Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter jets en route to Iran during Operation Rising Lion. (Israel Defense ... More Forces handout photo published on June 25, 2025)

Israel has expressed its intent to lock in the strategic gains it made over Iran during the recent ‘12 Day War’ with Tehran in June, including air superiority. Doing so could entail Israel imposing an “air occupation” on its arch-enemy, something almost unimaginable just a few weeks ago.

In a recent post on X, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that he had ordered the Israeli military to “prepare an enforcement plan against Iran that includes maintaining Israel’s air superiority, preventing nuclear advancement and missile production, and responding to Iran for supporting terror activity against Israel.”

“We will act regularly to thwart such threats,” he said.

While Katz did not use the term ‘air occupation,’ maintaining air superiority and preventing Iran from doing those things might inevitably require one.

Possible precedents for an Iran air occupation include Israel’s aerial dominance over the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and the past U.S.-led no-fly zones covering large swathes of the airspace of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq between 1991 and 2003. Still, none of these precedents were as logistically challenging as a sustained, long-term Israeli air occupation of Iran could become.

The absence of “any ground element,” as Middle East Quarterly editor Jonathan Spyer observed, defined the 12-Day War. Iran’s most powerful militia proxy, Hezbollah in Israel’s northern neighbor Lebanon, sat out the whole war, having endured a fatal bludgeoning by Israel in the September-November 2024 conflict. Aside from covert operatives launching short-range drones from within Iran to strike strategic targets, Israel also relied overwhelmingly on its airpower to hit strategic and leadership targets during the campaign.

Israel had already caused considerable damage to Iran’s strategic air defenses in a four-hour campaign of........

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