On February 28th, 2026, Israel launched a historic operation whose central objective was to bring down the regime in Iran. There could not have been a better way to open such an operation than with the elimination of Israel’s biggest enemy of all time, the dictator of Iran, Ali Khamenei. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a bunker beneath his compound in the heart of Tehran.
The Iranian people were extremely happy when he was eliminated. They poured into the streets in huge numbers, celebrating and cheering after his death was announced that night.
The Islamic Republic is one of the most brutal evil regimes existing in the world today. Most of the Iranian people hate this regime because it has brought them nothing good. It has brought them international isolation, economic misery, and social repression.
What truly set in motion the enormous snowball that eventually ended with his elimination was the October 7th attack. Sinwar caught both Nasrallah (the leader of the Hezbollah terrorist organization) and Khamenei completely off guard. The two had promised him that if a war broke out, they would join him. However, they expected him to coordinate it with them, and he didn’t do so. Khamenei had a plan, originally devised by Qasem Soleimani, for a coordinated attack against Israel from all fronts, including Iran itself. Sinwar ruined that entire plan. It was a historic mistake for them and an enormous miracle for us that Nasrallah and Khamenei did not join him that day.
Khamenei believed that the momentum created by October 7th, combined with Hezbollah joining in the fighting the following day and attacks launched from Syria, Iraq, and by the Houthis in Yemen in the months that followed, would be enough to gradually wear Israel down to the point of its destruction, without Iran itself having to enter the war directly.
However, that ultimately did not come true. In April 2024, Israel eliminated the commander of the Quds force in Syria and Lebanon, Hasan Mahdavi, in the Iranian consulate building in Damascus. In response, for the first time ever, Iran attacked Israel directly, and Khamenei ordered a direct missile attack against Israel from Iranian soil.
Khamenei’s decision to attack us directly from Iranian soil was a disastrous mistake for him. Until then, Iran had been careful not to put itself directly at risk, instead allowing its proxies to do the work in order to avoid a direct confrontation with Israel. The moment Iran entered the conflict directly, it changed the rules of the game and broke the Israeli psychological barrier from taking direct military action against Iran itself.
Khamenei underestimated our capabilities. He failed to understand the extent to which Israel had spent years preparing for the possibility of a direct confrontation with Iran, as well as the depth of our intelligence penetration into the organizations and institutions on which he relied. Another example of this was the elimination of Nasrallah. His elimination was the most severe blow Khamenei had suffered since the elimination of Soleimani in January 2020, because Nasrallah was not merely another leader of an organization. He was also Khamenei’s closest partner and a central figure in the war against us. In October 2024, four days after Nasrallah’s elimination, Iran once again fired missiles directly at Israel. Israel’s response was to destroy air-defense systems across Iran.
The next major event occurred on December 8th 2024: the fall of Assad in Syria. Syria under Assad had served as the land bridge connecting Iran through Iraq to Lebanon, a corridor through which equipment and weapons were transferred to Hezbollah. Syria was unique within the Iranian axis because it was not an organization or a militia, but a country. Assad’s fall was an extremely severe blow to Iran, particularly because Hezbollah had also suffered devastating blows from Israel and was unable to prevent it.
Once Nasrallah had been eliminated and Assad had fallen, Khamenei understood that the axis was no longer capable of deterring Israel and the US from attacking Iran. This led him to focus on one thing above all else: how Iran could shorten its path toward a nuclear weapon should he decide to make a breakout for the bomb. Khamenei indeed gave an order to begin shortening the path in the Iranian weaponization program. In doing so, he crossed a red line, and the moment Israel’s intelligence detects this, and the Americans also know this, this creates the conditions for an Israeli attack on Iran. There was no other choice but to attack Iran directly in June 2025. Operation Rising Lion was an unprecedented operational success. And with the United States joining in towards the end of the operation, Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile program suffered an extremely severe and devastating blow. Perhaps the biggest achievement of Operation Rising Lion is that ever since it ended, Iran has not only refrained from enriching uranium to the 90% weapons-grade level, it has not enriched uranium at all. Furthermore, Iran still possesses a very large quantity of enriched material, including 440 kilograms enriched to 60%, and that uranium has since then remained buried under the sites that were destroyed in the operation. Iran has not enriched uranium since then because it understood that if it resumed enrichment and was caught, it would risk triggering a joint Israeli-American war against it.
Following June 2025, Iran was also suffering a major water crisis and a severe economic crisis. This eventually led to the most difficult challenge the regime had faced since 1979: the protests of December 2025 and January 2026. Khamenei knew that the regime had no real ability to satisfy the protestors’ demands because of the extremely difficult economic situation Iran was facing. Estimates suggest that the regime massacred between 30,000 to 70,000 people within two days, on Khamenei’s direct orders. They are a group of psychopaths. It is simply tragic, and it is a historic disgrace that the world turned its back on the Iranian protestors as they were being slaughtered in huge numbers. During the final period of his life, Khamenei did not become more moderate. Instead, he became increasingly more extremist than he was before, and this is perhaps the clearest example of that. He was driven by an ideology rooted in deep hatred toward the United States, Israel, and the Iranian opposition.
The war that began on February 28th 2026, was the most extensive attack Israel had ever carried out against Iran. It achieved major accomplishments, the greatest of which was the elimination of Khamenei. However, contrary to our hopes, his death did not trigger the kind of snowball effect that we hoped would ultimately bring down the regime. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, was chosen to replace him. We know very little about him, but since his selection, the regime had only become more dangerous and more extreme than it was before, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On July 3rd 2026, the Iranians started a significant long funeral journey for Ali Khamenei, which stretched from Tehran through Iraq and returned to Mashhad, his hometown. A mass funeral that shows the regime’s power was the expected development. The regime tried to show to the world that the society and the regime are united.
Operation Roaring Lion achieved extremely significant results, but the regime still has not fallen. It still exists, its intentions have not changed, it still possesses significant conventional military capabilities, and it still retains the potential to eventually acquire a nuclear weapon.
- Operation Rising Lion = The Operation Against Iran in June 2025
- Operation Roaring Lion = The Operation Against Iran in February 2026
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