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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Deliberately Indifferent’: Trump Administration Sues Harvard University Over Campus Antisemitism
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University ignored antisemitism while extreme anti-Zionist activists subjected Jewish students to harassment and discrimination in violation of federal civil rights laws as well as the institution’s own purported commitment to anti-racism, the Trump administration alleged in a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts on Friday.
The complaint demands the recovery of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants and other federal support Harvard received during the years in which it allegedly neglected to correct the hostile campus environment.
The lawsuit marks a shift in the Trump administration’s previous strategy of confiscating Harvard’s federal money and then defending the action in court. That policy has yielded mixed results, making a strong political statement while leaving Harvard strong enough to mobilize its GDP-sized wealth to sidestep the worst potential consequences by issuing bonds or bringing the matter before judges who have been sympathetic to their case.
It has also alienated progressives, including some Jewish students, unwilling to validate the administration’s coupling addressing campus antisemitism with its parallel ambition of reforming higher education in a manner preferred by political conservatives. Others have said that they sustained collateral damage when funds were cut from their own departments and programs.
“Harvard has been and remains deliberately indifferent to what its own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias deemed the ‘exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities,’” US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued in the filing. “Harvard has failed to enforce its rules or meaningfully discipline the mobs that occupy its buildings and terrorize its Jewish and Israeli students. Harvard instead rewarded students who assaulted, harassed, or intimidated their Jewish and Israeli peers.”
In a statement, Harvard contested the government’s account of the facts, saying it “deeply cares about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.” It also argued that it enacted “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”
On Friday, Middle East expert and writer Alex Joffe told The Algemeiner that time will tell whether the government’s lawsuit is effective in addressing antisemitism at Harvard.
“The new filed lawsuit represents another volley in what has become a well-established pattern of federal allegations and Ivy League stonewalling,” he said. “Universities appear to have decided that the Trump administration is too preoccupied with other problems, not least of all Iran and battles with Congress, including Republicans, to pursue its reforms of the higher education industrial complex and are planning to wait it out.”
He added, however, that “the national security implications of the lawsuit come into focus,” noting that “the pro-Hamas movement is shown to be comprised of exactly the same protest groups and funders as the pro-Iran and anti-ICE movement, including the ANSWER Coalition, Code Pink, The People’s Forum, and others, all connected via personnel and Chinese Communist Party funders.”
There has been a major overlap between campus groups that participated in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests throughout the Gaza war and those that have been expressing support for the Iranian regime amid the current US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
Harvard University student Tejas Billas added, “This lawsuit largely copies Harvard’s own task force report, which found widespread discrimination against Jews and Israelis. It’s hard to say that Harvard has done all it can to combat antisemitism while many of Harvard’s proposed actions to improve the campus have yet to be implemented.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.
In a 300-plus-page report, the task force compiled a comprehensive record of antisemitic incidents on Harvard’s campus in recent years — from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee’s endorsement of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist atrocities in Israel, to an anti-Zionist faculty group’s sharing an antisemitic cartoon depicting Jews as murderers of people of color. The report identified Harvard’s past refusal to afford Jews the same protections against discrimination enjoyed by other minority groups as a key source of its problem.
Throughout that time, according to a 2024 report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Harvard repeatedly misrepresented its handling of the explosion of hate and rule breaking, launching a campaign of deceit and spin to cover up what ultimately became the biggest scandal in higher education.
The committee charged that Harvard formed an Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) largely for show and did not consult its members when Jewish students were subject to verbal abuse and harassment, a time, its members felt, when its counsel was most needed. The advisory group went on to recommend nearly a dozen measures for addressing the problem and offered other guidance, the report said, but it was excluded from high-level discussions which preceded, for example, the controversial congressional testimony of former president Claudine Gay, in which the chief executive said choosing to punish antisemitism “depends on the context.”
The public has not learned anything new about Harvard, Sabrina Soffer, research fellow for the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, told The Algemeiner.
“The federal government is reaching conclusions drawn years ago but campus antisemitism at Harvard rages on,” she said. “The effort is appreciated, but the fight against antisemitism must not be reduced to a game of “Whack-A-Mole” — government should enact real enforcement mechanisms that correct both faculty and student conduct. This suit, if it succeeds, could achieve that, as it calls for an independent monitor of conditions at Harvard and other actions to correct the campus climate, but Harvard has proved adept at avoiding accountability. It may do so again.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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We need to talk about New Jersey’s Jewish master of literature. No, not that one
Philip Roth and Judy Blume were born five years apart in the 1930s. Both grew up in New Jersey, in the crucible of Jewish American suburban assimilation. Both were haunted by the Holocaust, news of which trickled stateside just as they were nearing adulthood. And both are literary icons.
But they’re icons of different kinds.
We see Roth as a giant of American Jewish literature, and Blume as a giant of American children’s literature. Within that distinction is a kind of tacit hierarchy. Roth was perceived as a writer for serious adults with serious concerns; Blume, as a writer for girls with girlish concerns. When Roth wrote about diaphragms (see Goodbye, Columbus) it was a bracing examination of shifting sexual mores at an inflection point in American culture. When Blume did, in Forever, it was sex education with a narrative twist.
I’ve been reading Mark Oppenheimer’s new biography Judy Blume: A Life, and thinking a lot about that hierarchy. I’ve read and loved a decent amount of Philip Roth, and a lot of Judy Blume. (I’ve written about both of them for this publication.) But I have a stronger relationship with her work than with his. One measure of a great novel is the dimensionality with which a reader experiences it. Do you see the characters as you read, smell their surroundings, hear their music? With Blume, my answer is always “yes.” With Roth, it’s “sometimes.”
So why have I, like many others, tended to think of Roth as an Important Writer, and Blume as merely an important writer to me?
This is a classic conundrum when it comes to children’s literature. As Alison Lurie wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Foreign Affairs — which I am, by coincidence, also reading right now — children’s literature is the “stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated” in any English department. We must read extensively to grow up well, but there is a sense that anyone who stays overly attached to the things they read in those early years has somehow gone developmentally awry.
The book that has most influenced me is almost certainly Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, but for much of my adult life, I would never have named it if a stranger asked me about my favorite novel. Not just because doing so would have seemed like a bit of a faux pas — what if that stranger thought I was childish, rather than merely open to the joys of childlike wonder? — but because it felt private. Like the part of me that loves that red-headed orphan beyond measure was too personal to share.
Roth and Blume both made careers out of writing about things that felt too personal to share. Both were taboo breakers, who experienced the vicious backlash that can accompany such transgression.
But Blume broke taboos in what might be seen as safer ways. Roth engaged with the unspeakable; she attacked the impolite. By being open about the stranger parts of girlhood — the bleeding, the sexual experimentation, the friendships that collapse in ways neither party really understands — her work made it feel a little safer to be a girl. The intimate things could now be intimate, but shared.
A tragic literary paradox is that women writers often need to win male readers to be taken seriously. Once they’re known as a writer who women like, the spectre of “chick lit” attaches itself to their work, a phenomenon that predates the development of that label by centuries. Aphra Behn, one of the first professional women writers, broke boundaries in the 17th century only to be dismissed by the 18th as a lightweight who was too open about sex. I once spent a six hour drive from Chicago to St. Louis fighting with my progressive-minded college boyfriend about his reluctance to read Jane Austen. The fight wasn’t really about him; Persuasion was never going to be quite his style. It was about my sense that the things I liked lost respect in some vaguely defined public eye because people like me liked them.
On a certain literary level, it’s strange to argue that Judy Blume should be considered as great an American Jewish literary master as Philip Roth. Her sentences are simpler. So are her themes. Her approach to great American issues, like race, can be hamhanded. (To be fair, Roth’s could, too.)
But on another level, I think it’s not just reasonable but right to define great literature in part by its impact. Books are meant to deepen our connection to the world. They are meant to brighten our experience of life. They are meant to help us understand ourselves and our neighbors. Few American authors have done either of those things more powerfully, or for more people, than Judy Blume.
The release of Oppenheimer’s book has been clouded by the mystery of why Blume fell out with the author after reviewing his first draft. As a reader, I understand: Nothing is more enticing than a mystery. But I find it, frankly, sad that the first in-depth accounting of how Blume came to be a writer of such impact has been clouded by the desire for an accounting of what mysterious rifts opened between her and her biographer.
By 1964, Oppenheimer writes, Blume’s “specific milieu of suburban Jewish middle-class ease was nationally recognizable,” thanks to Roth’s work. When Blume had not yet started to write, Roth had produced a “shorthand for a kind of tacky, nouveau riche suburban Jewish experience.”
But he had done so for only a select portion of that populace: the young man on the come-up, the wealthy, bored girl trying to throw off her parents’ values without breaking herself off from their comfortable lifestyle.
The unspoken others in that vision — the basically good mothers, the mostly obedient daughters — needed their own chance to be recognizable, too. They were just as interesting, only, perhaps, in quieter ways. The literature of American Jewish life isn’t just more complete because Blume gave them voices. It’s better, too.
The post We need to talk about New Jersey’s Jewish master of literature. No, not that one appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Continues to Kill Key Iranian Officials as Netanyahu Says Iran Can No Longer Build Missiles, Enrich Uranium
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference, amid the US-Israel conflict with Iran, in Jerusalem, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun/Pool
Israel continued its efforts to kill key Iranian officials and destabilize the regime on Friday, one day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised what he described as the military’s unprecedented achievements three weeks into the war.
The Israeli military said on Friday it killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Ali Mohammad Naini in an overnight airstrike against regime targets across the Iranian capital of Tehran.
“Naini disseminated the regime’s terrorist propaganda to its proxies across the Middle East,” the military said, describing him as a central figure in messaging tied to attacks against Israel.
Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at United Against Nuclear Iran, described Naini’s death as “a significant blow to the regime’s psychological warfare and propaganda operations — an increasingly central pillar of the IRGC’s current war strategy.”
Iranian state media had reported his death earlier in the day.
The Israeli military also announced on Friday that, two days ago, it killed a key, senior commander in Iran’s intelligence ministry, Mahdi Rostami Shamastan, in an airstrike in Tehran following a joint operation involving Israel’s Military Intelligence, Mossad, and Shin Bet.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also said on Friday that it killed the Basij militia’s intelligence chief, Esmail Ahmadi, in a strike in central Tehran.
ELIMINATED: Esmail Ahmadi, Head of the Intelligence Division of the Basij Force, as well as several other senior commanders in a strike on the senior leadership of the Basij Force in the heart of Tehran.
Ahmadi played a central role in advancing and executing terror attacks… pic.twitter.com/M9mwVmlvH7
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 20, 2026
The Iranian regime uses the Basij paramilitary force, which is affiliated with the IRGC, to violently suppress protests and crush political opposition across the country.
“Ahmadi played a central role in advancing and executing terror attacks carried out by Basij Forces,” the IDF posted on social media. “He was also responsible for enforcing public order and the regime’s values on behalf of the IRGC and leading major suppression operations during the recent internal protests in Iran.”
Ahmadi was killed earlier this week in the strikes that targeted and successfully eliminated other senior Basij militia members, including top commander Gholam Reza Soleimani and his deputy, Seyyed Karishi.
The IDF’s announcements came after Netanyahu on Thursday vowed the campaign against Iran will continue “as long as necessary” until all objectives are met.
Speaking at a press conference, Netanyahu reiterated the war’s three main objectives, emphasizing the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, the destruction of its ballistic missile capabilities, and the creation of conditions for the Iranian people to determine their own future.
“Today, after 20 days [of conflict], I can tell you: Iran does not have the ability to enrich uranium … and it does not have the ability to produce ballistic missiles,” the Israeli leader said. “Not only did we destroy the existing missiles [and nuclear components], but we seriously damaged the industries that make it possible to produce them.”
He also stressed that Israel is operating on all fronts — by air, on land, underground, and across the Caspian Sea — where, this week, Israeli forces launched their first attack on Iranian Navy targets since the outbreak of the war.
“A revolution cannot be made from the air; there are also ground-based options,” Netanyahu said.
“We have eliminated the political and military top command, the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Basij,” he continued.
On Tuesday night, the IDF killed Iranian Intelligence Minister Ismail Khatib in Tehran during a precision airstrike carried out with a narrow window of real-time intelligence.
Appointed in 2021, Khatib led Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, a central pillar of the regime’s repression apparatus, overseeing espionage, covert operations, and intelligence activities targeting both domestic dissent and foreign adversaries, including Israeli and US targets.
He also played a central role during the regime’s brutal crackdown on internal opposition, including the latest nationwide anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, with thousands of demonstrators tortured and killed.
Khatib’s assassination was part of an ongoing wave of targeted killings of senior Iranian officials in recent days, further weakening the regime’s leadership and operational networks.
During Thursday’s press conference, Netanyahu praised Israel’s recent military and strategic successes, presenting them as a defining moment for the country’s strength and influence in the region.
“I promised that we would change the Middle East — and we have changed it beyond recognition. The State of Israel is stronger than ever and Iran is weaker than ever,” he said.
“We have turned Israel into a regional power, and some would say … into a global power,” he continued. “The relationship between me and my friend [US President Donald Trump] is unprecedented, and together we are leading the fight of the free world against the forces of evil.”
Earlier this week, the Israeli Air Force also killed Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, in what was the most significant assassination since the killing of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of the campaign on Feb. 28. Larijani was widely believed to be running the country following Khamenei’s death.
With the military campaign escalating, Israeli forces have now been authorized to carry out targeted assassinations of senior Iranian officials without requiring approval from higher command.
Netanyahu also said he had instructed intelligence officers to “act so that the Revolutionary Guards’ killers know we will hunt them down in the cities as well.”
“It’s too early to say whether the Iranian people will take advantage of the conditions we are creating to take to the streets,” the Israeli leader said. “I hope so — but it will depend only on them.”
“I see this war ending much faster than people think,” he continued. The Islamist regime’s collapse “will not happen in one day, but we can already see the cracks.”
According to a recent intelligence assessment, the Iranian regime shows no signs of surrender and remains far from collapse, and Israeli officials have been warned that the war could continue for weeks, the Israeli news outlet N12 reported.
Even though there have been demonstrations in Iran in recent days, this latest assessment shows that they have been limited to a few locations with relatively small numbers of participants, and that the regime’s brutal repression continues to instill fear.
However, a senior Israeli source also told the outlet that the regime is in a state of “complete chaos,” with Jerusalem seeing increasing signs of a breakdown in the regime’s systems in Tehran.
“There is no one there at the moment who is taking the orders, and the government vacuum is deepening,” the official said, adding that Israel is “working to create a breaking point” for the regime.
“The goal is for the Iranian public to understand for itself, through the reality on the ground, that this regime has reached a ‘game over.’ We want to create the conditions in which the Iranian people feel they have an opportunity to take their fate into their own hands and take to the streets,” the source reportedly said.
Israel’s campaign is increasingly focused on dismantling Iran’s internal repression systems, aiming to create a leadership vacuum and logistical breakdown that could hinder the regime’s ability to respond if mass protests erupt again.
Israeli forces have carried out targeted strikes on senior Basij and IRGC officers, destroyed infrastructure used to suppress protests, and launched cyber operations to disrupt internal security communications and coordination, crippling the regime’s ability to redeploy its forces effectively.
So far, Israel says it has dropped some 10,000 munitions on targets linked to the IRGC, Basij, and other internal security forces, delivering a devastating blow to the regime’s security apparatus.
Late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning alone, around 300 Basij commanders and field officials were killed in a wave of strikes on key command and operational centers, according to Iran International.
During Thursday’s press conference, Netanyahu expressed pride in the Israeli people for their steadfast stand, praising their resilience and unity in the face of ongoing conflict.
“I know how difficult it is to stay in the security rooms and showers, and I understand the challenges with studies, businesses, and reservist duties. Your patience gives us the strength to keep fighting until we achieve the campaign’s objectives,” he said.
“Continue to stand tall, continue to stand with us, and with God’s help, together, we will stand and together we will win.”