Iran’s Islamic republic will ‘collapse internally’, says Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Photo: EPA Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced confidence on Monday that Iran’s Islamic republic would eventually fall, though he again said that was not the objective of the US-Israeli war on the country. “I think this regime will collapse internally.

But at the moment, right now, what we’re doing is just degrading their military capacity, degrading their missile capacity, degrading their nuclear capacity and also weakening them from the inside,” Netanyahu told conservative US broadcaster Newsmax.

Netanyahu said the war on Iran had achieved more than half its aims, without putting a timeline on when it would end. “It’s definitely beyond the halfway point.

But I don’t want to put a schedule on it.” Gulf allies of the United States, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are meanwhile urging US President Donald Trump to continue prosecuting the war against Iran, arguing that Tehran has not been weakened enough by the month-long US-led bombing campaign, according to US, Gulf and Israeli officials.

After private grumbling at the start of the war that they were not given adequate advance notice of the US-Israeli attack and complaining the US had ignored their warnings that the war would have devastating consequences for the entire region, some of the regional allies are making the case to the White House that the moment offers a historic opportunity to cripple Tehran’s clerical rule once and for all.

Officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain have conveyed in private conversations that they do not want the military operation to end until there are significant changes in the Iranian leadership or there is a dramatic shift in Iranian behaviour, according to the officials, who were not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The push from the Gulf nations comes as Trump vacillates between claiming that Iran’s decimated leadership is ready to settle the conflict and threatening to further escalate the war if a deal is not reached soon.

All the while, Trump is struggling to rally public support at home for a war that has left more than 3,000 dead across the Middle East and is shaking the global economy.

Yet the US leader is sounding increasingly confident that he has the full support of his most important Middle East allies – including some who were hesitant about a new military campaign in the lead-up to the war.

The UAE has emerged as perhaps

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