Despite warnings after an earlier wave of killings, top Iranian officials gathered in person, and Israel seized the chance to kill Iran’s supreme leader.
A rally to mourn the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran on Sunday.
The Iranian government supposedly drew painful lessons from the 12-day war with Israel and the United States in June.
After Israel located some of Iran’s top leaders and commanders deep underground during that war, Iranian security officials discovered that Israel had tracked them because their bodyguards were carrying cellphones.
Such failures had infuriated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, according to Iranian and Israeli officials.
And yet, the fatal mistakes made by Iran this weekend were even worse than their missteps last June, making the latest assault on the nation’s leadership especially deadly.
Some of Iran’s highest military and intelligence officials gathered in broad daylight, above ground, at their last known address — the country’s National Security Council offices — for a high-level meeting on Saturday morning, just as much of the world was expecting the United States or Israel, or both, to attack, Israeli defense officials said.
Even the supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei — presumed to have been moving from one secret, underground hideaway to another — was also above ground, at his anything-but-secret, official residential compound, the Israeli officials said.
Exactly how U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials knew where all those leaders would be at 9:40 a.m. local time on Saturday is unclear. But the two countries exploited that knowledge and other sensitive intelligence collected from Iran to wage a three-wave attack that decimated the Iranian high command and quickly battered Iran’s air defenses, the defense officials said.
Next came a furious search-and-destroy mission against Iran’s ballistic missile systems, including munitions, launchers, crews, storehouses and production sites.
Crucially, in killing Mr. Khamenei, Israel also crossed a new Rubicon, killing the head of state of a sovereign country — something it had shied away from doing early in the war last June, according to two of the Israeli defense officials.
By midday on Sunday, Israeli military officials said that air supremacy in the skies over Iran had been achieved and that its jets were flying freely over Tehran.
“Iran right now is totally exposed to airstrikes,” said Amir Eshel, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force. “It’s only for U.S. forces and the Israeli Air Force to decide where, when and how. They almost cannot challenge. There’s almost total freedom of maneuver.”
Israeli officials were so emboldened by the freedom of action that some were privately expressing concerns — particularly after a deadly Iranian strike on a residential area west of Jerusalem on Sunday — that the United States wanted to bring the air offensive to a close too quickly. The Israeli Air Force still had many targets to eliminate, Israeli officials said.
“Ballistic missiles will take time,” said Zohar Palti, who headed the political-military bureau of Israel’s defense ministry after a long career in intelligence. “That’s not something that you finish today or tomorrow. Let’s try to finish, not to cut it short.”
