Israeli Threats Against Iran

On 28 February 2026, Israel and the United States opened a second war against Iran in less than a year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described a campaign against the Islamic Republic's leadership, coercive institutions, missile forces and nuclear infrastructure. He also said the attack would create the conditions for Iranians to “cast off the yoke” of the government.¹ The Israeli military gave its objective as severely degrading the “Iranian terrorist regime” and removing what it called existential threats.²

These statements are often quoted as if they all mean the same thing. They do not. A proposal to bomb a nuclear facility is not a threat to destroy Iran; a call to overthrow the Islamic Republic is not a call to kill Iranians. Any of them can still kill civilians, and in time several became policy.

Israel's public campaign against Iran began well before Peres's 2006 remark. Netanyahu was arguing in the Knesset in 1993 that deterrence was not enough.³ By 1995 an IDF planner was reported to be contemplating an Osirak-style pre-emptive strike,⁴ and in 2003 the defence minister spoke openly of destroying Iran's nuclear capacity.⁵ Peres's line was not the beginning. It was the widest formulation yet: Iran itself could be destroyed.⁶

From warning to war

“Deterrence is essential, but deterrence cannot be the exclusive doctrine against such a danger.”³

16 February 1993 · Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud member of the Knesset

Netanyahu predicted that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons by 1999 and called for a policy of “prevention” alongside deterrence. In that speech, prevention meant first mobilising the United States and other industrial states to deny Iran materials and technology; he did not call for an Israeli attack.

Israel might have to decide that year whether to make a pre-emptive attack like its 1981 bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor.⁴

January 1995 · Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, IDF planning chief, as reported by the Los Angeles Times

This is the newspaper's account of Dayan's remarks at a Tel Aviv University conference, not a transcript. Military sources said the remarks had been taken out of context and were an example of contingency planning. The paper reported that they were widely understood as a warning to Iran.

“If there is a need to destroy Iran's nuclear capability, the necessary steps will be taken so Iranian civilians are not hurt.”⁵

December 2003 · Shaul Mofaz, defence minister

Mofaz delivered the warning in Farsi on Israel Radio. His stated distinction between nuclear facilities and civilians did not make the proposed action less direct: Israel was contemplating a military operation inside Iran.

“They want to wipe out Israel ... Now when it comes to destruction, Iran too can be destroyed (but) I don't suggest to say an eye for an eye.”⁶

9 May 2006 · Shimon Peres, vice premier

Peres was answering statements by Iranian leaders. The threat was conditional and directed at Iran as a country; his warning against retaliation in kind was part of the same answer.

“If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective. Attacking Iran in order to stop its nuclear plans will be unavoidable.”⁷

6 June 2008 · Shaul Mofaz, transport minister and deputy prime minister

The quotation comes from contemporaneous reporting of an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth. The original print interview has not been located online.

“Those who threaten to wipe us out put themselves in a similar danger, and in any event will not achieve their goal.”⁸

29 August 2018 · Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister

Netanyahu spoke at Israel's Dimona nuclear complex. Reuters described the words as a veiled warning in the context of his government's confrontation with Iran; he did not name a means of retaliation.

“Any regime that threatens Israel with destruction will find itself in similar danger.”⁹

20 May 2020 · Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister

Netanyahu was answering Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The original Hebrew reads: “כל משטר שמאיים על ישראל בהשמדה ימצא עצמו בסכנה דומה”. It names the regime, although Ynet's headline rendered the object more broadly as a state.

“The only way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, is to put a credible military threat on the table.”¹⁰

22 September 2022 · Yair Lapid, prime minister

Lapid told the UN that continued nuclear advances should be met “with military force.”

“And above all, Iran must face a credible military threat.”¹¹

22 September 2023 · Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister

Netanyahu said “credible nuclear threat” while reading the speech, but his office immediately identified it as a slip and corrected the record to match the prepared text. The mistake is not evidence of an intentional threat to use nuclear weapons.¹²

“A regime that threatens destruction is destined to be destroyed.”¹³

29 June 2024 · Israel Katz, foreign minister

Katz was answering an Iranian warning about a possible Israel-Lebanon war. The original Hebrew reads: “משטר שמאיים בהשמדה, דינו להיות מושמד”. It names the regime, not the population.

Khamenei “can no longer be allowed to exist.”¹⁴

19 June 2025 · Israel Katz, defence minister

Six days earlier, Israel had opened Operation Rising Lion against nuclear and military sites and senior officials.¹⁵ The war brought attacks on capacity and command together with a personal threat against Iran's supreme leader.

“Together with the United States, we will strike hard at the terror regime and create conditions that will allow the brave Iranian people to cast off the yoke of this murderous regime.”¹

28 February 2026 · Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister

Netanyahu called on Iranians to establish a “new and free Iran” and said “the end of the evil regime will also come.” The Israeli military stated its objective as severely degrading the regime and removing threats over time.²

The language had moved from prevention and proposed attacks on nuclear facilities, through a conditional threat against the country, to a threat against the supreme leader and an avowed effort to help end the Islamic Republic. By 2026, regime change was no longer an implication at the edge of the campaign. It was a declared political purpose of the war.

The hostility was made, not inherited

The confrontation is often presented as the natural result of an ancient hatred. Its modern history is political.

In 1953 the CIA and Britain's intelligence service organised the operation that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalised Iran's oil industry. A later CIA memorandum called the objective a pro-Western government under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and described propaganda, political pressure and a covert military apparatus used to bring it about. Israel was not responsible for that coup. It matters here because the U.S.-backed order that followed became the setting for close Iranian-Israeli cooperation.¹⁶

Under the Shah, Iran supplied Israel with oil and the two states developed trade, intelligence and security ties.¹⁷ The 1979 revolution replaced that alliance with the Islamic Republic's anti-Israel doctrine, but even the rupture was not absolute: Israeli and American intermediaries later transferred weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, as the congressional Iran-Contra investigation documented.¹⁸

The Islamic Republic has never been a passive object of foreign pressure. It has threatened Israel, armed allied forces around the region and violently repressed Iranians. A UN fact-finding mission found that acts committed during the suppression of the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests amounted to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, rape and other sexual violence.¹⁹ On 13 April 2024 Iran launched its first direct military attack on Israel, after a strike widely attributed to Israel destroyed Iran's consular building in Damascus and killed senior officers.²⁰

Acknowledging those acts does not make the states equal in power or excuse attacks on civilians. It prevents a different distortion: treating Iran's government and Iran's people as one actor.

Why Iran stood in the way

By 2026, Israeli expansion was literal. The Associated Press documented Israel's largest expansion of militarily occupied land in decades: roughly 1,000 square kilometres across Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, much of it held in what Israel called indefinite “buffer zones.” In the West Bank, the same government approved new settlements and enlarged or legalised existing ones.²¹

Iran lies far beyond any territory Israel could plausibly annex. Land seizure alone cannot explain the confrontation. Nor is this simply a rivalry between equivalent national-security doctrines. The larger struggle is over the freedom of an expansionist Zionist state to retain occupied territory, strike across borders and deepen its political and economic integration with Arab governments without facing a state capable of imposing sustained military costs.²¹

Netanyahu has described that order in unusually direct terms. At the UN in 2024, he presented a choice between “the curse of Iran's unremitting aggression” and “the blessing of a historic reconciliation between Arab and Jew.” The blessing was a network of normalized relations linking Israel with Saudi Arabia and other U.S.-aligned states; Iran and its allies were the force to be broken.²²

Iran is not the region's only opponent of Israeli occupation or military power. Palestinians have resisted occupation directly. Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi armed groups have opened other fronts. The Arab League collectively offered normalization only in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab territory and the establishment of a Palestinian state.²³ Turkey's presence in Syria was substantial enough that Turkish and Israeli officials established talks to prevent their forces from clashing, although both governments said they wanted to avoid confrontation.²⁴

What made Iran exceptional was the combination. It had the territory, population, industry and state institutions to sustain missiles, drones and cyber capabilities able to reach Israel, while financing and arming a network rooted in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iranian strategists called this “forward defence”: moving the line of deterrence away from Iran's borders and giving Tehran the ability to retaliate through several theatres. Hezbollah's arsenal in Lebanon was intended to make an attack on Iran costly before it began.²⁵

That system was neither a single Iranian chain of command nor a disinterested project of Palestinian liberation. Its members had their own constituencies and ambitions, while Tehran used them to protect the Islamic Republic, project power and keep wars away from Iranian territory. The network could be coercive for people living in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.²⁶ That is not an equivalence: Iran used an anti-occupation network for its own state power; Israel was the occupying and territorially expanding state.²¹

It nevertheless constrained Israel in a way diplomatic condemnation did not. A network able to fire from several fronts forced Israel to plan for escalation beyond one occupied territory. After October 2023, Israel attacked that network as a regional system. Chatham House described the campaign as a transnational war aimed at reshaping the Middle East by weakening Iran and its allied groups.²⁶

Neutralising Iran therefore promised more than the removal of a nuclear risk. It would destroy the principal state sponsor of armed forces that had imposed costs on Israel and its occupations and open more room for an Israel-centred regional order.²² It would also help remove the government Netanyahu said a “free Iran” would replace.¹ Iran was not the only source of resistance. It was the most extensive state-backed military counterweight to Israel's regional power.

From nuclear pressure to war

The nuclear dispute is where broad rhetoric most often conceals a specific target. Destroying centrifuges, enrichment plants or scientific expertise is not identical to destroying Iran, though strikes on nuclear facilities can endanger workers, nearby communities and regional safety.

Coercion long preceded open war. Current and former U.S. officials told The Washington Post that American and Israeli experts developed the Stuxnet malware used against Iranian centrifuges. Neither government formally acknowledged the operation.²⁷ In 2020, intelligence officials attributed the killing of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh to Israel; Israel did not claim responsibility.²⁸

Diplomacy also produced measurable restraints. In February 2018 the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran remained within the nuclear agreement's limits on enrichment, stockpiles, centrifuges and heavy water, and that inspectors had obtained access they requested.²⁹ Three months later President Donald Trump ended U.S. participation and restored sanctions.³⁰

By 2025, the evidence had changed. The IAEA concluded that Iran had conducted an undeclared structured nuclear programme until the early 2000s, had failed to resolve safeguards questions and had accumulated uranium enriched to 60 per cent, which the agency called a serious proliferation concern. The same report found no credible indication of an ongoing undeclared structured programme.³¹ The U.S. intelligence community separately assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei had not reauthorised the programme suspended in 2003, while warning that pressure on him to do so had probably grown.³²

Israel's military offered a stronger claim when it attacked in June 2025: that secret work and rapid advances made a weapon possible in the near future. Its public briefing did not provide independently reviewable evidence for that assertion.¹⁵ The available official record therefore showed a dangerous and increasingly opaque nuclear programme, not public proof that Iran had decided to build an imminent bomb.

Regime change by air power

During the June 2025 war, Netanyahu said overthrowing Iran's leadership was not a formal goal because that decision belonged to Iranians, though it “could be a result.”³³ Katz's threat to Khamenei already showed how thin that boundary had become.¹⁴

It disappeared on 28 February 2026. Netanyahu told Iranian soldiers not to defend the Islamic Republic, described the regime as the common enemy of Israelis and Iranians, and said the attack created an opportunity to end it. He still distinguished the public from the state: Iranian citizens, he said, were not Israel's enemy.¹ The military's own formulation joined regime degradation to attacks on nuclear sites, missiles, armed forces and command structures.²

Six months of war did not produce the promised new order. The Islamic Republic survived leadership assassinations and sustained bombing. Iran retaliated against Israel, U.S. bases and Gulf infrastructure and used the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, while the conflict remained unresolved.³⁴

Over more than three decades, Israeli political rhetoric moved from warning and prevention³ toward proposed attacks on nuclear facilities,⁵ a personal threat against Khamenei¹⁴ and an avowed effort to help end the Islamic Republic.¹ Officials usually named the government, its leaders, or its military and nuclear capacity rather than Iran's people. The wars of 2025 and 2026 carried those threats into Iran itself. For Iranian civilians, the distinction between an attack on the government and an attack on the country did not keep the war at a safe distance.³⁴