Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar called the status of Mojtaba Khamenei an “open question,” adding that it was “embarrassing” for the Iranian regime that he had not been seen since he was appointed the new Supreme Leader of Iran in an interview with Fox News on Monday.
“I mean, they elected the leader. He’s not there… It’s starting to be embarrassing for the Iranian regime,” Sa'ar said in response to the interviewer asking for his thoughts on whether or not Khamenei was alive or dead.
Sa'ar also called the regime “mad,” both in the way Iran was attacking neighboring states and in its behavior in the Strait of Hormuz, which Sa'ar referred to as “close to modern piracy.”
Sa'ar emphasized the danger of this piracy by comparing the activity to that of the Houthis in the Red Sea in the past, suggesting that “it might become like a new practice of mad regimes and that will affect the cost of living everywhere.”
“They want to take the whole global community as hostages,” Sa'ar said.
The goal of Operation Roaring Lion
When asked about the goals and objectives of Operation Roaring Lion, Sa'ar explained that a main goal is to remove long-term existential threats.
“It is not our wish to go to a new war every year,” Sa'ar said, adding that it would be “very hard to do that with the current mad regime.”
However, while Sa'ar said that Israel is weakening the regime, it would ultimately be the Iranian people who would need to make the final change possible.
“Eventually, it will be up to them, not to us. But it was not possible to do that... without any kind of external help,” Sa'ar said.
“I believe we should do our utmost, of course, to degrade [the regime’s] power to threaten all this region, but at the same time to try to create the conditions for the Iranian people in order to make this change possible.