Tehran’s Resolve and the Limits of Israeli Power 

By Elijah J. Magnier 

In the war declared by Israel against Iran, a balance of force has emerged: Israel dominates the skies over Iran, while the Iranian missiles prevent Israel from securing its sky. Israel is capable of bombing any location within Iran’s 1.6 million square kilometres, just as Iran can strike and destroy any site within Israel’s 20,000 square kilometres. In the initial days, Iran deployed its older generation of ballistic missiles — alongside a limited number of hypersonic missiles — to test Israel’s response and deplete its multi-layered interception systems and the personnel operating them.

However, on Tuesday, Iran altered its approach: it launched the first-generation Fattah-1 hypersonic missile, successfully hitting all designated targets. Moreover, Israel’s initial wave of surprise attacks, along with its secondary targets, appear to have been exhausted within the first days of the conflict. From a military standpoint, this presents a serious dilemma for the command and control structure: the original bank of objectives has been fulfilled in line with the initial political goals. The Israeli command now requires further instructions from political leadership to expand the scope of targets — moving beyond the nuclear programme, as originally stated by the government, to also include the destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities. 

However, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, harbours broader ambitions: he seeks to bring about regime change in Iran. He has met with members of the Iranian opposition and, as he deliberately made public, granted interviews to Iran International, a media outlet representing the opposition. He went so far as to suggest that the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei — a spiritual figure followed by tens of millions — could not be ruled out. He dubbed his military campaign “Rising Lion,” a calculated nod to the Lion and Sun flag of the opposition led by the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi. Yet, the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader would not alter the trajectory of the conflict. 

For Iran, Sayyed Khamenei’s death is an anticipated eventuality, and his successor is unlikely to harbour any less hostility towards Israel or the United States. Given the extent of what the US and its ally have inflicted upon Iran in this war — and how deftly the scheme was devised and executed in coordination between Israel and the US — replacing the Supreme Leader will not change the nature of the resistance. 

Thus, achieving all of Netanyahu’s aims would require a difficult and perilous decision, and certain critical conditions are not yet in place — politically or militarily. First, Israel must ensure that Iran is incapable of retaliating: that it has either depleted its missile arsenal or had its stockpiles destroyed, and is no longer able to manufacture replacements. Only then would Israel proceed to the next phase — targeting Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure to collapse its economy without restraint. This would dramatically expand the Israeli air force’s bank of targets, opening the door to a relentless bombing campaign.