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Israel strikes Iran’s South Pars gas field hours after forces kill intelligence minister

Israel struck Iran’s giant South Pars gasfield on Wednesday, marking a major escalation of the war, hours after Israeli forces killed the regime’s intelligence minister and launched some of the most intense airstrikes in Beirut for decades. The attack on the Pars site in the Persian Gulf, which Iran shares with Qatar and constitutes the world’s largest natural gasfield, prompted Tehran to warn neighbouring states that their energy infrastructure could be targeted “within hours”, and triggered furious rebukes from Qatar and other nations in the region. Located off the coast of the southern Bushehr province, the field holds an estimated 1,800tn cubic feet (51tn cubic metres) of in situ gas, accounting for about 70% of Iran’s domestic supply and a vast portion of Qatar’s exports. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari described the targeting of the gasfield – an extension of Qatar’s North Field – as a “dangerous and irresponsible step”. In a rare rebuke, the United Arab Emirates also condemned the attack, calling the strike a “dangerous escalation”. “Targeting energy infrastructure poses a direct threat to global energy security … It also entails serious environmental repercussions and exposes civilians, maritime security, and vital civilian and industrial facilities to direct risks,” the UAE’s foreign ministry said. As the war intensifies, fresh evidence is raising questions over the purpose of the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. A day after Joe Kent, the director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his role in protest, the US national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress that Iran had made no attempt to rebuild its uranium enrichment programme since it was destroyed in the June 2025 strikes. “As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to rebuild that capability,” Gabbard said in testimony to the Senate. Israel’s strike against South Pars was coordinated with and approved by the Trump administration, the American news website Axios reported, citing two senior Israeli officials. The report said a US defence official confirmed the claim. The attack on the heart of Iran’s gas infrastructure marks a significant stepping up of US and Israeli military operations. Until now, both countries had largely spared Iran’s oil and gas sector in an effort to contain global price shocks, but oil climbed towards $110 (£83) a barrel on Wednesday as growing threats to Gulf energy infrastructure and the continuing blockade of the strait of Hormuz raised fears of further supply disruption. In a statement shared by Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency on Wednesday, Iranian authorities said five facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar “will be targeted in the coming hours”. The US-Israel war on Iran is now in its third week, with at least 2,000 people reported killed and no clear end in sight. The strait of Hormuz remains largely closed and US allies have resisted calls from Donald Trump to help reopen the vital shipping lane, through which about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies normally pass. In a post on his Truth Social network on Wednesday, the US president appeared to suggest the US could “finish off” Iran and then leave responsibility for securing the strait to allied countries that depend on it, a familiar nod to his longstanding complaints about burden-sharing. “I wonder what would happen if we ‘finished off’ what’s left of the Iranian Terror State, and let the Countries that use it, we don’t, be responsible for the so called ‘Straight?’” Trump said. “That would get some of our non-responsive ‘Allies’ in gear, and fast!!!” The strike on the South Pars gasfield came as Iran confirmed the death of the intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, after Israel said it had killed him in an overnight strike, making him the third senior Iranian figure assassinated in 24 hours. Khatib’s death follows those of Ali Larijani, the head of the supreme national security apparatus, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij militia. Khatib was appointed as Iran’s intelligence minister in August 2021 by the then president, Ebrahim Raisi. A cleric with deep roots in the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus, his career spanned roles within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the judiciary, and he was placed under sanctions by the US Treasury in 2022 over alleged cyber operations targeting Washington and its allies. The Israeli military said the intelligence ministry led by Khatib was “the Iranian terrorist regime’s primary intelligence organisation, which also played a key role in supporting the regime’s repression and terrorist activities”. His killing removes yet another pivotal figure from the core of Iran’s political and security establishment at a moment of acute crisis, after the deaths of Larijani – a linchpin of the system, and the most senior figure to be killed since Ali Khamenei – and Soleimani, along with other senior paramilitary figures. Taken together, the three killings suggest Israel retains detailed intelligence on the movements of Iran’s leadership inside Tehran and is able to act on it, leveraging near-total control of Iranian airspace alongside the US to strike with apparent precision. In Lebanon, Israel hit central Beirut, destroying apartment buildings in some of the most intense airstrikes on the city for decades. It also bombed two bridges over the Litani River, marking an expansion of attacks against civilian infrastructure in the south of the country. A spokesperson for the Israeli military said it blew up the bridges to prevent Hezbollah from transporting fighters towards the south of Lebanon, where the organisation is engaged in intense clashes with Israeli soldiers. The destruction of the two bridges, one of which led into the major city of Tyre and the other just south of the city of Nabatieh, further cut off the area south of the Litani from the rest of the country. Israel has bombed two other bridges over the Litani, petrol stations and major roads in the region in recent days, while issuing sweeping displacement orders for the area 25 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border. Israel’s announcement that it would soon bomb bridges triggered a renewed flight of residents from Tyre. Cars packed with families and with mattresses strapped to their roofs headed northwards as civil defence members directed people towards the last remaining bridge out of the city, the other already struck by Israel. The Lebanese army withdrew from their checkpoints on the bridges ahead of the strikes, wary of being caught in the blast. Meanwhile, Hezbollah continued to announce rocket launches at Israel and claimed it was holding strong against an advancing Israeli army in southern Lebanon. People wounded by Israeli strikes streamed into hospitals throughout the day. At least 968 people including 116 children had been killed and more than 2,432 people wounded by Israeli strikes over the last 16 days of fighting, the Lebanese ministry of health said. Despite heavy Israeli and US strikes on its missile infrastructure, Iran appears to retain the ability to launch targeted attacks. Israel’s medical service said two people, a couple in their 70s, had been killed in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv. According to Israeli officials, the couple were killed by Iranian cluster munitions, which Tehran has been firing at Israel since the start of the war. In a separate attack, at least two Palestinian women were killed when an Iranian missile struck near Hebron in the West Bank on Wednesday night, the Red Crescent said. Even when intercepted by Israel’s air defence systems, such weapons can remain highly dangerous: their submunitions disperse in mid-air and may fall over urban areas, detonating on impact or remaining unexploded, posing a lethal risk long after interception.

Middle East war: why attacks on gasfields like South Pars are a major escalation

Strikes by both sides on so-called upstream gas production facilities in recent days are a significant escalation in the war in the Middle East, with potentially long-term consequences. The strikes were the first time facilities associated with the production of fossil fuel energy had been hit in the conflict, rather than sites associated more generally with the oil and gas industry. What has been targeted in recent days? On Tuesday a successful Iranian drone attack resulted in operations at the Shah gasfield in Abu Dhabi being suspended. The site can produce 1.28bn standard cubic feet of gas a day and supplies about 20% of the UAE’s gas supply and 5% of the world’s granulated sulphur used in phosphate fertilisers. On Wednesday an Iranian production facility for the South Pars gasfield, which it shares with Qatar across the Gulf, was struck. The field is the largest in the world and is the biggest source of domestic energy in Iran, which sometimes struggles to produce enough electricity. The strike, which prompted a threat from Tehran of further retaliation against energy infrastructure, was widely reported in Israeli media to have been carried out by Israel with US consent, though neither country immediately confirmed responsibility. The US and Israel had previously held back from targeting Iran’s energy production facilities in the Gulf in an attempt to avoid Iranian retaliation against the oil and gas industries of its neighbours. Why are the strikes significant? The strikes are significant because they signal a potential deepening of the war, with longer-term consequences for the global economy. While a cessation of hostilities could result in suspended gas and oil shipments returning within months, experts assess that any significant damage to production itself could have a years-long impact. Warning of the impact of possible further escalations, Saul Kavonic, an analyst at MST Financial, told the Financial Times: “Something that takes out a few million barrels of production would have a bigger impact because it means there is no way to refill stocks even after the war ends.” Hitting a liquefied natural gas facility would be the worst, he added, because it could take several years to repair. Oil prices shot up after the South Pars attack on the back of fears that disruption to global energy supplies would worsen. The disruption raises the political stakes for Donald Trump in the run-up to the US midterm elections. Diesel prices in the US have already risen above $5 a gallon for the first time since the 2022 inflation surge that eroded support for his predecessor Joe Biden. How have countries in the region reacted? After the South Pars attack, Iran listed an array of prominent regional oil and gas sites belonging to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar that it said were now “direct and legitimate targets” and should be evacuated at once. Loud explosions were heard in Riyadh a few hours later. Qatar, a close US ally which hosts the largest American airbase in the region, blamed the attack on Israel without mentioning any US role. The Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson called it a “dangerous and irresponsible” escalation that put global energy security at risk. The UAE said the South Pars attack posed a threat to global energy and to the security and stability of the region. Can’t this just be repaired? One lesson from the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that it took much longer than expected to repair damaged energy production infrastructure. The Bush administration had promised that reconstruction would be funded by oil revenues, but even though contractors were able to access Iraqi plants and $2bn was spent on oil projects, production took more than two years to return to prewar levels. Attempts to repair Ukrainian power infrastructure hit by Russia has highlighted issues around equipment logjams. What role does energy production play in the Gulf beyond income? Energy production in the Gulf has long had a social, political and diplomatic importance far beyond the economic top line. Social settlements with citizens living under often repressive monarchies are based on the sharing of energy wealth, and it is key to living standards and the ability of states to attract foreign workers. Energy is also integral to the way countries in the region interact with each other. The brief detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which just survived Israel’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities last year, was a priority for Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, as part of his moves to diversify the Saudi economy. He assessed that tensions with Iran were a drain on resources. On the Iranian side the detente was driven by an economy slowly imploding under US-led sanctions. Historically closer to Iran because of a shared interest in the South Pars field, Qatar’s anxiety over the attack has been palpable. The field has at times acted as a diplomatic bridge not just between Doha and Tehran but more widely.

Tulsi Gabbard tells Senate panel US strikes on Iran are strategic success

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence who in 2019 was selling “No War With Iran” T-shirts, told the Senate intelligence committee on Wednesday that US strikes on Iran had been a strategic success. “I’d like to remind those who are watching what I am briefing here today conveys the intelligence community’s assessment of the threats facing US citizens, our homeland and our interests,” Gabbard told the committee, “not my personal views or opinions”. Iran’s retaliatory strikes to the US-Israeli campaign have already killed 13 American service members and wounded approximately 200 more, cost taxpayers billions of dollars and scrambled global supply chains for oil, fertilizer and aluminum. This week, when Donald Trump asked allies to help reopen the strait of Hormuz, the call wasn’t answered. According to the annual global threat assessment report, Iran’s conventional military projection capabilities had been “largely destroyed”, Gabbard said, and Iran’s strategic position “significantly degraded”. But, the regime appears intact, and since internal protests have been violently suppressed with thousands killed, if it survives, Iran would probably “seek to begin a years-long effort to rebuild its military, missiles and UAV forces”. In last year’s assessment, the intelligence community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so.” Gabbard this hearing said that the intelligence community assesses that Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan have been researching and developing new and advanced missile systems “with nuclear and conventional payloads that put our homeland within range.” When Democratic senator Jon Ossoff asked about Iran’s nuclear program, Gabbard confirmed the intelligence community assessed it had been “obliterated” during last June’s strike – a finding she had omitted from her opening statement – and that Iran had made no effort to rebuild since. But when repeatedly pressed on whether Iran had posed an imminent nuclear threat before the strikes, she deflected. “It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said. “That is up to the president, based on a volume of information that he receives.” That answer sat uncomfortably alongside Trump’s own Truth Social video announcing the war, in which he told the American people the campaign was to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime. The 2026 assessment also said that missile threats to the US homeland were projected to grow from roughly 3,000 to more than 16,000 by 2035, that North Korean hackers stole $2bn in cryptocurrency last year, and the Islamic State is actively rebuilding in Syria. But it was what the assessment did not say that drew the sharpest response. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice-chair of the intelligence committee, noted that for the first time since 2017, the assessment contained no mention of adversary attempts to influence American elections. “I don’t believe this omission means that the threat has disappeared,” Warner said. “It means that the intelligence community is no longer being allowed to speak honestly about it.” In response to questioning from Warner, Gabbard said that she did not “participate” in the FBI seizure of 2020 election documentation in Fulton county, but was present “at the request of the president, and to work with the FBI to observe this action that had long been awaited”. Warner had asked Gabbard what she was doing there, given that the criminal warrant “showed no foreign interference or nexus. As a matter of fact, the warrant was based on conspiracy theories that have already been examined and rejected repeatedly.” Warner was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the Fulton county action by the FBI. Gabbard asserted that her directorate hd authority to investigate threats of foreign interference on elections, referring to a letter sent to Congress shortly after the FBI raid. She said Trump sent her to observe, but added that she had no prior knowledge of the contents of the warrant affidavit, and that she was “not aware that the president knew about an affidavit before it was served”. “Then why was he sending you to Fulton County?” Warner asked. “This occurred the day that the FBI had approved their warrant, approved by a local judge, and they began to execute this,” she replied before quickly moving on to other topics.

UK says it remains in talks over escorting ships through strait of Hormuz

Britain has said it remains involved in discussions with the US and European allies over escorting merchant shipping through the strait of Hormuz but the situation remains too dangerous for it to happen soon. Iran is still considered to pose a threat and to have a wide range of weapons available – from cruise missiles to sea drones – despite 19 days of US-led bombing of its navy and coastal sites. A UK defence official said Tehran had “a very effective kind of disaggregated command and dispersal system”, meaning it could continue to attack even though many of its military and political leaders have been killed. Its mountainous coastline makes surveillance of missiles and drones difficult. The defence official added: “The level of threat is such that I don’t see many nations being willing to put warships into the middle of that threat right now.” Iran has in effect closed the strait with periodic attacks on oil tankers and other shipping. About a fifth of seaborne crude oil traffic passed through the strait before the war, and a dramatic fall in exports has helped push prices above $100 a barrel. Donald Trump has criticised the UK and other Nato members for failing to offer warships to help patrol the strategic waterway. On Truth Social on Tuesday he said the United States “no longer ‘need’ or desire the Nato Countries’ assistance”. However, the UK said contacts continued about the issue at a military level, and additional British planners had been dispatched to liaise with US Central Command (Centcom), which is leading the American military effort against Iran. It is unclear what the UK would contribute to any maritime escort operation, though the Royal Navy could in theory redeploy HMS Dragon, a destroyer currently en route to Cyprus, into the Arabian sea. No other warships are immediately available. On Wednesday, John Healey, the defence secretary, discussed the strait of Hormuz in a call with the defence ministers of France, Germany, Italy and Poland. France has previously said it would be willing to send warships to the strait, but only when the “most intense” phase of the conflict is over. Al Carns, a UK junior defence minister, said the last escort operation in Gulf, which began in 1987 during the last phase of the Iran-Iraq war, required 30 warships. “That gives you just an example of the resources required. So it’s a major undertaking,” he said in a briefing. He emphasised “this must be a multinational solution”, arguing that Britain had no choice to work with the US, however difficult. “But I would say this: there is one thing worse than working with allies and that’s working without them,” he said. The US navy has so far not indicated it is ready to become involved in an escort operation, preferring to focus on the continuing bombing campaign, though officials have suggested that could change next month. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is operating off the coast of Oman. Overnight, Centcom said it had used 5,000lb “bunker buster” bombs on what it said were “hardened Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the strait of Hormuz”, part of a wider attempt to eliminate the threat from anti-ship cruise missiles. Kevin Rowlands, a naval expert with the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said that while Iranian capacity to inflict damage was being steadily reduced, danger to shipping remained. “It is almost impossible to reduce the risk to zero and we can expect ships to face a residual level of threat for some time to come,” Rowlands said, adding that the narrow, 20 nautical mile width of the strait “effectively creates a kill zone” where the warning time for an attack may only be a few seconds.

Damaged Russian tanker carrying natural gas floats into Libyan waters

A severely damaged Russian tanker carrying liquified natural gas that has been adrift in the Mediterranean for two weeks, raising concerns of an ecological disaster, has floated into Libyan waters, Italy’s civil protection agency said on Wednesday. The Arctic Metagaz was part of a Russian “shadow fleet” used to circumvent sanctions imposed on the country’s oil and gas after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It was struck in a suspected drone attack close to Maltese waters earlier this month, causing a huge hole. The crew is believed to have been rescued between Malta and Libya. Earlier this week the tanker was adrift between Malta and the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, prompting the governments of Italy, France, Malta, Spain, Greece and Cyprus to write a joint letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, warning that the vessel posed an “imminent and serious risk of a major ecological disaster”. A spokesperson for Italy’s civil protection agency, which has been monitoring the situation, told the Guardian that the vessel was now in Libya’s territorial waters and therefore the responsibility of the north African country’s authorities. Libya on Wednesday issued a navigation advisory to all vessels operating in the area – where sea conditions were currently rough – urging them to exercise maximum caution, according to reports in the Italian press. The spokesperson for Italy’s civil protection said that while no leaks had been detected, the fundamental risk was the “dispersion into the sea of the hydrocarbons onboard”. They said: “There are about 90 tonnes of heavy oil or diesel onboard, so we are more certain of this risk. The other danger is related to the gas that the tanker was transporting. We are less certain about its quantity, but there could be gas dispersion.” Russia’s foreign ministry acknowledged that the Arctic Metagaz, which had been carrying LNG from the Arctic port of Murmansk, was adrift in the Mediterranean and said Moscow’s involvement in resolving the situation depended on “concrete circumstances”. Russia’s transport ministry claimed the vessel was attacked by Ukrainian naval drones launched from the Libyan coast.

Canada in push for joint G7 and Middle East effort to de-escalate Iran war

Canada is pushing for a collective G7 and Middle East approach to de-escalating the Iran war, including off ramps that could bring an end to the conflict, the Canadian foreign minister, Anita Anand, has said. In London to meet the UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, after talks with the her Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, Anand told the Guardian she hoped a G7 meeting chaired by France, this year’s president of the group, might start to build a broader collective approach to the crisis. Europe and Canada have been largely left as bystanders in the US-Israeli bombing campaign, which Iran has retaliated against with missile and drone strikes on its Gulf neighbours and threats to shipping in the strait of Hormuz. They are only now starting to coordinate their position. Anand said she had drafted a “document of principles” to share with others “to reduce the risk of regional spillover, to minimise the collateral impacts on non-belligerent states and civilian populations and finally to mitigate local economic shocks”. “It’s a document I am working with a number of countries on. I am speaking with every G7 country and every partner impacted by the war in the Middle East to stress the principle of de-escalation,” she said. “It’s important for us to have a conversation about the off ramps. I want to engage with the countries being directly impacted by the retaliatory strikes in particular, so this is a collective and coordinated discussion about off ramps.” Diplomats recognise the extreme difficulty of ending the war because Iran is seeking some kind of guarantee that it will not be attacked again, but that is not likely to be forthcoming in a format Tehran would accept. Levels of trust between the US and Iran are at an all-time low and Donald Trump may now have set the reopening of the strait of Hormuz as one of his war objectives. Anand stressed Canada’s lack of enthusiasm for the US-Israeli assault, but at the same time described Iran’s response as reprehensible and a breach of international law. “We were not consulted on the offensive military operation. We did not participate in the offensive operation. We have no intention of participating in the military operation period,” she said. “That does that mean we are not concerned about the strait of Hormuz. We recognise the importance of the stoppage of 20% of the world oil reserves. It’s extremely problematic for food supply chains and energy supply chains.” Canada is home to a large Iranian diaspora but has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran for 15 years. It has declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. European states and Canada have arguably been slow to coordinate their initial response to the US attacks, but their positions are gradually coalescing. The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, recently made a much-hailed speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos calling for “middle powers” to be more active in the face of the major hegemons, something they have not done over the Iran crisis. Anand said Carney’s speech continued to resonate with every diplomat to whom she spoke. “It identified that we are at a unique point in time where countries with like-minded interests and values can be more powerful and influential together than apart,” she said. The precise constellation of middle-power alliances would be driven by pragmatism, she said, and would be “different on different issues whether it is the coalition of the willing in Ukraine, whether it is the Nordic five plus Canada on Arctic sovereignty, whether it is Australia, India and Canada on information technology”. She denied Canada was being forced to spread its diplomatic wings solely because of the difficulties in its relations with Trump, but accepted that it had been pursuing a policy of trade diversification since early 2025. “Since Mark Carney became prime minister we have signed more than 12 trade agreements over six months on four continents.” She said the aim was to double non-US trade over the next 10 years. “We are doing it with alacrity.” Anand, a former defence minister, also pressed the case for the UK to join the Defence Security and Resilience Bank. Negotiations on its charter are scheduled to take place in Montreal next week. The aim is for the bank to provide capital for defence firms that want to scale up to meet increasing demand.

US and Israel’s strategy to kill Iran’s top figures may prove counterproductive

Israel’s decision to authorise its military to kill any senior Iranian official on its assassination list has raised significant new questions about its so-called decapitation strategy and what it is intended to achieve. Privately, Israeli officials have briefed their US counterparts that in the event of an uprising, Iran’s opposition would be “slaughtered”. That appears to be at odds with Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to pursue regime change by targeting senior figures in Iran’s political and security apparatus. Even before the outbreak of full-scale war, however, Iran experts and analysts – and some former Israeli officials – were sceptical that Iran’s clerical regime could be toppled by such strikes. So far the targeted attacks have killed the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the security chief Ali Larijani and the intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, among others. At the heart of the issue is the structure and resilience of Iran’s regime – and how both the regime and the Iranian public respond to such attacks. Before the US and Israel launched their attacks three weeks ago, experts had assessed that the regime was stagnating in the face of protests and that some kind of change appeared inevitable. That dynamic has now changed. “This isn’t a personalised regime,” said Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert at Chatham House. “There are institutional layers under every individual and I suspect that the response to decapitation strikes would be to simply [promote] from within – although that risks bringing up unknown and untested individuals. Given the Israeli success rate you could imagine there are perhaps lower-rank individuals not so amenable to moving up the system in what is dangerous work.” Thus far, Vakil does not judge Israel’s decapitation strategy to have been successful. “At the moment it seems to be buying time, and I’m not sure what the US is trying to achieve, but there exists a potential for air to be blown back into the system to rejuvenate a regime that was becoming a spent force, where the people moving up have seen their mentors and their bosses and family members killed. “It is not an approach that produces Jeffersonian democrats but hardened resistance fighters. It breeds more resistance,” she said. Israel’s history of assassination does not point to much success. Over the years it has killed numerous senior leaders in Hamas and Hezbollah, including Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin in 2004, and Hezbollah’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. Yet while Israeli campaigns have diminished those groups, both have rebounded. Jon B Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, is another sceptic, citing the example of Hamas, which he said “as a political movement absorbed its martyrs and lives to fight another day”. He wrote in a recent post: “Unfortunately meaningful improvement through decapitation is unlikely. Each situation is unique, and each involves an element of chance. Still, the track record for advancing ambitious political goals – which is what the United States has – through a limited military effort is poor.” While he cited the example of the killing of Osama bin Laden as an example of how a non-state group could be degraded significantly by the removal of a leader, Alterman said the Israeli attempt to decapitate a state was “unprecedented”. “One of common myths in the US government post-9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq was that you simply had to remove the ‘dirty dozen’ [of senior regime figures] in Iraq,” he told the Guardian. “I thought it was ill-conceived then and ill-conceived now. An issue that has not got sufficient attention is that if you eliminate the people who have credibility with the nasty guys, there is nobody with influence to make the nasty guys stop. “It also feels like the resilience of the regime is being underestimated. Maybe it is possible to create an internal split, but I don’t know any evidence of moderate democrats waiting in wings.” For Alterman, the most likely outcome of the decapitation strategy “is an internally unstable Iran” that is more likely to carry out acts of violence outside borders, either via cyberwarfare, proxies or terrorism. Complicating the issue is that a successful popular uprising is not even necessarily the most likely outcome of a destabilised regime. In a January essay for the American magazine Foreign Affairs, Afshon Ostovar, a Middle East expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, predicted that any coup would more likely come from within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the strongest actor in the country, and would be aimed at preserving existing institutions, a potential dynamic that still holds. Steven Simon, a security expert at Dartmouth College and a former US national security council staffer, wrote in War on the Rocks: “The scenario that deserves more attention than it is getting[is] not Iranian collapse but Iranian persistence; wounded, revanchist, and ungovernable by the tools that won the war.” Vakil said: “There also something perverse about this. What Israel and the US are pursuing, that makes me so uncomfortable, is that there is no agency or choice or justice for Iranians in this process.”