Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not rule out the possibility of targeting Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an interview with ABC News on Monday, amid widespread speculation in Israel and beyond that the strikes on the Islamic Republic could pose an existential challenge to the regime.

Netanyahu said Israel was “doing what we need to do,” when asked if Khamenei would be targeted in the strikes.

Regarding reports that President Donald Trump vetoed plans for Israel to kill the ayatollah because it may lead to an escalation, Netanyahu said, “It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict. We’ve had half a century of conflict spread by this regime that terrorizes everyone in the Middle East.” 

Netanyahu said that the fall of the Iranian regime “could be a result, because this regime is weak, and suddenly understands how weak it is… We could see tremendous changes in Iran.”

Israel did not name overthrowing the ayatollah’s regime as one of the goals of its operation against Iran as authorized by Israel’s security cabinet, but Israeli airwaves have been full of enthusiasm for the prospect. An Israeli defense source told Jewish Insider earlier this week that regime change was not included in the war aims because it would not have “international legitimacy” to do so, but that Jerusalem would favor such an occurrence.

The nightly airstrikes on Iran since last Friday have degraded the regime by taking out some of its leading figures, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Hossein Salami and the IRGC’s intelligence chief and his deputy.

“Every day [Israel is] bringing down the regime a little more,” Ben Sabti, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told JI on Monday. “It’s like we are pushing them closer to the edge every day. It’s a big country, so it takes time.” 

Sabti argued that “even if Israel isn’t aiming to bring down the regime, it is on the way to doing so, because it is hurting the basis on which it stands — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

He said that Israel’s targeting of key military and intelligence figures is “like killing nuclear scientists; the facilities are still there but there isn’t anyone to run it. The same is true with the government as more and more senior people fall.”

Khamenei handpicked the leading figures in the IRGC, and they also control Iran’s “resistance economy,” its circumvention of sanctions, as well as its oppression of the Iranian people, including enforced modesty, Sabti said.

”When you strike the IRGC, everything is shaken up,” he added. “It’s not like in a democratic state where, if a general is killed, they can still function.” 

Israel struck the complex hosting Iranian state news channel IRINN on Monday, and the explosion could be heard live on the air. The IDF said that the building was “a communication center that was being used for military purposes by the Iranian Armed Forces … under the guise of civilian activity, covering up the military use of the center’s infrastructure and assets” and that the IDF sent advance warnings to the civilian population in the area. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “the propaganda and incitement broadcast authority of the Iranian regime was attacked by the IDF after the broad evacuation of the residents of the area. We will strike the Iranian dictator everywhere.” 

Sabti said that he saw many Iranians post on social media that they hoped that Israel would target the broadcast authority, and accused the regime of staging videos to make it seem like there are more civilian casualties in Iran.

“The public isn’t buying the propaganda,” he said.

In addition, Sabti noted, many senior Iranian officials, including Khamenei, have not been seen in public since the war began, which is being viewed as a sign of weakness. 

Meir Javedanfar, a lecturer on Iranian politics at Reichman University, said that Israeli strikes have put “unprecedented pressure on the regime … People are fleeing Tehran; they are pulling their money out of the banks as much as they can. They are doing what Iranians do in crises, which is filling cars with petrol, and there’s not enough petrol. It’s difficult to see how the government can continue governing this way, because the pressures are tremendous.”

Sabti and Javedanfar both cited people fleeing Tehran in the largest numbers since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War as an indication that the people of Iran do not support the regime.

”In the 1980s,” Sabti recounted, “I saw with my own eyes when we were attacked by missiles and planes, people made human chains around government buildings, to defend them. The Iraqis came and attacked anyway; we [Israelis] are more humane.” 

Now, Sabti said, people are not showing that kind of support and “there is a disconnect between the people and the regime … The minorities are against the regime, women are against the regime, the general public is against the regime.”

That being said, Sabti estimated that the number of people hanging signs against the regime or shouting “death to Khamenei” is very small, and “there is not enough energy yet in the public for the regime to fall.”

Iranians, Javedanfar said, “don’t see this as a war they’re involved in. It’s not their responsibility. It’s between Khamenei and Israel. They are not going to do regime change for Israel. What they’re considering is that this is a regime invested more in Hamas and Hezbollah than in the domestic electricity production capability. Even before this crisis, there were electricity cuts.”

One thing that could encourage the fall of the Iranian regime, Sabti suggested, would be for Trump to say he wants that outcome.

“If Trump would talk about regime change, it would really happen. It would bring down the government,” Sabti, who grew up in Iran, predicted. “America is America, there is no one else like them.” 

Javedanfar, however, said that the threat of regime change “is meant to get Khamenei to compromise on a nuclear agreement with Trump.”

The most important strategic goal, Javedanfar said, is for Iran to enter an agreement to end its uranium enrichment, which would mostly eliminate its nuclear program, and to make Iran reconsider and change its policies of aggression against Israel, directly and through proxies.

“There’s a proverb in Persian,” Javedanfar said: “‘You threaten someone with death so they will settle for a fever.’ You threaten the other side with something far worse to get them to agree to what you want. I think this is the strategy. Israel cannot overthrow the regime but it is using the threat to create conditions which could potentially make the regime believe that it could be overthrown, and that’s good enough for Israel.”

Javedanfar was skeptical about the possibility of regime change in the short term, because “to overthrow a regime, you need an alternative. Who’s going to take over?”

Sabti and Javedanfar both said that Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah of Iran, who lives in the U.S. and has been giving interviews to the international media in recent days, does not appear to be leading an effort on the ground in Iran.

“It’s difficult to know how popular he is,” Javedanfar said. “There are enough reasons to say he’s a suitable alternative and reasons to say he isn’t, because he doesn’t have the capacity or the people.” 

Pahlavi is “trying,” Sabti said, but would need outside help to take a leadership position, such as through outreach to the U.S. or Israel to back him, which Sabti thought would be very effective. 

“The son of the king needs more energy. He is very beloved in Iran, I see a lot of posts about him, but that’s good for the Internet. How will he organize people? How will he organize demonstrations? How will he come back? The public is saying ‘come back,’ but he needs an organization. He would need to take things up a level,” Sabti said.

Another alternative to the current regime may be a dissident in an Iranian prison, Sabti said, noting that there have been many social media posts calling for Israel to target prisons so that people can escape.

Sabti pointed to a group of 14 political activists in prison since 2019 for writing a letter calling on Khamenei to resign and for the Islamic Republic to be replaced by a democratic, secular state.

”If they get out, there could be a massive change,” he said.

Sabti also speculated that an IRGC general may lead a coup “to save Iran, but more to save himself … Someone who is within the system, just like in the Soviet Union.” 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has staked everything — his legacy, his global standing, his relationships with world powers — on defending Israel against the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

The topic has dominated nearly every major address the prime minister has given, from U.N. General Assembly speeches to addresses to Congress, for the last 15 years. And over the last four days, Israel has been forced to put into action a plan that was years in the making — one that could profoundly reshape the Middle East in the days and months to come.

As Israeli journalist Amit Segal notes, “And so Netanyahu’s life mission became dismantling Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Over the years, in meetings with U.S. presidents, the incumbent president would raise the Palestinian issue, while Netanyahu would focus on the Iranian threat. Menachem Begin destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Ehud Olmert did the same to Syria’s reactor in 2007, and Netanyahu vowed to do likewise with Iran.”

The writer Douglas Murray forecasted exactly this situation 13 years ago, speaking at the Cambridge Union: “When Israel is pushed to the situation it will be pushed to of having to believe [Iran] mean[s] it, and when every bit of jiggery pokery behind the scenes runs out, and when the U.N. and distinguished figures have run out of time, and Iran is about to produce its first bomb,” Murray said at the time, “Israel will strike.”

Israel’s Friday morning strikes came as the Trump administration’s announced 60-day deadline for negotiations expired, and following intelligence reports indicating that Iran was weeks away from nuclear capabilities — as Murray predicted.

What has ensued is the deadliest and most destructive direct conflict between Israel and Iran in history. At least 24 Israelis have been confirmed killed since Friday night in strikes around the country. 

For the last three nights, Israelis around the country have stumbled into safe rooms and public shelters as Iran bombarded the country with ballistic missiles.

And while the barrages, meant to overwhelm Israel’s defensive systems, have inflicted damage across the country, the vast majority of the roughly 350 missiles fired from Iran and Yemen over the last 72 hours have been intercepted by Israel’s missile-defense systems.

With Iran believed to still have nearly 2,000 ballistic missiles in its arsenal, the ongoing air raid sirens and attacks around the country could continue for weeks, stranding the more than 150,000 Israelis currently abroad as Israeli airspace remains closed. Israel’s Channel 12 reported today that repatriation flights may begin in the coming days, allowing stranded Israelis to return home. 

In the last 72 hours, more than a decade of warnings have crystallized into reality, a culmination of years of diplomatic efforts, proxy battles and intelligence operations. What happens in the ensuing days and weeks will not only determine the strategic balance of the region — it has the potential to reset the global order.

The Knesset is set to hold a preliminary vote on Wednesday to trigger an early election — and crucial partners in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition are threatening to support it.

For the past week, Haredi parties have said they would vote in favor of legislation that would dissolve the Knesset and schedule an election for this fall. The parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, are threatening to jump ship because the coalition has not passed a law to continue the long-standing exemption for full-time yeshiva students from IDF conscription.

Without Shas and UTJ, Netanyahu’s coalition would be left with 50 members, far short of the 61-seat majority he needs to keep his government afloat.

As such, Netanyahu and his allies have been frantically trying to negotiate a compromise that will keep the Haredi parties in the fold. 

Past laws exempting young Haredi men from military service have expired and a new one has not been passed, leading the High Court of Justice to order the government last year to actively conscript them.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein, who is responsible for ushering a bill to a vote that would codify the status of young Haredi men and set rising enlistment targets for the coming years, has said he will not move it forward unless it includes significant penalties for yeshiva students who refuse to serve. These reportedly include canceling daycare and housing subsidies and bans on leaving the country and receiving a driver’s license before age 29. 

Likud and other parties leading Israel over the past half-century allowed the Haredi exemption to continue out of political expedience. But that position has become politically and militarily untenable in the more than 600 days since the war in Gaza began and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been called for reserve duty, with some serving for hundreds of days. 

In addition to Edelstein, several other coalition lawmakers and Cabinet ministers have similarly said they will not support a bill that would continue to allow the vast majority of Haredi men between the ages of 18-24 to decline IDF service without sanctions.

Those sanctions are a red line for the Haredi parties, for whom maintaining their communities’  practice of yearslong full-time yeshiva study has become a key political issue. As such, the parties’ spiritual leaders instructed their politicians to force new elections if penalties for avoiding IDF service are put in place. 

While the gaps between the sides are significant and the disputes are serious, Netanyahu has managed to keep coalitions afloat in seemingly hopeless political situations before.

Several factors are working to his advantage. Most significantly,the Haredim are not likely to find themselves in a better situation after a new election. Opposition parties are even more opposed to yeshiva students’ exemption from the draft than those currently in power, and they favor more liberal policies on other religion and state issues that are important to Haredim. 

As such, the best an election can do for the Haredim is to buy time, hope the war will end and bet that public pressure to draft their young voters will abate. One senior Shas rabbi predicted that the current coalition parties will “come crawling” back to the Haredi parties after an election. 

The leading rabbi of one of the Hasidic sects within United Torah Judaism, Belz, opposes holding an election during wartime, and his representative, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Meir Porush, has also been working to try to stop the dissolution of the Knesset.

In addition, the vote on Wednesday is a preliminary one, which means that in order for the Knesset to call an election, three more votes on the matter would be necessary. While it would be possible to go through the whole process in a day, Netanyahu and his coalition would likely drag out those votes for as long as possible, at least past July 23, when the Knesset’s long summer recess begins. 

If the bill is voted down, it cannot be brought to a vote again for six months, though a different party could put forward a similar bill days later.

If the law passes, an election would have to be held after a minimum of 90 days and no more than five months after the Knesset is dissolved.

During that time, a caretaker government would comprise the current Cabinet members, who would still be led by Netanyahu. There are few limits in Israeli law to what a caretaker government can do, and the High Court has been inconsistent about the kinds of decisions a government can make after the Knesset is dispersed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition was thrown into disarray on Wednesday night after the spiritual leaders of Haredi factions threatened to bring about an early election if penalties for yeshiva students avoiding military service are not canceled.

The leading rabbis of Agudat Yisrael, the Hasidic party of United Torah Judaism, told party leader Yitzchak Goldknopf on Tuesday to move forward with vote next week on a bill to dissolve the Knesset, calling an election, because Netanyahu did not keep a promise to pass a bill exempting young Haredi men from military service by Shavuot, a holiday that was observed on Monday in Israel. On Wednesday morning, the other part of United Torah Judaism, Degel Hatorah, received a similar directive from the senior rabbis of the “Litvak” non-Hasidic Haredi community, Dov Lando and New York-native Moshe Hillel Hirsch.

Still, Netanyahu’s 68-seat coalition would retain a narrow majority in the Knesset even if he lost those Haredi parties’ seven seats.

The political threat became more acute on Wednesday evening, when Sephardic Haredi party Shas, which has 11 seats in the Knesset, supported UTJ’s move to call an election. Israeli media reported that Shas’ spiritual leader Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef told the party’s lead negotiator, former minister Ariel Atias, to tell Netanyahu that he will not have a government if agreements are not reached with the Haredi parties.

Shas has functioned as an electoral satellite of Netanyahu’s in recent years, with its base holding right-wing views and strongly supporting the prime minister. The party has campaigned with the slogan “Bibi [Netanyahu] needs a strong lion,” playing on the Hebrew meaning of Shas leader Aryeh Deri’s name. Yet Yosef reportedly told Atias that he should reach out to opposition parties, in effect ending Shas’ reflexive support for Netanyahu.

The Haredi parties’ threat to topple the coalition may be empty because they have no good alternatives. Opposition parties are even less likely to support the Haredi position, calling for a blanket exemption with no penalties for full-time yeshiva students who avoid the IDF draft – one poll from this year showed that 92% of left-wing voters and 82% of centrist voters oppose a Haredi draft exemption – and they disagree with Haredim on other major issues of religion and state.

Netanyahu met on Wednesday night with Haredi party representatives and, separately, with Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein, the lead lawmaker on the conscription bill. Following the meeting, Netanyahu’s office said “there is a way to bridge the gaps on the topic of the draft,” and that the prime minister would hold another meeting with Atias, Edelstein and Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs on Thursday evening to find a solution. Despite the positive readout from the Prime Minister’s Office, Yosef’s instruction to Atias to support the government’s dissolution reportedly came after the meeting.

The crux of the dispute between Edelstein, a senior Likud Knesset member, and the Haredi parties is that the former has persistently pursued sanctions for yeshiva students who avoid the draft, while Haredi parties consider such penalties to be a red line. 

While the bill, whose text is not yet final, has not been made public, it reportedly includes a target of 10,500 new Haredi recruits in the next two years out of 82,000 eligible Haredi men aged 18-24. Sanctions on draft-dodgers would remain in place even if the targets are met, and reportedly include canceling discounts on municipal taxes and public transportation, exclusion from subsidized housing programs and daycare and a ban on receiving a drivers license until age 29. Those who avoid conscription could also be arrested when attempting to leave the country.

The Haredi parties also want volunteers in Magen David Adom emergency medical services, ZAKA, and civilian service in government offices to be officially recognized and avoid sanctions, but Edelstein has insisted that only IDF enlistment would count.

Following a meeting with Haredi lawmakers on Wednesday, Edelstein said, “There is nothing new under the sun. The enlistment bill outline that I presented last night in the meeting is the same one we have been discussing for over a year. A law without personal, effective sanctions, high enlistment targets with a rapid increasing rate is not enlistment but evasion, and therefore I have opposed it the entire time.”

“While IDF soldiers and commanders are in the middle of their efforts to defeat Hamas, I am committed to them and their families for Israel’s security to broaden the IDF’s base of conscription, to ensure we can build up our forces for generations and ease the burden on the reservists,” he added.

Full-time Haredi yeshiva students have been exempt from the IDF draft since the inception of the state; first unofficially in the hundreds, and then officially in the tens of thousands as of 1999. That exemption, known as the Tal Law, was struck down by Israel’s High Court of Justice in 2012, and disputes over the topic have been a constant, major feature of Israeli politics ever since. 

In June 2024, the High Court ruled that the IDF and government must actively conscript Haredim, because there is no longer an exemption law in place. 

The IDF reported last month that 5% of the 24,000 Haredim who received call-up letters in the past year reported to the recruitment office. In the first four months of 2025,  23% of Haredim who were called up reported for duty. 

While the exemption was never popular in the general public, opposition to it surged following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, after which hundreds of thousands of Israelis were called up to fight the war in Gaza and the IDF has complained of personnel shortages. A January poll from the Israel Democracy Institute showed 68% of Israelis oppose a law allowing Haredim to avoid the draft, including 75% of non-Haredi Jews and 60% of voters for Netanyahu’s Likud party.