A regime change in Iran would be a “proper” end to the current conflict, although this is not one of Israel’s goals, security cabinet member and Innovation, Science, and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
“We will never allow Iran to become a nuclear power, and therefore, the proper solution is to replace its regime,” Gamliel said.
Currently, Israel is not aiming to topple the Islamic Republic’s regime, the cabinet member continued, but “the people of Iran are against it, and today, we have shown them that the regime is very weak.”
The security cabinet is the ministerial body responsible for deciding on all matters of national security.
Israel’s goals are to “neutralize” both the nuclear and ballistic missile threat, and the US strike early on Sunday morning indicated that the former has been achieved, Gamliel said.
She said that Iran could attempt to build back its nuclear capabilities, but doing this, Gamliel underscored, would require “taking money from the Iranian people – money that they do not have.”
In this scenario, an “uprising will happen on its own,” while the situation on the ground in Iran was already “on the brink of exploding,” Gamliel added.
Assassinating the Ayatollah
Regarding the threats made by some ministers to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Gamliel said that she believed in “less talking,” but stressed that “whoever threatens us, their lives are at risk.”
Gamliel sharply criticized what she said was Iran’s “war crime” of intentionally targeting civilians. She also decried the damage to “lifesaving research” at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
Iran’s leaders had “no value for human life” and were only interested in a “fanatic religious war” geared toward spreading the Islamic Revolution to the entire world, Gamliel said.
Regarding the war in Gaza, the cabinet member said that there was “still work to do” in blocking Hamas’s ability to seize humanitarian aid and sell it at exorbitant prices.
She dismissed criticism of the large numbers of Palestinian casualties near aid distribution sites, blaming Hamas terrorists for attempting to disrupt humanitarian aid distribution by the Israel and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Further, according to Gamliel, the eventual end to the Israel-Hamas War had to be the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza.
Gamliel said that she had proposed the plan as early as one week after the Hamas October 7 massacre, adding that she believed that US President Donald Trump still supports this idea.
Gamliel concluded by praising Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “bravely leading the battle.”
She made a special thanks to Netanyahu, who, she said, had “identified the [Iranian] threat many years ago.”