Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday night that the intelligence chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kazemi, had been eliminated in an Israeli airstrike.
“We attacked their top command,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. “Moments ago, we also got the chief intelligence officer and his deputy in Tehran, because we’re now over the skies of Tehran.”
“Our great pilots are over the skies of Tehran and we’re targeting military sites, nuclear sites—that’s what we’re doing,” he continued, noting that Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on the Jewish state have targeted civilian areas.
Jerusalem launched “Operation Rising Lion” against the Iranian regime because intelligence indicated that Tehran had amassed enough enriched uranium for nine bombs, the premier stressed. “All they had to do was weaponize them. We stopped that by attacking their nuclear scientists.”
“We attacked their chief nuclear scientist. It’s like Hitler’s nuclear scientist—would you leave them? Of course not,” he continued.
The premier also revealed that the Islamic Republic had made plans to transfer a nuclear weapon to the Houthis, its proxy in Yemen. “That’s nuclear terrorism on a global scale; it threatens everyone,” he stated.
Asked whether regime change was part of Jerusalem’s plans for the ongoing military operation, the Israeli prime minister said it “could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is very weak.”
“Eighty percent of the people would throw these theological thugs out,” he said of internal opposition to the regime. “They murder them, they oppress them—for 46 years they’ve yearned for freedom,” he continued.
“The Persian people and the Jewish people have had an ancient friendship that goes back to the times of Cyrus the Great; that could happen again,” Netanyahu told Fox, while saying that “the decision to act, to rise up, at this time is the decision of the Iranian people.”
Early on Friday, more than 200 Israeli jets attacked dozens of enemy targets, including military and nuclear sites, in a “preemptive, precise, combined offensive” against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
The IDF said the attack was based on “high-quality intelligence” and came “in response to the Iranian regime’s ongoing aggression against Israel.”
Netanyahu said the operation would “continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat,” vowing to stop “the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
