ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the ongoing war against Iran has already achieved more than half of its intended objectives, while declining to set a clear timeline for its conclusion.
Speaking on March 30, Netanyahu indicated that progress should be measured by operational outcomes rather than duration.
“It’s definitely beyond the halfway point. But I don’t want to put a schedule on it,” AFP reported him saying on Tuesday, adding that the assessment referred to mission success rather than elapsed time.
He clarified: “in terms of missions, not necessarily in terms of time”.
The conflict, launched jointly with United States President Donald Trump on February 28, was initially expected by Washington to last between four and six weeks.
However, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since suggested a longer timeframe, saying the war would continue for “weeks” rather than months, even as public opposition in the United States grows and energy prices surge.
Netanyahu credited the campaign with major military achievements, including the killing of “thousands” of members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and extensive damage to Iran’s defence and industrial infrastructure.
Israel and the United States are also “close to finishing their arms industry,” he said.
“Just the whole industrial base – wiping out all, you know, just plants, entire plants, and the nuclear programme itself,” he added.
Both Netanyahu and Trump have repeatedly asserted that Iran was nearing the capability to produce a nuclear weapon, although this claim has not been supported by international nuclear inspectors. Trump has previously stated that key Iranian sites were “obliterated” in earlier strikes.
Despite the scale of military operations, Netanyahu suggested that internal political change in Iran could emerge as a consequence of sustained pressure, while maintaining that regime change is not an explicit objective.
“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,” he said.
The war follows a period of internal unrest in Iran, during which authorities reportedly suppressed large-scale anti-government protests. In recent days, Trump has suggested that the conflict has effectively driven “regime change” dynamics by strengthening alternative factions within Iran’s political system. - March 31, 2026
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