Iran says US, Israel goal still to overthrow Islamic republic

TEHRAN: Iran’s intelligence ministry said on Wednesday that the goal of the United States and Israel remained to overthrow the Islamic republic and break up the country.

“The enemy is now pursuing through other means the objective of overthrowing and partitioning the country, which it openly declared at the beginning of the recent war but failed to achieve through military attack,” the ministry said in a statement carried by Iranian media.

The remarks come amid exchanges between Tehran and Washington to draw up an agreement to end the war which broke out on February 28 and engulfed the Middle East.

The ministry said it received intelligence that the US and Israel would seek to “intensify economic pressure”, create divisions in the country among religious and ethnic groups and carry out sabotage and other “terrorist operations”. 

It added that such actions would involve large-scale “smuggling of various weapons, ammunition and illegal communication tools, especially Starlink devices”, used to access the internet via satellite.

For decades, Iran and Israel had engaged in a shadow war involving sabotage operations including to Iran’s nuclear facilities and the assassination of scientists.

That, however, was prior to last year’s 12-day war which at the time was the first sustained conflict between the long-time foes and after sporadic tit-for-tat attacks in 2024 that stopped short of open warfare.

Iran does not recognise Israel and has had no diplomatic relations with the United States since 1980.