Netanyahu says ‘many signs’ Khamenei ‘no longer alive’

The United States and Israel mean business in their latest coordinated assault on Iran. They intend to topple the regime.

The United States and Israel attack on Iran today bore no resemblance to previous strikes on the regime. Operation Epic Fury has very little to do with nuclear disarmament. The target is to topple the Ayatollah and his regime.

On Saturday morning, U.S. and Israeli forces launched a massive, coordinated military assault across Iran that targeted not centrifuges or enrichment facilities, but the Supreme Leader himself. The first strikes hit Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s palace compound in Tehran’s Pasteur district in broad daylight. Not at night, when every previous Israeli strike on Iran has come. In daylight. Because the target was not infrastructure. The target was leadership.

Israeli officials confirmed the strikes hit locations where Iran’s senior officials were gathered. Seven missiles struck the Tehran district that houses Khamenei’s residence, the presidential palace, and the National Security Council. Satellite imagery published by the New York Times shows Khamenei’s palace reduced to smoldering rubble. President Masoud Pezeshkian was also targeted. Senior IRGC commanders are confirmed dead. CNN confirms months of joint U.S.-Israeli planning went into the operation.

Israel now assesses that Khamenei was likely killed. Iran insists he was moved to a secure location beforehand. Both scenarios are catastrophic for the regime. If he was moved before, someone inside Tehran’s inner circle told Jerusalem when and where to strike. If he wasn’t, they hit the room and he’s gone. Either way, the message is unmistakable: the Ayatollah must die.

Donald Trump confirmed it himself. In a statement directed at the Iranian people, he said: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” That is not the language of arms control. That is the language of regime change.

Benjamin Netanyahu was equally direct, declaring that the United States and Israel intend to “remove the existential threat” posed by Iran. Not the nuclear threat. The existential threat. The regime.

Look at the target list. This is not a surgical strike on Fordow or Natanz. Explosions have been reported in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Tabriz, Kermanshah, Karaj, Ilam, and Lorestan province. You do not bomb Qom — the spiritual seat of Shia clerical authority — to stop uranium enrichment. You bomb Qom to collapse a theocracy.

The timing reveals the lie. Forty-eight hours ago, American and Iranian negotiators were sitting across from each other in Geneva for what both sides called the “most intense” round of nuclear talks yet. The U.S. demanded that Iran destroy its three main nuclear sites and surrender all enriched uranium. Iran’s foreign minister called these “excessive demands” and refused. Two days later, instead of another round of diplomacy, Washington launched the biggest American military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The nuclear talks were theater. A box to check before the bombs fell. A diplomatic fig leaf for an operation that was always coming.

Iran is retaliating. Hard. Tehran has launched strikes on U.S. military installations across the Persian Gulf — Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, bases in Kuwait and the UAE. Blasts have been heard from the beaches of Dubai to the streets of Doha. Israel has come under fire. Iran’s Fars News Agency confirmed attacks on every Gulf state hosting American forces.

This is now a regional war. And Iran’s retaliation accomplished something Washington and Jerusalem could not have bought at any price: it built a Gulf coalition overnight. Saudi Arabia, which was not a target of the U.S.-Israeli operation, condemned Iran and pledged “all its capabilities” to the Gulf states under fire. The alliance that did not exist yesterday exists today because Tehran built it by attacking everyone simultaneously.

And it raises the question no one in Washington wants to answer: what comes after? The United States tried regime change in Iraq. It produced two decades of chaos, hundreds of thousands of dead, the rise of ISIS, and Iranian influence spreading across the entire Middle East. Iran is a country of 88 million people — more than twice Iraq’s population in 2003. It has proxy forces embedded across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It has ballistic missiles capable of reaching every U.S. base in the region, as Saturday’s retaliatory strikes have already demonstrated.

But the real damage is not the rubble. It is the destruction of institutional trust inside the regime. Every general who sits with Khamenei — if he is alive — will now wonder who told Jerusalem about the meeting. Every IRGC commander who receives a summons will calculate whether attendance is duty or a death sentence. Every secure facility in Tehran has been proven insecure.

Trump is betting that killing the Ayatollah will cause the Islamic Republic to collapse from within — that the Iranian people, who have been protesting in the streets for years, will seize the moment. Maybe they will. But history suggests that bombing a country into regime change doesn’t produce democracy. It produces a vacuum. And vacuums in the Middle East get filled by the worst actors imaginable.

The Ayatollah must die. That is now American policy. The question is what dies with him.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.