Operation Roaring Lion Day 19: Inside the Hunt for Ali Larijani
Also, Israel has a new war goal, a powerful flight home, and more.
Ali Larijani’s coffin.
It’s Wednesday, March 18, and the nineteenth day of Operation Roaring Lion. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:
Israel’s fatalities have risen to 15 after an elderly couple were killed last night when an Iranian missile struck their apartment in the Tel Aviv area. Also damaged in the attack were Tel Aviv’s Savidor station, a street Petah Tikva, and a vehicle in Bnei Brak; at least six were lightly wounded. Meanwhile in the north, Israel was anticipating a major Hezbollah attack; in the end, the total barrage numbered 40; last week, it was 200.
Israel’s pace has not slowed. Yesterday brought another decapitation strike on the regime and today, the Defense Minister announced the elimination of the head of Iranian intelligence.
After Trump hinted that France would join a “Hormuz Coalition,” Macron pushed back, declaring that France would not participate until all “acts of hostility” cease. Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom have been similarly unhelpful.
Trump has officially postponed his visit to China scheduled for the end of the month. Reports suggest he had been hoping to present Xi Jinping with a fait accompli power shift in the Middle East ahead of the meeting. The delay suggests Trump does not expect the conflict to be resolved by the end of March—bad news for Passover.
Now, on to the details.
IDF announcement of Ali Larijani’s elimination. (IDF)
Ali Larijani was not an easy target.
One of the reasons Iran was caught off guard at the opening of this war is that its leadership did not take Yahya Sinwar or Hassan Nasrallah’s approach. The Iranian regime—a state built on terror—was acting like a state and forgot what happens to those who spread terror. What Hezbollah and Hamas understood, and what Iran forgot, is that when you attack Israel, you become prey.
After the regime’s decapitation on the first day, Larijani grasped that reality. As Iran’s most senior surviving security official, he never stayed in the same place twice, and maintained exceptionally high security awareness.
In the end, it took a combination of precise intelligence, special ground capabilities, and rapid decision-making at both the political level and the by chief of staff to complete the operation. The time between the intelligence alert and the order for the strike was less than an hour; that’s an incredibly tight kill chain. This wasn’t a Hamas or Hezbollah target; exploiting this opportunity meant scrambling aircraft all the way to Iran.
But the unavoidable question is: how much closer does this bring us to regime change?
Israel has beheaded the regime twice and is likely planning a third, but the truth is, it is hard to say. On the one hand, terrorist organizations—and even states like Iran—absorb heavy blows, stagger, and stand up again, weakened but still very much in the fight. On the other, some never recover and quietly collapse or fade into irrelevance.
So is this, as a senior political official suggested today, a brittle regime composed of aging generals that could be toppled with one more push? Or is it something far more deeply rooted—resilient in the way that ideological movements can be, long after their leadership is gone?
To increase the chance it’s the former, Israel has been playing the ground game. According to The Wall Street Journal, Israel is chasing internal repression forces from their headquarters to secret muster points at sports stadiums, even to neighborhood police stations. All in an effort to demonstrate to the Iranians that the regime’s fangs have been removed.
Meanwhile, Israel is calling mid- and low-level commanders, threatening them and their families if they don’t stand aside in the event of an uprising.
One conversation is worth recounting.
“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.”
“OK,” the commander said in the recording.
“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. “And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?”
“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”
Benjamin Netanyahu pointing out the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. (GPO)
Last night, a very senior Israeli source outlined to me Israel’s five objectives in this war:
To act jointly with the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
To permanently deny any future Iranian regime the ability to again close the strait — including through the development of alternative pipelines.
To dismantle Iran’s weapons industry, with an emphasis on ballistic missile capabilities — this time targeting not just equipment but the factories that produce it.
To complete the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program.
To create the conditions for regime change.
Objectives 3 through 5 were already known; after all, they are written all over satellite imagery and the increasing number of Iranian state funerals. Objectives 1 and 2 are interesting.
The first objective—acting jointly with the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—is an unexpected lesson in finance. The U.S. spends roughly three billion dollars a year on Israel’s military, and somewhere between ten and twenty billion dollars annually to station troops in Japan, South Korea, and Europe. Nineteen days into this war, only one of those investments has produced a return. The underperformance of his European assets may well prompt Trump to audit NATO.
The second goal—permanently denying any future Iranian regime the ability to close the strait—is new and ambitious. Achieving it militarily would require the elimination of every drone, missile, and mine stockpile Iran possesses, which is a near-impossible prospect. All it takes is two or three IRGC survivors with a few short-range drones to send tankers sailing the other way.
Developing alternative pipelines is a more promising avenue. As I write, five million barrels of oil are flowing daily from one side of Saudi Arabia to the other, keeping prices below a hundred dollars.
But two constraints loom.
The first problem is capacity. Saudi Arabia’s East-West Crude Oil Pipeline tops out at seven million barrels per day—nowhere near enough to carry a fifth of the world’s oil supply currently meant to be navigating the strait. And even if capacity were unlimited, the oil would simply swap one chokepoint with an Iranian presence for another: the Strait of Hormuz for the Bab al-Mandeb. Egypt’s SUMED pipeline can carry oil directly to the Mediterranean, but it runs into the same capacity ceiling—and solves nothing for Asian buyers, who make up the bulk of Gulf exports.
Which brings us to the second constraint: the Houthis and their conspicuous silence.
There are two possible explanations—fear or patience. The fear argument points to Trump’s general trigger-happiness and recent shifts in Yemen’s balance of power as the source of instilling Houthi hesitance. The patience argument holds that Iran is holding them in deliberate reserve, a final escalation card to be played at the decisive moment.
I am skeptical. If Iran’s strategy is to end this war through economic pressure, keeping the Houthis on the sidelines is like America going to war without its B-2s.
More likely, the Houthis are making their own calculation. And like any self-interested actor, that calculation begins with a simple question: who is winning?
And yet, with all the talk of catastrophe, some perspective is warranted.
Over nineteen days, the scale of damage has been significantly lower than what was feared and, to some extent, expected. Iran was the threat that paralyzed the country and stole Israel’s military planners’ sleep for decades. In the end, it peaked on day one, and after nineteen days, people are walking around more or less as usual.
Parents are uncomfortably aware that schools remain largely online or closed, but before the Six-Day War in 1967, planners faced the grim question of which public parks to convert into cemeteries. In this conflict, the dilemma is whether to send children back to classrooms during the war.
The current framing of this conflict depicts it as a war of attrition. That is certainly a large part of Iran’s strategy—but Iran did not spend twenty years building thousands of ballistic missiles with sleep deprivation and forced babysitting as the intended payoff. Thankfully, Tel Aviv is far from ashes, and the number of civilian fatalities, mercifully, is outpaced by the number of days this war has lasted.
New immigrants land on special flight at Ben Gurion Airport last night.
Israel is unique in that when it goes to war the only refugees it creates are those desperate to return. When the war broke out, over a hundred thousand Israelis stranded abroad scrambled to get back in to a war zone. But what made this truly remarkable is that there isn’t only people trying to get back to homes under fire—there were those arriving to build one for the first time.
Last night, in the middle of the war, fifty immigrants from France and Britain landed at Ben Gurion Airport.
There is a phrase from Jeremiah, long associated with immigration to Israel:
And there is hope for your future..
your children shall return to their country.
It is one thing to come to a normal Israel, or as normal as Israel ever gets. It is another to choose to come now. Last night, fifty people made that choice. And that, more than any war update, is what gives me hope for the future.
English Editor: Ari Tatarka
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As an American taxpayer, I’m hoping Trump and others take note of France, Britain, Japan, and others refusing to come to our military aid. Not only are they cowards they are grifters.
Thank you for ending with the inspiring story of new refugees from some of those grifter countries
Another brilliant hit.
At very least send these vile monsters back towards the Dark Ages they so seem to crave.