Israeli and U.S. military intelligence had long watched and waited for a rare opportunity: senior political and military leaders in Iran holding a meeting—where they could all be killed at once.
The day finally came Saturday.
Intelligence officers had identified not just one meeting but three, Israeli officials said. And they had a fix on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top decision maker and spiritual leader.
The moment was so unique that
U.S. and Israeli warplanes struck in full daylight. Israeli jets dropped 30 bombs on Khamenei’s compound leaving it scorched and shattered. President Trump said
the Iranian leader was killed in the strike.
Israel also said it had killed a number of other top political and military officials including Ali Shamkhani, a top security adviser to Khamenei; Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; and Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh.
The attacks once again highlighted the capabilities of Israel’s intelligence services and its ability to catch its enemies vulnerable and unaware.
“Everybody waited for a target at midnight, when there is cover of darkness,” said Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence, adding that Israel struck late at night at the start of its surprise attack on Iran last June.
The daylight attack, he said, “was a tactical surprise.”
Iran hasn’t said whether Khamenei is dead, but if confirmed, the ayatollah’s killing would be a remarkable capstone on more than two years of war in which Israel has also killed the top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, indirectly precipitated the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, and created the most severe crisis for Iran’s regime in its half-century in power.
But it also ushers in a period of uncertainty and possible instability that alarms other Persian Gulf governments, and reveals an ambition for regime change that has led to frustrating failures for prior American administrations. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged Iranians to rise up and take control of their country. Few activists or analysts say there is a clear path for them to do so.
Iran retaliated by striking at targets not only in Israel but across the Persian Gulf, with explosions in Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar—countries that aren’t usually caught up in the region’s wars. Israeli air defenses intercepted missiles over northern Israel, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Israel and the U.S. said they were continuing to carry out strikes. Officials said they could be heavy for days.
“This fateful operation will continue as long as necessary, and it requires patience,” Netanyahu said.
In the lead-up to the campaign, Israel’s military brass had been flying in and out of Washington to plan the offensive, including its top general, air-force chief, head of military intelligence and Mossad director. Netanyahu met with Trump in December at the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where they agreed publicly that military action would be justified if Iran persisted in its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and met with him again in early February at the White House.
Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence was gathering targets in Iran and sharing them with the U.S., Israeli officials said.
The Iranian government’s precarious hold on power came into focus with an outbreak of protests that started in late December and spread quickly around the country. Trump warned he would intervene if Iran killed protesters and came close to ordering a strike in mid-January, but his advisers convinced him the U.S. didn’t have enough firepower in the region.
Trump ordered the largest buildup of American firepower in the Middle East in two decades, dispatching two aircraft carriers, about a dozen destroyers and a host of advanced fighter planes to the seas and bases around Iran.
At the same time, the president reopened a diplomatic track, saying he would rather cut a deal than attack. The U.S. team pushed tough demands—Iran would have to dismantle its nuclear facilities, turn over its stockpile of uranium and give up nuclear enrichment, none of which were acceptable to Iran.
Iran appeared to show an openness to compromises that it had rejected outright in the past.
But one of its latest proposals would have left Iran with thousands of advanced centrifuges and permitted Iran to enrich uranium as much as 20%—far in excess of the initial caps on Iran’s nuclear program under
the 2015 nuclear deal.
The Iranian position wasn’t anywhere close to the token enrichment program the U.S. was willing to consider, U.S. officials said.
Trump got on the phone Thursday with his two envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, U.S. officials said. They told him the talks had gone badly: Tehran wasn’t willing to end its nuclear enrichment or dismantle its missile program, the officials said.
That further confirmed for Trump that he had one option left, the officials said. The U.S. also had intelligence that Iran considered attacking American targets before Trump authorized strikes, a senior administration official said, adding a sense of urgency to the president’s decision. U.S. casualties and damage to American interests would be higher unless the U.S. moved first, the senior official said.
The attack began just before 10 a.m. Iran time with enormous waves of missiles and jets. By evening, about 200 Israeli fighters had struck close to 500 different targets, in the largest single air campaign in Israel’s history, the Israeli military said.
U.S. forces struck hundreds of targets of their own and defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Israeli strikes focused on high-value officials and Iran’s missile capabilities, while the U.S. attacks went after missile infrastructure and military targets, people familiar with the matter said.
In parallel with the strikes, Israel hit Iran with broad cyberattacks that targeted media and phone apps with messages calling on Iranians to rise up against their government, said people familiar with the matter.
Israel hacked an app that helps Muslims track prayer times and is used widely in Iran, causing it to send messages calling on Iran’s armed forces to defect and telling the population that “help has arrived.”
The state news agency IRNA was also hacked. One message on its front page referred to the unfolding strikes, calling it “A terrifying hour for the security forces of the Ayatollahs’ regime; the IRGC and the Basij have suffered a crippling blow.”
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