Ruhollah Khomeini did not call Israel a state. He called it the regime occupying Jerusalem, and said it had to vanish from the page of time. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, four months into his presidency, repeated the line at the “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran on October 26, 2005, and credited it to his imam. The New York Times rendered it as wiped off the map.

Ali Khamenei, supreme leader until he was killed in the opening strikes of February 28, called Israel a cancerous tumor. On Quds Day in 2020, the observance Khomeini fixed to the last Friday of Ramadan, he called Zionism a virus that has to be eliminated. Quds is the name for Jerusalem in Arabic and Persian.

In February 2025 Major General Ebrahim Jabbari told Basij members that Operation True Promise 3 would be executed at the right time, with precision, and on a scale sufficient to destroy Israel and raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground. He was the third Revolutionary Guard commander to say it that week.

In the twelve days of June 2025 Iran fired roughly 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones. Thirty-one hit populated areas or critical infrastructure. Twenty-eight people were killed, all but one civilians. Nine died in Bat Yam, four in Petah Tikva, three in Haifa, one in Bnei Brak, a woman in Tamra, and more in Beersheba on the final day. Three workers died at the Haifa oil refinery. The Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba took a direct hit.

The war that began on February 28 of this year ran forty days before the April 8 ceasefire. Around 650 missiles, sixteen of them into populated areas, twenty-four civilians killed. The worst single strike........

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