Israel Had No Realistic Plan For Regime Change When Tel Aviv Attacked Iran: Report

Last Updated:March 12, 2026, 20:11 IST

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump launched the war with explicit calls for regime change.

Israel did not have a realistic plan for regime change when it launched its campaign against Iran, multiple senior Israeli security sources told the Guardian, with expectations that airstrikes would trigger a popular uprising driven by “wishful thinking" rather than hard intelligence.

Nearly two weeks of bombing raids have destroyed much of Iran’s military industrial capacity and killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, yet the Iranian government has held together. With Donald Trump now publicly contemplating ending what has become an increasingly costly war, Israeli defence and intelligence veterans said that the long-term verdict on the conflict may hinge on the fate of 440 kilograms of enriched uranium buried under a mountain by US strikes last June.

Was Regime Change Ever A Realistic Goal?

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump launched the war with explicit calls for regime change, immediately framing the conflict in existential terms for Iran’s rulers. An intelligence source told Guardian, “It’s wishful thinking. We used to have a plan how to take out the ballistic missiles, how to deal with the nuclear sites, how to take care of the military industry in Iran. But I never heard that we knew how to do a campaign of regime change from the air. We never knew how to get into the heads of 90 million people. So how would we know how to assess whether they would go to the streets or not? We are hoping they will go."

Sima Shine, an Iran specialist and former head of research at Mossad, told the outlet, “I belong to those who don’t think that regime change can happen from bombing from the outside."

There have been no significant street protests and no notable defections from Iranian security forces since the campaign began. In January, mass anti-regime demonstrations were brutally suppressed, with tens of thousands reportedly killed. Netanyahu has repeatedly called on Iranians to rise up since the war began.

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