The targeted killings were part of a “first wave” in the attack plan designed to kill “decision-makers” in the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s regime while they “were in places that we knew about”, the senior Israeli security official said.
Israeli officials, who have an incentive to tout the success of the strikes, and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the secrecy of the operation, which expanded in the ensuing hours to include missile and airstrikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites.
Among those killed in the opening phase were Major General Mohammad Bagheri, commander of Iran’s military; Major General Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s main paramilitary force; and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, a physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran.
The killings were part of a multi-stage operation led by Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, that had accelerated in recent months but was “long in the making and required bold and sophisticated planning” as well as “tactical deception,” a second senior Israeli security official said.
The final stages of preparation unfolded even amid revived United States nuclear negotiations with Iran, and they involved Mossad agents enlisted to “smuggle large quantities of special weaponry into Iran, deploy it throughout the country, and launch it toward designated targets”, the second official said.
The strategic impact of the operation will take days or weeks to assess, said Western security officials, who noted that it is too early to tell whether the attack would amount to more than a temporary setback in Iran’s alleged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iranian officials have denied pursuing a nuclear weapon, and they say their nuclear programme is solely for peaceful ends.
The simultaneous killings of so many key leadership figures appeared to expose a startling inability by Iran to protect leaders of its military and scientific establishments from an adversary that has been assumed to be targeting those individuals for years.
Israeli officials warned on Saturday that the decapitation campaign is poised to continue.
The first security official said that Mossad had relayed messages to second-tier commanders and regime officials likely to be tapped to replace those killed.
“Some of them received a letter under the door; some received a phone call; some received a call on the number of their spouses,” the official said of messages meant to make clear that “we know where they are and that we have access to them”.
US President Donald Trump seemed to amplify that warning in a post on social media.
“They’re all DEAD now,” he said of the regime figures killed in the Israeli attacks. He urged Iran to reach a deal to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons before follow-on attacks that “will only get worse”.
The “elimination operations”, as one Israeli official described the initial wave of attacks Friday, were one aspect of Mossad’s role in the Rising Lion operation, officials said.
The agency worked “shoulder to shoulder for years” with the Israel Defence Forces to assemble dossiers on key Iranian leadership figures, including locations of bunkers and residences.
More recently, Mossad commando units began deploying “precision-guided weapons systems in open areas” near Iran’s surface-to-air missile batteries to take out anti-aircraft capabilities in the early hours of the strikes, the second Israeli security official said.
Mossad also established “a base of explosive drones” deep inside Iran well before the attack, weapons that were activated and aimed at ground-to-ground missile launch locations at Iran’s Esfajabad base near Tehran, the official said.
The attack came just weeks after Ukraine carried a similar operation, using armed drones hidden in shipping containers in strikes that stunned the Kremlin and destroyed Russian military aircraft on unprotected airstrips.
To neutralise other air defences that might be used against Israeli jets, Mossad “secretly deployed strike systems and advanced technologies on vehicles”, an apparent reference to hidden explosives that could be remotely detonated to damage and disrupt air defence systems.
The first Israeli security official provided some additional detail about this aspect of the operation, indicating that it targeted trucks used to move Iranian missiles to launch sites. “For every truck you eliminate, you eliminate four missiles,” the official said.
The killings and military strikes add to an already substantial toll on Iran and its proxies and allies over the past year.
That included an elaborate operation in Beirut last year in which hundreds of Hezbollah operatives were killed or maimed when pagers that the militant group had purchased for operatives - and had been rigged with explosives by Israel - exploded.
The surprise attacks on Iran are part of an ongoing campaign by Israel after its security services were caught off guard on October 7, 2023, by a brazen attack from Gaza into Israel by Iran-backed Hamas.
The Israeli Government has said it believes as many as 20 hostages - among about 250 seized on October 7 - are still alive in captivity.
