“Operation Roaring Lion” against Iranian nuclear sites fulfilled the Jewish state’s promise to prevent a second Holocaust, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday night.

Had the Israeli and U.S. militaries failed to act, “the names Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan and Parchin might have been remembered eternally in infamy, just like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor,” the prime minister said in Hebrew remarks aired during the state ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah), which was held via a prerecorded broadcast due to the tenuous ceasefire with Tehran.

“In the Holocaust, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg wrote: ‘We were an extinct people like a wild beast in a hunt.’ In contrast, today, our people fight back against our oppressors. During the Holocaust, we were an abused animal crying in agony. Today, however, we have a state which is stronger than ever, which roars with power,” declared Netanyahu.