Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump will finish the job in Iran, according to Shosh Bedrosian, spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office.
In an interview with the ILTV Podcast, she outlined the objectives of the war and said the leaders will not stop until they are achieved.
What are the war goals? Bedrosian said they are to remove the existential threat posed by Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, while also creating the conditions for the Iranian people to rise up and take back their country.
“The prime minister has made very, very clear, it has to come from the Iranians,” Bedrosian said. “Once they have this opportunity, and this moment, they will know what that moment is, it's up to them.”
Operation Roaring Lion is Israel’s second war with Iran in less than a year. In June, Operation Rising Lion rolled back Iran’s nuclear program and capabilities, Bedrosian explained. The current campaign is targeting the Ayatollah regime that funds and advances that nuclear program.
Many have asked why the war had to take place now and why Israel and the United States struck first. According to the spokeswoman, this was not only about preempting an Iranian strike, although that was expected. She said that over the past more than six months, the regime had been expanding its nuclear program and building deeper underground bunkers to hide it.
“If we didn't target this infrastructure now, it would become immune to aerial attacks, and the only way for us to really locate and go after them is through aerial attacks, which is what we're doing now,” she said. “We needed to target this now, because if we didn't in 10 months, in two years, in five years, 10 years, what would happen? We would be dealing with an Ayatollah regime that had a nuclear weapon.”
Bedrosian added: “We have to take out the Ayatollah regime, to remove all of the other terrorism that surrounds us... This is really an operation to protect the free world, to protect our values, our democratic values, and also just civilization.”
Israel targeted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, along with 39 other leaders in the first 40 seconds of the war. Since then, several additional strategic and high-ranking figures have been eliminated by Israel and America. Bedrosian said they are “targeting the layers” of senior officials and “crushing” and “battering” the Ayatollah regime so that it will not be able to reconstitute itself or stop the Iranian people from rising up against it.
“One of the prime minister's advisors actually said in an interview just this past week, he said that we are obliterating their infrastructure so hard we're rolling it back to the Stone Age,” Bedrosian stressed.
She told ILTV that the Iranian regime wants to annihilate Israel and the United States.
“They call death to America, death to Israel. They mean it. They build it. They say it, and they want it,” Bedrosian added.
So what is the vision for the day after?
According to Bedrosian, many countries in the region are now turning to partner with Israel, and Operation Roaring Lion “could usher in an era of peace we have never, ever seen before” in the Middle East.
According to the spokeswoman, Trump and Netanyahu together “are going to create a society in the Middle East of peace we have never seen. And that's the goal here. And this is what could happen. That's what we were hoping and, God willing, that's how this will end.”
Watch the full conversation: