Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal's long-form report, "Exclusive: The Warnings Netanyahu Received Before the War," reduces "Operation Roaring Lion" from a war to a history of decision-making failure: a regime-change plan estimated at "one to three years" was compressed by political clocks into a gamble of a few months; Mossad and the IDF told two different stories about the very same plan; and the scenario of 150,000 Kurds invading Tehran collapsed the moment Turkey objected. The systemic failure did not happen on the battlefield — it happened before the war even began, at a point where the parties could not even agree on the facts.
One Plan, Three Ledgers
The core finding of Eyal's reporting is that regime change — the overarching objective — was never truly aligned among the political echelon, the Israel Defense Forces, and Mossad. The assessment Mossad submitted to the cabinet on the eve of the operation was "one to three years"; the IDF's judgment was "completely unrealistic — at best, weakening Iran"; but Netanyahu's cabinet could not wait. Iran's crushing defeat in last year's twelve-day war convinced Israel's decision-making establishment that "the landscape of the Middle East may change," and from that they concluded that "there is only one strategic way to solve this problem: regime change. Otherwise we will keep bailing water from this barrel — sometimes with a teaspoon, sometimes with a ladle."
The divergence among the three ledgers was fully exposed in the postwar recriminations: Mossad says the military fully agreed during the meetings; the military says it issued warnings from the very start. The parties cannot even agree on whether an agreement was ever reached — exactly as the report's opening characterization states: this is the story of a systemic failure, of how a vast strategic objective became an executable task even though the parties never truly agreed on its nature, its importance, its feasibility, or whether the tools matched the ambition.
The Kurdish Army of 150,000
The core operational dimension of the plan was the Kurds. Mossad's design ran as follows: Kurdish armed forces would invade from the west, advance city by city, absorbing more Kurds and Iranians along the way, and ultimately march on Tehran; the Israeli Air Force would carve out ground corridors for the Kurds. The Kurdish force initially numbered around 15,000, with the plan calling for it to swell to "150,000 to 200,000" as the advance proceeded.
This plan rested on two premises, and neither held up. The first was Turkey's acquiescence — once the war began, Turkey opposed a Kurdish offensive, and Trump promptly called the operation off, invalidating the Kurdish route on the spot. The second was a response from Iranian society — Mossad planned to incite a nationwide uprising after the bombing phase, and Netanyahu even publicly called on the Iranian public to rise up during Nowruz; that, too, came to nothing. The Air Force abandoned large numbers of significant military targets and instead bombed the security checkpoints of the police and the Basij militia; the objective of disrupting public order was never achieved, and the war was dragged into attrition instead.
Green Light and Brakes on the American Side
The swings in the American stance form the most dramatic thread in the report. Senior US officials, briefed on Israel's regime-change plan, were unconvinced — Secretary of State Rubio and the CIA director both considered it "utterly absurd." Yet days later Trump threw his strong support behind it, and the White House gave the green light.
The green light came quickly, and the brakes came just as abruptly. After Trump halted the Kurdish operation, Israel pressed ahead with a new plan cobbled together on the fly by Mossad; and the fact that the US military was unable to force open the Strait of Hormuz was something Israel had not even factored into its calculations when the war began. The report's final layer of judgment points at the decision-making system itself: in the late phase of Netanyahu's tenure, the phrase "limits on the use of force" had ceased to exist; the National Security Council could not function effectively, the Defense Ministry's Political-Military Bureau was paralyzed, the Foreign Ministry's professional staff had no voice whatsoever, and there was no independently operating staff team around Netanyahu.
This report supplies the war's origin narrative for "From Battlefield to Negotiation Table — The 14-Point Memorandum of the US-Iran Peace-Deal Gambit and the Structural Chasm of Trust": every reversal at the negotiation table can be traced back to the decision-making failures before the war began. Because Israel treated regime change as the only solution, a war that could have been avoided was dragged out into today's deadlock.
Shen Yi relayed Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal's long-form report "Exclusive: The Warnings Netanyahu Received Before the War": a nine-layer breakdown of Operation Roaring Lion — Mossad's "one to three years" assessment versus a cabinet that could not wait; the Kurdish invasion plan scaling from 15,000 to 150,000–200,000; the IDF deeming it unrealistic; senior US officials calling it "utterly absurd" before Trump gave the green light; Turkey's objection invalidating the Kurdish route; the Air Force's bombing of security checkpoints and the failed call for a Nowruz uprising; Israel's failure to anticipate that the US military could not force open the Strait of Hormuz; and a wartime decision-making system in total breakdown (via Shen Yi, 2026-08-05).