Exclusive: The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War
An in-depth look at Roaring Lion — the war aim Israel never made public, the intelligence assessment that failure could push Iran toward the bomb, and what the Mossad told the Kurds
To my readers: Over the weekend I published a long investigation in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest daily, into how Israel decided to go to war with Iran. This is a version of that piece, translated and edited for readers abroad. One thing should be said at the outset: parts of the Mossad's plan have still not been published, including elements that were serious and, by several accounts, persuasive. So the plan described here is not the whole plan, and it may read thinner than it actually was. Everything below is nonetheless sourced to people who were in the rooms where it was decided.
It is impossible to think about Israel’s plan to bring down the Islamic Republic without first thinking about its sheer presumption. Grinding a regime down over years — sanctions, influence operations, the slow seeding of fear and confusion — is one thing. Recruiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president and Holocaust denier, as an asset and installing him in power is another. So is launching a full-scale Kurdish invasion. This is the kind of project superpowers fail at. Israel tried it, and poured an enormous effort into the attempt.
Over the past weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published a great deal about that effort. What follows adds to the record on the most ambitious regional objective Israel has ever pursued: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power — attempted in wartime, and in coordination with the only superpower, the United States.
In the presentation the Mossad gave the Israeli cabinet on the eve of the operation, regime change was projected to take “one to three years.” That was a reasonable hedge; the Islamic Revolution did not happen in a day either. The ministers heard a different tune. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for regime change in a fast, sweeping move — killing the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent, protesters in the streets.”
Begin with a distinction
Again and again this has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — was without question the animating force, the planner, the one pushing. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by its cabinet. It grew out of a conviction that had taken root at the political level and was then imposed on the security establishment: there would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and no end to the friction with Iran, without a change of regime in Tehran. The 12-day war of June 2025 had created an opening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. Israel had to try, because the window might close. The cost of inaction, even weighed against the risk of failure, was higher than the cost of action.
Those words were said explicitly by Benjamin Netanyahu to the American president. The doctrine is his.
None of this is interpretation. The war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published. After conversations with a double-digit number of sources, military and political, the central objective can be reconstructed:
To deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. Those may not be the exact words. But “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line.
The phrasing was a compromise, negotiated in part with the IDF. From the first moment, the army said it did not know how to produce regime change on its own. For the General Staff, the main effort was strategic damage to Iran — the erosion of capability over time. Support for the Mossad was, as the army understood it, a secondary effort.
Why “creating the conditions” rather than “toppling the regime”? One defense official offered me a guess: the IDF knew this was a complicated objective, possibly an impossible one. It did not want to be dragged into a war with an aim so absolute that it could run forever — far past the number of interceptors in Israel’s magazines.
And yet the cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. An objective that large — Megalomanic, some would say — dictates the allocation of resources and carries severe regional consequences. Put another way: the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles mattered, but they were not the holy grail, and they were not the message of the new war that followed. Where Rising Lion, the June 2025 campaign, prioritized the nuclear project — and did in fact halt enrichment — Roaring Lion was meant to be the war that ended all wars. With Iran, at least.
The result, as of this hour: Iran’s defense industry, and its ballistic missile production line in particular, has been badly damaged, and the harm to the nuclear program has been deepened. The IDF inflicted losses that can be measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Israeli intelligence demonstrated extraordinary penetration of the Iranian establishment. But if the purpose of operation Roaring Lion was to create conditions for a change of regime, the regime is alive, intact, and ruling with an iron fist. Foreign parties made sure the details of the Israeli plan leaked, including the Mossad asset Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once the Israeli operation failed to reach the objective it had set, the regime could claim victory. We won, because we survived.
This is not semantics. In the summer of 2025, the “axis of resistance” had been beaten across the region and Israelis, by every poll, felt they had won. In the summer of 2026, an overwhelming majority of Israelis do not believe they defeated Iran — only 11 percent say Israel won, according to a Channel 12 survey — and the axis looks steadier than it did. Last summer, the Iranians did not control Hormuz. A year later they hold a strait that is critical to the world economy. The regime will not last forever. It is doubtful the war “created the conditions” for its fall.
This is not a story about an adventure that didn’t pan out. Many of those involved argue the operation could have worked had Washington not changed its mind about its central components, and there is not enough on the record to judge, because parts of the plan remain in the dark. The story is one of systemic failure: how an enormous strategic objective — regime change — became an executable mission without the political level, the IDF, and the Mossad ever genuinely agreeing on what it was, how central it was, whether it was feasible, and whether the tools matched the goal. In hindsight, most of those parties cannot even agree on the facts.
“Appetite Comes with Eating” — the road to February 2026
The October 7 massacre, and Khamenei’s decision to enter the war directly against Israel, again and again, led Netanyahu to present the fall of the regime as the supreme objective of Israeli policy.
In parallel, the Mossad was running a deep and impressive effort to penetrate the Iranian government. As the various investigations have reported, Mossad director David Barnea met former president Ahmadinejad in Budapest, the product of contacts that had gone on for a long time. Ahmadinejad emerged as a leading candidate for an alternative inside Iran; having grown up within the system made him, ostensibly, a more credible figure. The political level was shown “analytic evidence” for Ahmadinejad’s strength and standing in the Iranian public — evidence the Mossad maintained had been validated repeatedly.
Netanyahu ran into reasoned opposition from the IDF of the day. Then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and then-Military Intelligence chief Aharon Haliva said in closed discussions that the ability to engineer regime change in a country like Iran was extremely limited. They warned that the approaches on offer, the Mossad’s among them, were pretentious and hollow against the regime’s grip on Iranian society. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was not persuaded either. The military’s reservations carried through the turnover in personnel, into the tenures of Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and Military Intelligence chief Shlomi Binder.
From outside, the army’s resistance can look strange. What’s wrong with toppling the regime? Why not try?
Defense policy is a hierarchy of priorities, and there is no appetite for pouring vast resources into a plan expected to fail. A more strategic answer has to do with the nature of the objective itself: if you try to bring down the regime and fail, the ayatollahs have won.
After the 12-day war, something began to shift. The Iranians had been beaten so visibly that, in the words of one defense official, “our eyes opened to the possibility of a changed Middle East.” Appetite comes with eating.
By the summer of 2025 it was clear Iran was rebuilding its ballistic array faster than expected. It was equally clear Israel could not afford to manage Iran through periodic rounds of strikes — the doctrine known here as the campaign between the wars (in hebrew: MABAM), the low-intensity attrition Israel has run for years against Iranian entrenchment in Syria and Lebanon.
“We thought there was only one strategic solution to this: regime change,” a senior figure involved in cabinet and security cabinet deliberations told me. “Otherwise we’re condemned to keep emptying this bucket, sometimes with a teaspoon, sometimes with a ladle. It isn’t sustainable.”
By that point the prime minister and the Mossad chief already held a common line — that regime change could and should be attempted — and the Mossad was deep in the field work of preparing a coup. The IDF, for its part, identified a renewed buildup of the Revolutionary Guards. The army kept its skepticism about toppling the regime, but felt urgency about the Iranian ballistic project and the surviving pieces of the nuclear program.
Israel began investing heavily in preparing a second, larger war. The distinction matters: for the political level, from the first moment, the plan was an attempt to bring down the Islamic Republic. Inside the IDF, the thinking was mainly about finishing the purely military business of the last round — ballistics, defense industry, nuclear. The Mossad assessed the operation could and should be executed in May or June of 2026. The IDF spoke of autumn 2026. The prime minister pressed relentlessly to move it up.
In December 2025 the mass demonstrations and the uprising erupted across Iran. It is safe to assume the Mossad’s influence directorate did everything it could to help them; that is what it was built for. The regime responded with mass killing of Iranian civilians. If Rising Lion (2025) had ended in deep satisfaction inside the security establishment, Iran’s destabilization in December and January produced something closer to euphoria — close to messianic. President Trump promised to come to the demonstrators’ aid. The Mossad and the IDF received an instruction from the prime minister to prepare for the big war, and to accelerate the plans toward execution.
Through January and February 2026, the entire Israeli system was focused on war preparations. The plans were nowhere near ready, least of all where the fall of the regime was concerned. The operative phrase was: don’t miss the opportunity.
The Kurdish plan
The Kurds became the cornerstone of the coup plan: they would invade from the west, move city to city, absorb more Kurds and Iranians as they went, and drive toward Tehran. In parallel, after the opening phase of bombardment, the masses would come out into the streets as they had in December 2025. A perfect storm.
Logistically, according to what has been published, Israel supplied weapons. It tried to assemble a Kurdish coalition.
It is worth pausing here: Israeli intelligence officers who have worked on Iran for many years consider any reliance on the Kurds to be, on its face, a wild delusion. The Mossad’s answer was that Iran is its field, its expertise. The Kurds would not take over Iran — they would mainly tie the regime down while the public brought it down.
Many of the problems with the Kurds were political: how to get several rival factions to act together, and to do so in a way that could actually produce political change in Iran. Among other things, Israel required the Kurds to fight under the monarchist Iranian flag — the pre-1979 tricolor bearing the Lion and Sun of the Pahlavi dynasty — rather than the Kurdish flag, so the offensive would read as an Iranian national uprising rather than a Kurdish separatist one. Israel arranged for the flags to be supplied.
The planning went down to a fine grain. The Mossad wanted to guard against the risk that the Kurds would carry out pogroms across Iran as they advanced. The condition set for them was known internally as the Ten Commandments: no killing, looting, theft, rape, or war crimes. “If you deviate from this,” the Israelis warned them, “the Israeli Air Force will not back you. The Iranians will slaughter you.”
The air force is the essential point. Israel did not tell the White House, President Trump, or the CIA that the plan was a Kurdish invasion. It described a joint operation of the Kurds and the Israeli Air Force. That was the explicit framing. The air force was to open ground corridors for the Kurds and handle emerging threats. The Kurdish force, roughly 15,000 fighters at the outset, was to liberate cities and gather more Iranians as it moved, until it numbered “150,000 to 200,000” advancing on Tehran under Israeli air cover.
Much else was supposed to happen first — uprisings among other minorities, and mass demonstrations by citizens across Iran some time after the opening of the offensive.
The Military Intelligence’ Warning, and The Blame Game
The IDF is fond of the word ‘tichlul’ — the integration and orchestration of a campaign across all its parts. In Israel, the army is the integrator of wars.
The Military Intelligence (AMAN) had deep reservations about the operation to bring down the regime, and its Research Division wrote an assessment putting the chances of success as low. As reported by Michael Hauser Tov in Haaretz, Military Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder determined that the probability of the regime falling was low. The reasoning was specific: that the Kurds could not be relied upon, and that the degree of American support was “unclear.” Military Intelligence also warned that the regime would take down the internet immediately, sharply reducing the odds of coordinating a revolution at all.
There was a further warning, and a more dramatic one. The Research Division held that if the effort to change the regime failed, the risk of an Iranian breakout to a nuclear weapon would rise — a risk, in its language, that needed to be hedged. This was delivered in a written report. It warned, in effect, that the price of failing at regime change could be very high. Many Iran specialists now assess that Mojtaba Khamenei — the son who succeeded his assassinated father as supreme leader — is indeed weighing a dash for the bomb.
“The correct conclusion from the December–January protests should have been that the regime won its battle for survival,” a defense figure with long experience told me. “The demonstrators were killed. Their friends retreated. The regime used lethal force. That is an argument against trying to bring it down two months later.”
These are serious points. Iran experts around the world respond to the details of the Israeli plan with something close to contempt. In their view, the vast apparatus of the Islamic Republic cannot be brought down by an external threat of this kind, certainly not in wartime. On the face of it, Military Intelligence’s skepticism was vindicated.
At the Mossad they tell the opposite story: there was no reservation from Military Intelligence at all, but rather remarkable cooperation.
When I spoke with political decision-makers — including some who were fiercely critical of the Mossad’s regime-change plan — they said they had heard no sharp warnings from the IDF about the plan to topple the regime.
In fact, they say they heard no reservations whatsoever. Not in the restricted consultations of the security cabinet, not in the cabinet session that authorized the prime minister and the defense minister.
“Does it seem plausible to you,” one of them said to me, “that we would hear all these grim assessments — that there’s no chance, that the Kurds aren’t serious, that the Americans aren’t with us, that they might dash for a nuclear weapon, that it won’t work — and that this wouldn’t set off a major debate?” Another minister told me: “The IDF pretty much agreed. And if it had reservations, it voiced them weakly. This wasn’t only the Mossad’s plan, it was the objective of the war. The IDF took part and believed in it, and if it didn’t believe in it that much, that never reached us.” I spoke with several people who sat in those rooms, and all of them offered a version of the same line: the army went along with it completely.
The IDF rejects this completely, and says every doubt and danger was presented in the relevant sessions to the decision-makers, in writing as well, and that the record documents it.
How does that square with what the ministers say? Former senior figures in the defense establishment answer that sometimes ministers hear what they want to hear. When something fails, they didn’t hear the warnings beforehand.
Which raises the obligatory question: in which discussions, and in which forums? The full cabinet barely discussed the complete plan, for fear of leaks. What is left? security cabinet sessions, and some meetings with the prime minister and the defense minister. There is no doubt that Netanyahu received a Research Division report expressing severe doubt about the prospects for regime change. Did he prevent that criticism from being presented in full to the cabinet, including the one that approved the war? And more broadly, what explains a factual gap this extreme between the ministers and the Mossad on one side and the IDF on the other?
Between “Bullshit” and “Ridiculous” — the American track
On February 11, the briefing for the American president takes place. Mossad chief David Barnea and Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir present the Israeli operational vision. The Israelis do not know what the journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan will later publish: that senior American officials, having heard the Israeli presentations on the war and above all on regime change, were unconvinced. They thought it was “bullshit,” to quote Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Or ridiculous, in the judgment of Barnea’s counterpart, the director of the CIA.
A few days later, Israelis say, the green light comes from the White House to proceed.
The war begins seventeen days after that briefing. A cabinet session is convened at the last possible moment, purely to obtain a rubber stamp from the ministers — standard procedure in the Netanyahu years. Then comes the assassination of Khamenei and members of his household. The IDF begins preparing air support for the Kurds, but prioritizes critical targets first. The Kurdish forces are ready to begin the invasion on 48 hours’ notice. The order never comes. The details begin to leak.
About a week into the campaign, the American president halts the Kurdish plan. It is reported that Turkish President Erdoğan intervened and called Trump. Erdoğan later said that a Kurdish invasion of Iran could have provoked a Turkish response severe enough to slide into a conflict between Turkey and Israel. Three days later, Israel understands that America has closed the door.
The Mossad could have come forward and said something simple: there was a plan. It was stopped. You cannot judge the “failure” or the “non-success” of toppling the regime, because the execution order was never given. There were other assets, other instruments, other allies — none of them activated. There are no guarantees it would have worked, but we were never allowed to try.
“The Mossad didn’t deliver much of what it promised, even before the Kurds,” one minister told me in response. “People started asking whether we were dealing with fantasists.”
By most accounts of those involved in the decisions, up until the collapse of the Kurdish move there is an atmosphere of consensus and relatively harmonious work at the top of the Israeli security establishment. There is an objective, and it has to do with creating “conditions” for an overthrow in Iran. The IDF calls this “severe damage to the regime.” The Mossad is far more ambitious. The coalition manages to function.
With the “no” from the White House, everything changes. Netanyahu and Barnea insist there is more to be done, or at least attempted. Within 48 hours the Mossad brings forward an improvised, hurried plan — patched together, in the words of one participant. The Mossad makes clear this is no longer the plan but a last-minute effort, and lowers expectations.
If until that moment there was harmony in the Israeli system, or the appearance of it, in the second phase the agreements disintegrate. The IDF, the chief of staff, and ministers believe the stammering attempt at regime change is a waste of precious resources. Flight hours, munitions. And above all, the draining hourglass before the war has to end.
The arguments are bitter. “In the first phase, when the Kurds were in the game, everyone was in agreement — or transmitted that way. Once the Kurds were out, everything blew up,” a senior figure told me. Another added: “The astonishing thing is that after Trump rules out Kurdish involvement, Netanyahu imposes the Mossad’s new improvised plan. Another fantasy that obviously wasn’t going to work.”
Under the improvised plan, the air force tries to hunt checkpoints of the Basij — the regime’s volunteer paramilitary militia, the instrument of internal repression — and the prime minister issues his public call for Iranians to take to the streets on Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Other assets are employed. Israel invests hopes in this. The Iranians stay home.
“We paid a heavy price for the alternative plan,” one decision-maker says. “Resources are limited. The air force didn’t execute everything it could have on the nuclear program. We were chasing other things.”
A Failure of Decision Making
The full account is broader than what is described here. The Mossad’s plan contained additional components, some of them weighty and relatively persuasive, that have not been published. Their absence can create the impression of a plan far thinner than what the organization was actually trying to realize. But even from the limited details set out above, sharp questions emerge.
The ministers, the IDF, and the Mossad hold different versions of what the war was for.
The IDF treated the Mossad’s regime-change operation as something it was assisting with, not as a substantive objective.
The ministers saw it as a substantive objective, even if not immediately achievable.
The Mossad understood it as the central objective of the war. The formulation of the war aim — “creating the conditions” for a change of regime — was an attempt to paper over severe disagreement.
The result was a political formula. A welding-together of words designed to leave everyone satisfied. That is not a clear objective for a war.
The Mossad maintains there was no IDF opposition to its original plan at all, not even behind closed doors.
The IDF says it laid out the doubts and risks in detail.
Ministers say no clear IDF criticism of the regime-change attempt was ever presented to them, and that the Mossad was failing to deliver even before the Kurdish move was blocked. This is an intolerable factual gap.
Judging by their reactions, the overwhelming majority of Iran experts in Israel and abroad regard the Mossad’s plan — a Kurdish invasion, an uprising of minorities, a set of further steps, the recruitment of Ahmadinejad — as a fiasco. The Mossad insisted it was a realistic, persuasive, credible framework, backed by empirical proof. That is a professional gap that beggars belief.
Turkey’s opposition to a Kurdish force attempting to take over a sovereign state — particularly on behalf of Israel — was foreseeable. Anyone who knows the American administration knows about President Trump’s close relationship with President Erdoğan. How did Israel launch an operation of this kind without preparing for possible Turkish resistance? Who was holding the Erdoğan file?
In Defense of the Gamble?
The campaign against Iran is not over. The deep damage to Iran’s defense industry and its nuclear industry is not in doubt. The regime’s distress is a basic fact, and inflation and economic hardship attest to it. Sometimes very small acts and very small forces bring down empires — larger and stronger ones than Iran. Who knows: had Trump approved the Kurdish invasion, perhaps the regime would have been shaken, or at least slid into civil war. And then everyone would be praising the Mossad’s gamble. In something like this, you only have to succeed once.
It’s not a convincing case. In December 2025 an uprising began in Iran, and together with the state’s weakness after Rising Lion, Trump’s promise to shield the protesters, the American success in Venezuela, and the extraordinary capabilities Israeli Military Intelligence and the air force had displayed, an atmosphere took hold in which everything seemed possible. Including toppling a regime. Netanyahu, with an election coming, pushed — and pushed hard. This is precisely the point at which cabinet ministers and defense officials should have smelled the obvious danger: a bridge too far.
Worse: no staff work was done that took in the campaign as a whole. Whoever wants to crown kings needs to understand kingdoms.
What would happen to Israel’s standing in the United States if it publicly pushed for a full-scale war with Iran? (The answer: a hard, perhaps crucial collapse.) How could Turkey disrupt the Kurdish move? (With one phone call.) If the leader were eliminated, would that not open the door to dangerous radicalization? (It did.)
And above all: Israel did not understand, and to this moment does not understand, American conduct around the Strait of Hormuz. “It’s a mystery,” one well-informed source told me. Israel believed the U.S. would never allow the strait to be closed. Hormuz was and remains Iran’s single most important strategic achievement of the war.
In the late Netanyahu era, the phrase “the limits of force” has gone extinct. The defense establishment is locked in a war of attrition against a political level that is inflamed and unbounded. The National Security Council does not function as an effective staff body, least of all in wartime. The Defense Ministry’s political-military bureau is paralyzed. The professional ranks of the Foreign Ministry have no say in decision making. Around the prime minister there is no independent, functioning staff.
That was the situation on February 28, when Israel went to war. It is also the situation today, perhaps on the eve of another confrontation.
Question 1: "Senior American officials, having heard the Israeli presentations on the war and above all on regime change, were unconvinced." And yet a few days later they said to proceed with the plan. Why?