Israel Moves Toward Regime Change in Iran
As Iranian television showed the building in the capital city burning and the on-air anchor fleeing smoke and falling debris, defense minister Israel Katz vowed, “We will strike the Iranian dictator everywhere.”
In a Hebrew-language press conference later on Monday, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu named Iran’s “totalitarian broadcast station” among a number of “leadership centers and, critically, regime-related targets” that Israel had struck, adding that there were “additional sites you’ll hear about soon.”
“This is a very weak regime. It now understands how weak it is,” he said. “I don’t know if the change will come tomorrow, or the day after, or in a week—but we could see many changes in Iran.”
On ABC News on Monday and Fox News on Sunday, Netanyahu declined to rule out Israeli action to promote regime change, including the potential assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Netanyahu told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that targeting Khamenei “would end the conflict” and that Israel was “doing what we need to do.”
Regime change is not among the war goals that Israel’s security cabinet approved ahead of the campaign, which Israel launched with a surprise assault on Friday, but decision-makers are nonetheless increasingly debating how aggressively to pursue such an outcome, according to current and former Israeli officials.
According to Ohad Tal, a Knesset member from the Religious Zionism party who sits on the powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Israel has five official goals for the campaign: to degrade Iran’s nuclear capabilities, dismantle its ballistic missile infrastructure, prevent its plans to destroy Israel, create conditions to end its nuclear program altogether, and minimize civilian casualties.
“Regime change is not in the official goals of the war. But unofficially, I think that’s what everybody hopes for,” Tal said. “If you really want to get rid of the nuclear program, you have to take down the regime. Otherwise, you’re just postponing their ability to go back to develop the program.”
Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military official who has advised the government during the past 20-plus months of war with Iran and its terrorist affiliates, said “there is serious consideration of toppling the regime completely and creating the terms for the Iranian people to rise up and take over the country.”
Asked how Israel might encourage regime change, Avivi said, “Kill the leadership—all of them.”
Yossi Kuperwasser, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer and one-time director general of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, confirmed that targeting Iran’s leadership is “something that may be on the table.” But, he said, “I don’t think there was any specific attempt to do it.”
Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli major general and former national security adviser to Netanyahu, cautioned that Israel has limited ability to determine who rules Iran.
“Israel can shake the regime and make it much weaker. Israel cannot produce an opposition,” he said. “It is beyond our capacity.”
Amidror, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, noted that even as Israel has broadened its strikes on regime-linked targets in Iran, nearly all of them have had a military link.
On Sunday, for example, an Israeli strike on the Mashad Airport hit a refueling plane, and an electronics factory that Israel reportedly destroyed in the central city of Shiraz produced radar and other equipment for Iran’s military, according to a U.S.-based watchdog.
Still, Israel’s strikes appeared designed in part to further discredit the mullahs in the eyes of the Iranian public. Israel’s evacuation warning to much of Tehran ahead of Monday’s strike on the public broadcaster was “part of a pre-approved plan to exert pressure on the regime … in response to the firing on the Israeli home front,” a security source said, referring to Iran’s daily missile attacks on Israeli cities. As of Monday afternoon, the military said, Iran had launched over 370 ballistic missiles, killing 24 people and injuring 592, mostly in central and southern Israel.
In strikes on Iranian infrastructure over the weekend, Israel focused on sites that served the domestic power grid, analysts said. Eran Efrat, a well-connected Israeli energy entrepreneur, said the goal was evidently to “make the day-to-day life of the normal Iranian person impossible, and maybe push the people to the streets” without causing a spike in global energy prices.
“It’s 100 percent focused on the domestic market. We didn’t even start to touch the production or export side,” Efrat said. “That’s a signal—we know what we’re doing.”
Israel has been able to ramp up pressure on the mullahs as a result of its unexpected degree of early success in taking out Iran’s air defense and ballistic missile systems, according to current and former officials. Israel began planning the strikes in December, shortly after the collapse of the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon and Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, both of which were backed by Iran.
“Israel now has air dominance over Tehran,” Netanyahu said during his Monday press conference. “We’ve paved an aerial highway to Tehran. We control the skies above the capital.”
Netanyahu also said Israel had eliminated 10 senior nuclear scientists, with more still being targeted, and had launched a “very serious strike” on Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. He added that Israel had destroyed sites where Iran manufactures centrifuges and a uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, which he described as “critical for breaking through to nuclear weapons capability.” The military, he said, was continuing to “systematically destroy nuclear targets.”
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi on Monday largely confirmed Netanyahu’s account, saying Israeli strikes had severely damaged almost all enrichment machines at Natanz and destroyed key uranium metal production equipment at Isfahan.
Netanyahu sidestepped questions about how far Israel had set back Iran’s nuclear program and whether U.S. bunker buster bombs would be needed to finish the job, particularly at the Fordow enrichment facility, buried deep inside a mountain near the city of Qom. The military confirmed that Israel has yet to strike the facility.
Israel may not have the capability to destroy Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear facilities by air, current and former Israeli officials acknowledged. They said Israel would use other means if necessary but that it would be much faster and less costly for the United States to drop bunker busters on the sites.
Tal said that even if Israeli munitions cannot fully penetrate Fordow and some other Iranian nuclear sites, Israel could “block the entrances” and “make it impossible to operate” the sites.
“There are ways to neutralize without total destruction,” he said.
Avivi, the head of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, an influential advocacy group, assessed that the United States could end the war with a single bombing run by B-52 bombers stationed at the U.S. Diego Garcia Navy base in the Indian Ocean.
“We know the exact coordinates of Fordow. One bomb from one U.S. bomber could eliminate the threat,” he said. “If we don’t get support now, the campaign will be longer, bloodier, and more dangerous.”
“I don’t understand what they’re waiting for,” Kuperwasser said. “The Americans are always saying they don’t want a nuclear Iran. Well, now is the time to prove it. We did the hard part. There’s no excuse not to act.”
Tal expressed confidence that the United States would ultimately intervene.
“I just have a feeling they’ll do it. They can’t afford to let us do everything alone. Not at this stage,” he said. “They need to show they’re still the superpower here. This is the moment. We opened the door. They just need to walk through.”
On Monday night, Trump abruptly left the G-7 Summit in Canada to focus on the Middle East. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump echoed Netanyahu’s recent rejection of a ceasefire with Iran saying the United States wanted “better than a cease-fire. An end. A real end. … Or [the regime] giving up entirely. That’s OK too.”
Originally published in the Washington Free Beacon.