JERUSALEM (Realist English). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved plans to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as early as November 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz said in interviews with Hebrew-language media.
According to Katz, a small group of senior Israeli officials discussed the operation with Netanyahu in what he described as a “very limited forum.” At the time, the plan envisioned a potential strike against the Iranian leader in mid-2026, possibly around June.
However, the timeline was accelerated after large anti-government protests erupted across Iran in late December. The unrest created conditions for closer operational coordination between Israel and the United States, Katz said.
Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike on Saturday during the opening phase of the current US-Israeli campaign targeting Iranian military and strategic infrastructure.
Initially, Israel did not immediately share its plans with Washington, Katz said, noting that Israeli leaders assumed they might need to conduct the operation independently. But dialogue between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump intensified after the protests spread across Iran.
The demonstrations plunged the country into a severe political crisis. Activist groups reported that thousands of protesters were killed by Iranian security forces, with some estimates placing the death toll in the tens of thousands.
Katz said the scale of the unrest surprised both Israel and the United States. Israeli officials feared the pressure on Tehran could prompt the Iranian leadership to launch a pre-emptive missile strike against Israel or US forces in the region.
Against that backdrop, Washington and Jerusalem began discussing broader strategic coordination. According to Katz, both sides eventually agreed to cooperate in defining the objectives of military operations against Iran and began planning jointly.
“There was joint planning and later a joint operational planning process,” Katz said, while insisting that both governments made their decisions independently and neither country forced the other into the confrontation.
The defense minister also addressed criticism that Israel had already fought a short war with Iran in June 2025 during Operation Rising Lion, after which Israeli officials claimed Tehran’s nuclear and missile capabilities had been severely degraded.
Katz argued that the earlier campaign had destroyed Iran’s nuclear program “as it existed at the time,” but said Israel was now acting to prevent Tehran from rebuilding its capabilities.
He described the current offensive as significantly broader than the previous conflict and said Israel was deploying far greater military force.
Israel’s stated objectives include preventing Iran from restoring its nuclear program, halting the development of large ballistic missile arsenals and weakening Tehran’s support for allied militant groups across the region.
Katz said the collapse of Iran’s political system is not an official war aim but remains a possible outcome.
“I hope this ends with the Iranian people overthrowing the regime,” he said, adding that any political change in Iran would ultimately depend on the country’s population rather than external military action.