Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said “Iran is being decimated” as the U.S. and Israel target its ballistic missile and nuclear programs from the air — but he added that meaningful regime change will require a “ground component.”
“You don’t want to replace one ayatollah with another,” Netanyahu said at a press conference. “You don’t want to replace Hitler with Hitler.”
He said that the Iranian people must ultimately “rise to the moment.”
“We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point,” he said.
A revolution cannot come “only from the air,” he went on. “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.”
His remarks left open the possibility that such on-the-ground action may take many forms. “There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”
The comments came hours after President Donald Trump, speaking in the Oval Office, said that he would not send U.S. troops to the Middle East.
Netanyahu also repeatedly denied accusations that Israel effectively dragged U.S. into the war. Trump needed no convincing of the nuclear threat posed by Iran — “he explained it to me, I didn’t explain it to him,” the prime minister said.
