TEL AVIV: As U.S. and Israeli military commanders met to map out war with Iran, they deliberated over how to divide responsibility for an array of targets, including missile batteries, military bases and nuclear sites, the Washington Post reported.
It was clear from the outset, however, that one grim mission would belong to Israel: hunting and killing Iran’s leaders.
Israel has pursued this assignment with ruthless efficiency, killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening salvo of the war and more than 250 other “senior Iranian officials” since, according to a count maintained by the Israeli military. The latest blow came Thursday when Israel said it had killed the naval commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The decapitation campaign relies on an assassination apparatus that Israel spent decades building but transformed over the past several years to achieve new levels of lethal proficiency, according to senior Israeli military and intelligence officials.
The officials cited a proliferation of sources and surveillance capabilities inside Iran — regime insiders recruited to spy for Israel as well as cyber-penetrations of thousands of targets including street cameras, payment platforms and internet choke points that Iran installed to impose communication blackouts on its citizens. These and other streams of data are being scoured by what Israeli officials described as a new, classified artificial intelligence platform programmed to extract clues to leaders’ lives and movements.
Israel’s targeted killing tactics — bombs planted months before being detonated, drones capable of slipping into apartment windows and supersonic missiles fired from stealth fighter jets — have been honed by years of conflict in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Asked why the mission of targeting Iran’s leaders was assigned to Israel, a senior Israeli security official cited its experience and expertise, saying: “There was a need to target them. And we could do it.”
Less clear, however, is whether the ongoing decapitation campaign will enable Israel to achieve its core war objectives: eradicating the threat of Iran’s missiles and proxy forces, blocking its path to a nuclear weapon, and weakening the regime to the point that it could be toppled.
So far, those goals seem elusive. Those killed often have been replaced by more militant subordinates, and street protests have failed to materialise amid continued U.S.-Israeli bombing and fears of a regime crackdown. Senior Israeli officials described the regime in Iran as battered but resilient, stable and feeling triumphant after withstanding a month of strikes by two of the world’s most powerful militaries.
Some experts worry that Israel’s growing proficiency at targeted killings, even when conducted with precision, is creating a dynamic of dependency on assassinations and a tendency to expand the boundaries of who can be targeted. “We have taken it too far in terms of making it into a strategy as opposed to an occasional operational necessity,” said Ariel Levite, a nuclear policy and Israeli security expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The divisions of labor in the current conflict create the impression that “the United States has relied on Israel to do the dirty jobs in the war,” Levite said, with the United States seeming to adopt a stance of “we can’t kill them, but we’ll be more than happy if you do.”
A U.S. official familiar with operations of the campaign said that Israel’s responsibility for leadership strikes reflects an arrangement in which “we’re working together but we have our own objectives.” U.S. officials said the division of duties reflects each side’s capabilities and not any legal impediments. The United States previously has carried out targeted killings of its own, including the 2020 assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
