The idea of regime change in Iran is gaining prominence with Israel’s pinpoint strikes on the Islamic Republic’s symbols of oppression Monday. Also Monday, Israeli planes bombed access roads to the Fordow nuclear site that suffered significant damage during the American strike Saturday night. 

While exiled Iranians who have suffered from the Islamic Republic’s oppression welcome the Israeli Defense Forces hits on Tehran’s symbols of power, including Iran’s most notorious prison, a dissident tells the Sun an uprising will likely start only after the war between Israel and Iran ends. Israelis hope to preserve the ground for such an eventuality.    

As the war enters its second week, officials in Jerusalem are telling reporters that the IDF has hit nearly all of its targets, and they hope the war will wrap up in days. They are well aware, though, that an end to hostilities will also depend on Tehran. 

“Today we hit the foundations of the regime’s rule,” an Iran watcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. “I hope we can maintain the pressure, and strike at targets beyond Tehran. Each of Iran’s large cities has oppression centers like the ones we bombed today. This is as important as hitting the nuclear sites and the missile launchers.” 

President Trump on Sunday for the first time indicated frustration with the 46 years of mullah rule. “It’s not politically correct to use the term ‘regime change,’ but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn’t there be a regime change?” the president wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “MIGA,” he added, meaning Make Iran Great Again. 

The targets Israel hit Monday seemed to have been chosen because they are instruments of power and oppression of the Iranian people. “These are legitimate targets,” Israel’s diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, told the news outlet Kan. He said changing the regime is up to the Iranian people, and he hopes they rise up, as “the opportunity might never present itself again.”  

One of the IDF’s most high-profile targets Monday was the entry gate to Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. A video documenting the gate’s destruction was widely shared on social media. Regime opponents, dissidents, protesters, and women who expose their hair in public are incarcerated, tortured, and raped at the site. The remainder of the structure seemed untouched, and inmates are still incarcerated. Israelis said they deliberately avoided hitting prisoners.  

“The Zionist regime has reached the point of desperation that it has resorted to moves such as targeting prisoners, which naturally have no value,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote in a Telegram message. “The fact that America has been forced to come to the aid of the Zionist regime shows how helpless they have become.”

Additional targets on Monday included the headquarters of the Islamic Republic’s enforcement arm, the Basij; several sites identified with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; and the internal security arm of the Iranian intelligence system. 

At the same time, Israel announced it struck the access roads to Fordow after the site was hit by 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs dropped from American B-2s. The American attack likely caused “very significant damage,” the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, told the Vienna-based watchdog’s board of governors Monday. 

The IAEA estimated that before the war Iran had enriched more than 300 kilograms of uranium to the level of 60 percent, close to the bomb level of more than 90 percent purity. Much of it was likely buried at Fordow, where America’s strikes Saturday blocked all entryways. The IDF hits Monday seemed designed to ensure that Fordow remains inaccessible for Iranians. 

In Israel, confidence is growing that Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been set back by years, or even completely destroyed. While Israel also likely destroyed more than half of Iran’s ballistic missiles and launchers, the Islamic Republic’s daily barrage against Israeli cities weighs on Israel’s economy and the lives of its residents. Attacking the regime with the aim of making it collapse seems like the war’s next stage.  

The time has come for Prime Minister Netanyahu and world leaders to “take advantage of this phenomenal opportunity to cause the complete fall of the regime” and its top leader, a former head of Israel’s external intelligence, the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, told N12 television. Ayatollah Khamenei “is no leader and isn’t supreme. He’s a mass murderer,” Mr. Cohen says. “His departure is unavoidable.”

While many in America and Europe warn of chaos, instability, and the possibility that even harsher leaders could follow if the Khamenei regime falls, Israelis say nothing could be worse than the current theocracy. “We need to end the hatred of Israel,” Mr. Sabti says. “We are not going to repair the world, and what happens in Iran is up to the Iranians. But if hatred ends, it could be better for everyone.”