For months last year, the toll mounted, with repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles.
The head of the elite special forces, the head of the drone unit, the head of the missile unit. All of them killed. The same for the intelligence chief and the head of the southern front — more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total.
In assassinating numerous top Iranian officers, the Israeli attacks on Iran, which continued Sunday, seemed to be following the script from last fall, when Israel decimated the Lebanese militia and degraded its military arsenal.
“It’s the same playbook that they used with Hezbollah — let’s eradicate the top leadership,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”
In Gaza, Israel has sought to eliminate Hamas, in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people. Over the past 20 months of fighting, Israel has killed one leader of the Hamas organization after another and tried to destroy its capacity to fire homemade rockets into Israel.
On Saturday night, Israel targeted a meeting of Houthi leadership, including the military chief of staff, according to an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss operational details. The result was not clear. In May, Israel had threatened to eliminate the head of the Houthis.
All three organizations were long established as Iranian proxy forces, Iran’s first line of defense against Israel if a war erupted. All three are now much diminished, and none of them have responded to the Israeli attack on Iran with anything more than strong verbal condemnations. Nor have the Iran-allied militias in Iraq.
However, the proxy forces are nonstate militias, lacking the muscle to challenge the powerful Israeli military except through guerrilla tactics, analysts noted. Hamas staged an attack against Israel in October 2023, killing more than 1,200, and Hezbollah once drove the Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon after a prolonged occupation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, with more than 90 million people, is a different story, experts said. It’s among the largest 20 armies in the world, with almost one million men under arms. The fact that it was able to lob heavy ballistic missiles into downtown Tel Aviv and elsewhere, even if many were deflected by air defenses, was proof of a far more potent enemy.
Israel’s strikes on Iran’s military infrastructure seem to have reduced the number of missile Iran could fire back, just as its earlier attacks on Hezbollah did. Both the operations against Iran and Hezbollah were preceded by years of intense intelligence operations, including placing agents on the ground.
Critics of Israel suggested that decimating Hamas and Hezbollah had made it reckless. If Israel tries to apply the same playbook to a far more powerful enemy, they say, the risks of setting off a regional conflagration are even greater.
“I know that their bets have been paying off for the past few months, but Iran is different from Hamas or the Houthis; it is a much bigger fish to fry,” said Bader Al-Saif, a professor of history at Kuwait University. “The region has suffered enough.”
The strategy against Iran does not seem to be a carbon copy of the others in at least one important respect. Last September, Israel used bunker-busting explosives to assassinate Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who was both overall military commander and spiritual guide to the Shiite Muslim faithful who form the bedrock of Hezbollah’s followers.
The absence of this charismatic leader, say analysts, has made it particularly hard for Hezbollah, widely designated as a terrorist organization in the West, to regroup. That challenge was compounded by the unexpected collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, a key ally of both Iran and Hezbollah.
In Iran, there is no indication that Israel has sought to kill the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has a similar dual role of commander in chief and religious guide. He was reportedly moved this week to a secret, safe location where he could remain in contact with the military.
Israeli officials seemed to indicate that Mr. Khamenei is not a target. The country’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said in a television interview Friday that Israel did not intend to go after Iran’s “political leadership” in the current campaign.
Iran, for its part, quickly appointed new commanders to replace some of those killed, among them the commander in chief of the military, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the head of its air force. One top Iranian general tried to play down the losses, telling state television that it was a mistake to believe that the deaths would “create weakness.”
“Their successors will continue the path of the martyrs with greater strength and, with God’s help, they will make this fake regime regret its actions,” said Brig. Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, a spokesman for Iran’s armed forces.
Leily Nikounazar, Aaron Boxerman and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
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