The joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran is, in one sense, a long-held aspiration for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He has been portraying the Islamic republic, a sworn enemy of his country, as a singular threat to Israel, the region and the world for more than three decades.
Now, an emboldened Israel and its strongest ally, the United States, have declared the aim of the war as nothing less than paving the way for the overthrow of Iran’s government by encouraging Iranians to rise up against the Islamic republic.
“Our joint action will create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement on Saturday.
“When we are finished, take over your government,” President Trump said, addressing the Iranian public in his own video. “It will be yours to take.”
Nothing would burnish the legacy of Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, more than toppling the Islamic republic, which he has likened to Hitler’s Germany, and ending its nuclear program for good.
He made progress last June, when Israel and the United States severely damaged Iran’s nuclear program and killed several senior leaders and nuclear scientists. Israel’s confidence has soared as it has degraded Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu also needs a major military win to help dispel Israelis’ memories of the costly two-year war with Hamas as he heads into elections later this year in a weakened political position.
As seen in Gaza, however, defeating an ideological enemy is easier said than done. Imposing regime change in Iran, a far larger and more powerful adversary, would be harder still, especially if the attacks against Iran are limited to air strikes.
It is impossible to know what would ensure a popular uprising against Iran’s government, analysts say, let alone what it would require to be successful.
Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at RAND, said the Americans and Israelis seemed to assume the Iranian government lacked resilience, that decapitating its leadership would topple it, and that opposition forces and minority groups would rise up.
“We would all be very happy if the ayatollahs would go away, but those assumptions may not be robust,” she said.
All of which makes the U.S.-Israeli attack both enormously ambitious and enormously risky.
“Let’s assume the people won’t go into the streets, and the supreme leader is still alive, and Iran will continue launching missiles,” said Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence. “Then what? You can continue the war for how long?”
The longer an air war continues, he said, the more likely Iranian allies in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq could join the fight as the Iranian government seeks to make the war as painful and costly as possible for both the United States and Israel.
“If they know it’s a fight for their life, then they have nothing to lose by continuing,” Mr. Citrinowicz said.
Iran is a nation of 93 million people, after all, of whom around 15 million are considered devoted supporters of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Citrinowicz said.
What is unknowable, several analysts said, is how many of those core supporters, who include well-armed security forces and militia members, would also need to be killed in airstrikes before it is safe for unarmed protesters to return to the streets. It’s also unclear whether those who protested weeks ago and endured a severe government crackdown would rise up against the leadership as Israeli and American missiles bombard the country.
Declaring regime change as the goal of the strikes also makes it less likely that Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu will be able to end the war, return to negotiations with Iran and declare victory at the bargaining table, Mr. Citrinowicz said. “If someone thinks that Khamenei will say, ‘OK, OK, I surrender, I will give you the missiles,’ it’s not going to happen,” he said.
Raz Zimmt, director of the Iran program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, suggested that the best outcome of the U.S.-Israeli air offensive might prove to be “a change within the regime, not necessarily a regime change.”
Should Ayatollah Khamenei be killed, Mr. Zimmt said he could imagine Iran becoming embroiled in a political succession battle that forces it to focus on domestic matters rather than pursue its strategic goals in the region.
And an eventual successor could prove more pragmatic or moderate. “One has to assume that someone else, other than Khamenei, might be less obsessed with this revolutionary ideology,” he said.
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
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