The gloves are off. The question may well be why they were on to begin with.
In the breathtaking opening attack of the full-scale war between Israel and Iran, the IDF struck numerous targets with precision and multiplicity — except the capital of Tehran. Aside from a a handful of carefully targeted strikes to take out military commanders, the IDF took care to avoid the densely populated capital, likely on the urging of the US. As a result, while the IDF decimated Iran’s top military leadership and nuclear-weapons developers, they left the political structure unmolested within Tehran.
After 24 hours of unrestricted ballistic-missile attacks on Israeli civilian population centers, that last bit of operational modesty has gone out the window. The IDF announced that it now has air superiority over Tehran after the missions last night successfully destroyed Iran’s defenses of the city. The Israelis intend to use that superiority to its full extent:
“The dozens of aircraft are flying freely over Tehran, thanks to the opening blow that removed the threat of Iranian air defense systems,” he says.
Defrin says it is the deepest area in Iran that the IAF has operated in so far.
“Tehran is no longer immune; the capital is exposed to Israeli strikes,” he adds.
The people behind the strategic X account OSINT Defender drily note what this means:
I think it is now safe to say that Israel and Iran are at war, and it appears like Israel is pushing for regime change in Iran.
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) June 14, 2025
Actually, that has been the obvious conclusion since the start of the operation. When Benjamin Netanyahu first spoke on early Friday morning (local time), he suggested that the Iranian people had an opportunity to rid themselves of the genocidal regime that had oppressed them for 46 years. He made that call even more explicit yesterday, urging Iranians — especially in Tehran — to “revolt” against the Ayatollah and the IRGC.
Even the symbolism Netanyahu chose speaks to regime change. The nominal reference in naming this war Operation Rising Lion is a quote from Numbers in calling the nation to arms. However, perhaps less appreciated is that Iranian flags prior to the mullahs featured a lion posing before the sun since the late Safavid era, starting in 1576. The Pahlavi shahs continued that tradition in their 54 years in power, but the mullahs threw out the leonine imagery when they seized power in the 1979 revolution.
“Operation Rising Lion” means something very specific to both Israelis and Iranians, and the Iranian people would likely recognize it. It’s a call for both lions to rise up against the insane mullah cult that has subjugated a great people and is attempting to annihilate another great civilization. That regime attempted to kill the lion 46 years ago; Netanyahu is calling the lion to emerge now when the opportunity has finally come for it to reign.
That brings us back to Tehran. Israel probably wanted to wait for Iran’s reaction before striking targets within the population center that would be the most likely to succeed in pulling down the mullahs, whether to allow Trump some opening for talks or just to wait for more provocation. After all, it was pretty clear that the only offense that Iran can now muster with its proxies all but demolished would be ballistic missiles with limited targeting capabilities. The Iranian attack on Israeli population centers essentially made Tehran an even more legitimate target.
But Israel has to be careful here too. They want to provoke an uprising, not fury that will rally the Iranian to the mullahs. The targets would have to be carefully selected to hit regime assets with as little collateral damage as possible, and/or the destruction of the economic infrastructure on which the mullahs rely for resources to wage war. And right now, it appears the Israelis are doing some of both, around Tehran and elsewhere. They have begun targeting IRGC-commanded law-enforcement leaders as well as Iran’s oil industry:
Iranian state-run media has confirmed strikes recently targeted the Phase 14 Refinery of the South Pars Gas Field, the Fajr Jam Natural Gas Refinery, and the Kangan LNG Port on the coast of the Persian Gulf, all in the Bushehr Province of Southern Iran. It appears that Israel has… pic.twitter.com/vJKaFukjab
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) June 14, 2025
And thanks to their air superiority, the IDF has tracked “dozens” of ballistic missile launchers and destroyed them:
The Israel Air Force struck surface-to-surface missile launchers across Iran, the military announced on Sunday morning.
The IDF also released video documentation of the strike alongside its statement.
Other targets hit by the IAF in Iran include the Mehrabad Airport, which caught fire early on Saturday morning after explosions were heard in Tehran, according to Iranian media reports. Later, an Iranian official confirmed that the country’s Fordow nuclear facility sustained limited damage following recent attacks.
Iran likely has hundreds of these launchers, but firing these missiles while the IDF patrols the skies will keep exposing more of them to destruction. That would be a slow process, however, and the Israelis want to end the ballistic missile threat as quickly as possible. The most reliable way to achieve that would be to end the regime that controls these weapons, and perhaps that may be the only way to accomplish that mission.
That is why Tehran is no longer immune. And it’s why Tehran shouldn’t have been immune from the first strike.
Addendum: This is a tangent, but this video has been floating around for the last several hours on Twitter. It captures precisely the kind of Western arrogance in assessing the Middle East in presuming that all Arabs agree with Hamas and the Islamists. A group of activists tried to cross Egypt to force their way into Gaza to deliver “aid,” and found out the hard way that Egyptians have no use for the Hamasniks on either side of the Philadelphi Corridor.
One of the ‘Global March to Gaza’ organisers just got her passport confiscated and thrown on a bus—after her friends were beaten.
Not by Israel. By Egypt.
Turns out blindly following Greta into the Middle East isn’t just cringe—it’s dangerous.
— Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) June 13, 2025
More on topic, here’s a video from earlier today discussing the IDF’s air superiority. This actually sounds more like air supremacy than air superiority, but this is a pretty interesting analysis otherwise.
