tel aviv
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Traffic cameras installed on the streets of Tehran showed the targets in real time.
Israeli officials say cameras hacked several years ago have allowed Israel to create detailed maps of cities, establish movement patterns and build a complex and complex picture of what is happening inside the enemy’s capital.
The cameras are just one part of a more complex system, some of the details of which were first reported by the Financial Times, that has allowed Israel to build what an Israeli source familiar with the matter calls an AI-powered “target production machine” capable of processing large amounts of data.
Visual intelligence, human intelligence, signals intelligence, intercepted communications, satellite imagery, etc. were introduced. Pinpoint locations were obtained in the form of 14-digit grid coordinates. The sheer volume of information required powerful computers to process, categorize, and analyze the data to derive what Israel wanted: its goals.
The system has been built over the past decade and requires a team that includes technicians, data analysts and engineers to verify strike recommendations and fine-tune the process, officials said.
This further reinforces what Israel has repeatedly shown over the years to infiltrate Iran’s inner circle, allowing it to assassinate scores of Iran’s top nuclear scientists and officials over the years, steal the country’s nuclear archives, and kill Hamas political leaders in Tehran.
For Israel, this system has proven itself before.
Another Israeli source said the Israel Defense Forces demonstrated similar capabilities in the opening strikes of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June last year, killing Iran’s most senior military personnel, the head of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and an aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
The system was used again on Saturday morning when the United States and Israel launched a major joint attack against Iran.
The main target is Iran’s late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who Israeli authorities believe is less dangerous during daylight hours. Defense Minister Israel Katz has previously said that Israel had no opportunity to target the supreme leader in June because he had taken refuge in an underground bunker and was likely silent.
Now there is an opportunity to remove not only Khamenei but also Iran’s top security and military leaders, some of whom replaced those killed by Israel in June.
The United States and Iran had been negotiating over Tehran’s nuclear program, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed the negotiations were doomed to failure. The Trump administration has varied in its answers about what it wants from talks, but Israel has made clear that it feels there will never be enough common ground to reach a deal, and it is certain that Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was a vocal opponent of the last Iran nuclear deal, will not be on board with anyone.
For Israel’s longest-serving leader, who had spent much of his political career educating the world about the dangers of a nuclear Iran, the time for attack was at hand. Prime Minister Netanyahu met with President Donald Trump at the White House on February 11. The private meeting between the two leaders lasted nearly three hours and only one photo was released.
As CNN previously reported, the meeting was not about the ongoing Iran negotiations. Instead, the story was about what happened when those negotiations failed. Prime Minister Netanyahu presented President Trump with new information about Iran’s military capabilities. The meeting came after a series of high-level military and intelligence talks between the United States and Israel, with the focus on plans for a joint attack between the two countries.
At 3:38 p.m. ET on Friday, President Trump issued the order to launch the opening attack. “Operation Epic Fury has been approved. We will not cancel it. Good luck,” said Gen. Dan Cain, the top US military official.
“This was a daylight attack based on a trigger event conducted by the Israel Defense Forces and made possible with the cooperation of the U.S. intelligence community,” Kaine told reporters at a briefing on Monday. He gave no further details, but was likely referring to the Israeli salvo that killed Khamenei and a number of other Iranian leaders, which also reportedly used U.S. intelligence to pinpoint the Iranian Supreme Leader’s location on the compound.
Within hours, Israel became optimistic about the outcome of the attack, even though it did not know with certainty of Khamenei’s death.
That confirmation came early Sunday morning when Iranian state television announced that “Iran’s supreme leader has reached the point of martyrdom.”
