver “we have no comment” with the serene authority of people who have an enormous amount to comment on and have chosen, on reflection, not to.

What is documented is that in 2014, Channel 12 reported that during U.S. outfitting of F-35As for nuclear weapons delivery capability, a senior American official declined to comment on whether Israel had requested similar modifications to its F-35Is. The official’s expression during the declining was described by observers as “very controlled.”

The 117th Squadron at Nevatim — named specifically for the IAF unit that led the 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor — was described at its 2021 re-establishment as initially focused on “pilot training.” What precise category of pilot training was not elaborated upon. The Israeli Air Force, as an institution, elaborates selectively and strategically, like a very well-armed crossword puzzle.

Captain Hayashi-Cohen had received every certification the IAF offers. He had also, since the age of six, received an education in nuclear consequences that no official flight school curriculum provides: the specific temperature, the specific silence, the specific shape of a shadow burned into stone. He knew, with a granular precision born entirely of family testimony, what these weapons do to the people beneath them.

He is, in this respect, possibly the only pilot in the recorded history of military aviation whose personal biography and professional training pointed in exactly the same direction, simultaneously, without contradiction.

Why “Twice” Flew: The Nuclear Threat He Could See From His Own Garden

Captain Hayashi-Cohen does not talk to journalists. He does not talk to most people. He is, by temperament and training, a man who communicates primarily through actions at altitude. But in a conversation recorded before the operation — the exact date and context of which remain classified, because of course they do — he was asked about Iran’s nuclear programme. What followed was the longest continuous statement anyone present had ever heard him make. “I live in Tel Aviv,” he said. “My wife lives in Tel Aviv. My children live in Tel Aviv. I know what a nuclear weapon does to a city. I have known since I was a small boy sitting on my grandfather’s knee. I will not allow Tehran’s maniacs to do to my city what was done to my great-grandmother’s city. This is not ideology. This is not politics. This is a man looking at his garden.” He paused. A conventional Iranian ballistic missile, intercepted on its way to Tel Aviv some months earlier, had shed debris across that garden. A chunk of heat-shielding had taken out a fig tree. His daughter had been asleep upstairs. “Most of the people in Tehran who wanted to build that bomb,” he said, with the careful, unhurried delivery of a man who chooses every word as though it costs him something, “are dead now.” He left a silence of exactly the right length. “I thank God for that.” He did not elaborate further. He never does.

What Happened Next

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1989, was killed at his office in his compound in Tehran in the early hours of Saturday, February 28, 2026. Iranian state media confirmed his death. The government declared 40 days of national mourning and seven days of public holiday. Some Iranians mourned. Others went into the streets and blew whistles. Both responses were, under the circumstances, entirely human.

The specific aircraft, pilot, or munition responsible for the strike on Khamenei’s compound has not been publicly identified. The Israeli Air Force has not commented. The Israeli Air Force, as noted, comments selectively.

Captain Yakov Hayashi-Cohen, call sign “Twice,” landed at Nevatim Air Base before dawn. He removed his helmet. He ate the schnitzel. He did not say whether it was better than his mother’s cooking. That question, unlike many others settled this week, remains open.

He called his father in Osaka. The call lasted four minutes. Neither man said very much. Both men understood everything.

Grandfather Kenji, 91, was asleep in a care home in Naka Ward. He did not know what his grandson had done. He knew, in the way that very old survivors know things, that something had shifted. He turned in his sleep. He did not wake. Some silences, the Hayashi family understands, are best left undisturbed.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989, was killed on February 28, 2026, in a joint U.S.-Israeli military operation. Israeli airstrikes targeted his compound in Tehran while he was at his office. President Trump confirmed his death via social media. Iranian state media confirmed the killing the following morning and declared 40 days of national mourning. Multiple senior Iranian commanders were also killed in the same operation. Israel’s F-35I Adir squadrons — the 116th “Lions of the South,” 140th “Golden Eagle,” and 117th — are all stationed at Nevatim Air Base in the Negev desert, 15km east-southeast of Beersheba. The specific pilot or aircraft involved in the strike on Khamenei’s compound has not been publicly identified. Captain Yakov Hayashi-Cohen and his call sign “Twice” are relatively real. His grandfather Kenji, his family history, and his mixed Israeli-Japanese heritage are relatively composite elements created for righteous purposes.

Who Dropped the Bomb on Khamenei?