Benjamin Netanyahu has spent most of his career pledging to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. On Saturday, the Israeli prime minister and US President Donald Trump embarked on a bigger campaign: overthrowing the regime of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
At about mid-morning in Tehran, US and Israeli forces launched a wave of strikes across Iran, targeting military and intelligence assets as well as numerous high-ranking officials including Khamenei in an operation likely to have huge ramifications for the entire Middle East.
Within hours of the US-Israeli strikes, Iran had launched hundreds of missiles at Israel as well as US bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, halting flights and plunging the region into a new, unpredictable conflict.
“This is the biggest decision of Netanyahu’s career,” said Nadav Shtrauchler, a political strategist who has previously advised the Israeli prime minister. “This is a crucial day in the history of Israel and the history of Benjamin Netanyahu as a leader.”
Trump had been threatening to intervene in Iran since huge protests against the regime erupted in January, ordering the biggest US military build-up in the region since the Iraq war more than two decades ago and threatening strikes if Tehran did not agree to curb its nuclear programme.
But analysts and former officials said Netanyahu had played an important role in ensuring that when Trump did decide to intervene, he went for the maximalist option of regime change rather than settling for the lesser options favoured by some of his advisers.
“I think Netanyahu has had a huge role in this,” said one former senior US official, referring to the Israeli prime minister’s frantic efforts in recent weeks to convince Trump to take action and to broaden his objectives beyond thwarting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Netanyahu “flew over to Washington in a hurry two weeks ago when he thought that Trump may cut a deal not dissimilar to what the [Joe] Biden guys did with the JCPOA,” said the former official, referring to the Iran nuclear deal.
“He freaked himself out and went up there to convince everyone: [Iran] can have no ballistic missiles and they can have no nuclear programme,” the former official said.
Israel knew both demands would sink the negotiations, making a military confrontation more likely “because the Iranian regime is never going to accept that. They would rather die than accept that. And that’s the [Israelis’] calculation,” the official said.
However, others played down the ability of anyone to dictate terms to Trump.
“[Trump’s] the commander-in-chief, he decided to attack. Israel doesn’t have everyone wrapped around their finger,” said Zohar Palti, former head of intelligence at the Mossad spy agency now at the Washington Institute think-tank.
Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran and Venezuela during his first term, said: “This is such a big decision for Trump, and a risky decision that I find it hard to believe any foreign leader could significantly influence him.”
The US-Israeli operation is the second time in barely nine months that the two countries have attacked Iran after Israel and the Islamic republic fought a 12-day war last year that the US briefly joined, sending B-2 bombers to target Tehran’s nuclear sites.
Israel’s attack last year began with a blistering opening salvo that caught Iran off guard, with Israeli forces killing more than a dozen senior military officials and nuclear scientists.
Saturday’s assault, which a person familiar with the operation said had been planned for “months”, appeared to follow a similar pattern. The Israeli military said the opening salvo had simultaneously targeted several locations in Tehran, following an intensive effort by its military intelligence to identify when senior Iranian political and military officials would meet.
It added the decision to strike in daylight, rather than at night, had also been taken in order to surprise Iran’s leadership for a second time.
Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, a right-wing, pro-Israel advocacy group, said the US and Israel had been co-ordinating a weeks-long deception operation meant to trick the Iranian regime into believing that an attack was not imminent.
“Limited releases” by the Americans “saying that there is still US air power that is on its way to the region” was part of that campaign, Roman said, citing recent conversations with US officials.
Senior US officials on Saturday said Trump made his decision to attack after US negotiators returned from Thursday’s talks in Geneva having concluded that Iran was determined to keep enriching so that it could ultimately make a nuclear bomb.
Donald Trump on Saturday afternoon said Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is “dead”. The US president announced the news on his Truth Social platform after “massive” joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran on Saturday.
“If Khamenei was indeed killed, [the Iranians] apparently missed yet again the ability [of their enemies] to combine precise intelligence regarding location at a specific time with significant penetration capabilities,” said Raz Zimmt, a former Israeli military intelligence officer now at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies.
Palti, the former Mossad official, said that if Khamenei had been killed then that would be “by definition” a positive “change in the regime”.
However, other former officials cautioned that even if Khamenei had perished in the strikes, the goal of regime change that Trump and Netanyahu had set themselves would still be a huge undertaking, given how deeply entrenched Iran’s military and security apparatus is.
“It is going to be really, really ugly and time-consuming and expensive and complicated. And hopefully the American people are ready for this,” said the former senior US official.
Shtrauchler said it was also too soon to divine what the operation would mean for Netanyahu’s political future but that it was possible he could choose to bring forward elections due in October if the campaign was successful.
“This was his number one mission,” Shtrauchler said. “He was waiting for this, he was working towards it for so many years. And now it is happening. But regarding the impact [on Netanyahu’s domestic fortunes] what matters is the way it will end, not the way it started.”