Prime Minister Netanyahu has suggested that the war with Iran is “beyond the halfway point” during interviews with US media.
Speaking to right-wing channel Newsmax, Netanyahu predicted that the Islamic regime in Tehran would “collapse internally” under sustained pressure from the US and Israel.
Asked to provide a timeline for the rest of the war, though, he quickly clarified that the “halfway point” he referred to was measured in terms of the completion of Israel’s war aims, of which he insisted regime change was not one, rather than the length of the conflict.
But he claimed that Operation Roaring Lion has eliminated “thousands” of officials in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and was “close to finishing [Iran’s] arms industry”.
"I think this regime will collapse internally. But at the moment, what we’re doing is just degrading their military capacity, degrading their missile capacity, degrading their nuclear capacity and also weakening them from the inside,” he went on.
His remarks came shortly before the Wall Street Journal reported that President Trump had told aides he was looking to pull the US out of the war once “its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks” had been achieved, even if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
The vital maritime route through the Persian Gulf, which carries around 20 per cent of global oil supply in peacetime, has been effectively blockaded for weeks by Tehran’s attacks against commercial shipping, with oil prices rising from $73 per barrel before the war to between $90 and nearly $120 since it began.
Citing a member of Trump’s “inner circle” the Journal suggested that the president has concluded that “a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks”.
Israel, meanwhile, has “has given up on the dream of toppling the regime through air power,” according to Channel 12’s Amit Segal.
"Israel has become convinced that Trump may try to end the war soon, and therefore shifted most of its airstrikes from targeting the destabilisation of the Iranian regime to inflicting severe damage on its military,” he went on.
Likewise, former JC Editor Jake Wallis Simons reports: “Regime change in Iran is now off the table, as the opposition is not organised and is successfully repressed, sources tell me.
"Israeli targeting is therefore shifting from regime repression apparatus to its military capabilities. Looks like this thing will end with a deal after all.
“One Israeli source says: ‘I believe we are in a better place, but it’s not a win.’”
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