The Trump Administration may or may not be seeking some kind of agreement with the Iranian leadership, but for Israel, the war doesn’t end until that leadership is gone. “Our mission has yet to be completed,” Mossad Chief David Barnea said at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, The Times of Israel reported yesterday. “We didn’t think that this mission would be completed immediately with the end of the battles. But we planned intensively for our campaign to continue and achieve results even in the period after the strikes in Tehran.” Mossad’s responsibility in the matter, he said, will end “only when this radical regime is replaced.”
“The regime that wants to destroy us must disappear from the world,” he said of Iran’s leadership. Regime change in Iran, said the spy chief, “is our mission. We will not stand by, watching, in the face of another existential threat.”
The Israeli threat behind Barnea’s words may be what the Iranian hacker group Handala was warning about in a statement issued yesterday in which it said that it had found evidence of an extensive Israeli surveillance operation in Iran aimed at senior leadership figures, officials and commanders in Iran. “All officials, commanders, and members of the Resistance Axis are strongly advised that... they and their families should refrain from using any electronic devices for communications or financial transactions until further notice,” it said. “It is also strongly recommended that any normalization of routines and repetitive behavioral patterns in daily life be strictly avoided until further notice.”
