Israel working to topple Iran, says Netanyahu, calling regime’s collapse inevitable

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicts Islamic Republic’s collapse, saying the regime “will fall.”

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is actively working to bring down Iran’s government, declaring that the Islamic Republic’s regime will ultimately collapse and suggesting Israeli forces remain prepared to strike deep inside the country again.

In an interview with i24NEWS aired Wednesday, Netanyahu described Iran as the center of the regional network Israel has spent years fighting and said the campaign against Tehran remains unfinished.

“Our pilots were there and can be there at any moment,” Netanyahu said. He later added: “We will defeat this regime. It will fall. We will bring it down.”

Netanyahu said Israel’s security and intelligence organizations were operating under his direction toward defeating the Iranian government, marking one of his clearest public statements yet that regime change in Tehran is now an Israeli objective.

The comments came as renewed fighting between the United States and Iran has sharply escalated after a month of relative calm.

US forces this week carried out strikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard air-defense systems, radar installations, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities and communications facilities.

Iran responded with missile and drone attacks on US positions and regional allies, including targets in Jordan, Bahrain and Iraq.

Netanyahu has so far stopped short of announcing renewed Israeli participation in the latest round of US-Iran fighting.

But Israel’s military has remained on heightened alert, and an Israeli security source said this week the Air Force could reopen an attack corridor into Iran on short notice.

Speaking separately during a visit to a hesder yeshiva in Sderot on Wednesday, Netanyahu warned Tehran against expanding the fighting to Israel, saying an Iranian attack would be “one of their last decisions.”

Netanyahu noted that Iran has recently targeted other countries and US forces while refraining from directly attacking Israel.

“They are attacking and threatening everyone, but not here,” he said.

The prime minister’s latest language represents a further hardening of his public position on the future of the Iranian government.

During the opening weeks of the war in March, Netanyahu said there was no guarantee that Iran’s government would collapse, arguing that outside military pressure could create an opportunity for Iranians but could not determine whether they would ultimately overthrow their rulers.

By June, however, Netanyahu was arguing that the US-Israeli campaign had weakened the Islamic Republic enough to make its eventual collapse possible.

“I think we created the conditions for its future fall,” Netanyahu said at the time, portraying the overthrow of the regime by the Iranian public as the ultimate measure of victory.

In a July interview, Netanyahu went further, saying the conflict could end either with the Iranian government being toppled or with Tehran becoming sufficiently weakened that it abandoned its nuclear program. He also vowed that Israel would respond with overwhelming force if Iran or its proxies attacked Israeli territory.

Iran’s economy has come under increasing strain. A US naval blockade and sanctions have sharply curtailed Iranian crude exports, with estimated loadings falling from roughly 2 million barrels per day in March to about 220,000-255,000 barrels per day in August.