I’ve gone to work on an oyster farm on Block Island, a tiny dot of land midway between Long Island and Rhode Island, every May for the past few years.

If you are, like most people, unfamiliar with the mechanics of oyster farming, here’s what it looks like, at least on this farm. First, you toot around a saltwater pond in a glorified bathtub with a motor hanging off the back. From the boat, wearing chest waders, you hop in the water to unmoor dozens of giant floating mesh bags full of oysters from lines anchored in the pond. The bags are usually also bogged down with a mess of extraneous sea dwellers like kelp, mussels, green crabs and goopy creatures called sea squirts, so they’re heavy. You pile as many bags as you can into the boat, clamber back in — which is harder than it sounds, because your wader boots are probably stuck in the mud at the bottom of the pond — and bring those bags to a floating barge.

Finally, you dump the bag onto a muddy wooden table, pick out everything that isn’t an oyster, since all of those aforementioned sea critters will kill the prize bivalve, and chuck the extra stuff back into the pond. Then you hand-sort the oysters by size. You harvest ones that are big enough to eat — oysters take a few years to reach full size, and grow unevenly, so each bag always has a range of oysters — shovel the rest back in the bags, get back in the boat and tie them back onto the lines. Then you do it again. On a good day, you get through around 100 bags of oysters in a shift.

Bigger farms might have machinery to help sort the oysters; this farm does everything by hand. This may sound backbreaking, and it is, but it’s also a great break from desk work. A day spent out on the water doing repetitive physical labor is a kind of a reset. You can’t look at your phone with the wet, muddy oyster gloves on, and there’s barely service anyway. Plus you’d probably drop it in the pond, so it’s best not to try.

You may, at this point, notice that you’re reading a Jewish newspaper, that I’m a Jewish journalist, and that oysters are not kosher.

But what if I told you oysters were, in fact, kosher? That a rabbi once argued they are actually vegetables, by virtue of the fact that they “root” on rocks in the ocean? And that their shells are a form of scales, thus making them part of the kosher category of scaled and finned fish?

These are real arguments that were made around the turn of the 20th century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the first American institution for Reform Jewish ordination.

The impetus for this Talmudic bit of logic was in large part a now-infamous feast that has come to be known as the “Trefa Banquet,” due to the amount of non-kosher food that was served. The menu included littleneck clams, shrimp salad, soft-shell crabs, a lobster bisque and frog legs in a cream sauce. Bordeaux wine and Champagne, also not kosher, were served alongside each course, and ice cream — real ice cream, made with dairy — followed with dessert, despite previous meat courses that included beef tenderloins and squab.

The occasion was a triple-header of religious Jewish events: HUC’s first ordination, a meeting of the Rabbinical Literary Association and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the previous name of today’s Union for Reform Judaism. And the discourse this meal set off about the place — or lack thereof — for kashrut in American Jewish life went on for years.

Despite the fact that oysters had not even been on the menu, in Jewish newspapers across the country, rabbis and laypeople wrote warring op-eds on the kosherness of oysters. Somehow, oysters became the symbol of what American Judaism would be. And, of course, what American Jews would eat.

The symbol of an oyster

I had never eaten an oyster until I lived in Seattle after college; for my first anniversary with a long-ago ex-boyfriend, we went to what was then the hottest restaurant in the city, an oyster bar. We were broke, but playing at a kind of sophisticated adulthood we hadn’t quite reached, and oysters seemed like the way to act out that sophistication.

Presented with a menu of oysters from across the country and not knowing where to begin, we got an array on the half shell, two each of a dozen types presented on a beautiful bed of ice with lemon and mignonette. Unsure how to slurp them out of the shell, I had to ask the waiter whether one chews oysters or just swallows. (You chew.)

The first one tasted like a stormy ocean, another buttery and mild, a third one sweet and meaty. They were evocative, like eating the memory of a day at the beach.

Oysters, if you haven’t had them, have terroir in the same way as wine does. Just as grapes take on the characteristics of the soil they grew in, oysters taste different depending on the water they came from; even though there are only a few different species of the bivalve, there are countless variations. East Coast oysters tend to be sharp and briny and refreshing, while West Coast oysters are usually creamy and sweet. But past that, each one is completely unlike the next.

One oyster I had from Maine tasted like pennies. (Maybe that doesn’t sound appetizing, but neither does petrol, yet aged rieslings are prized for their petrol notes.) I’ve had oysters that tasted delicately vegetal, like a cucumber, or deeply umami like a mushroom.

When the Trefa Banquet occurred, oysters were in vogue across the U.S. And the occasion was a lavish and sophisticated one, almost a coming-out party for American Jewry. It was, after all, the celebration of the first class of rabbis ordained in the U.S., proof to the country that Jews were here to stay, and a statement to the rabbis and Jews of Europe that these American Jews were just as good, just as learned, as their European counterparts. In fact, perhaps more so — they were creating a new model of Reform Judaism, leaving the Old Country’s ways behind for a modern, American image of what it meant to be a Jew. The menu had to be the pinnacle of refinement.

Plus, these Cincinnati Jews had a bunch of New Yorkers in from the big city to impress. In a 2005 paper published in The American Jewish Archives Journal, rabbi and historian Lance J. Sussman argued that the menu, which included numerous French misspellings, may have been the caterer’s attempt to appeal to what he imagined were the more elevated tastes of the event’s East Coast guests.

Of course they served shellfish.

In 1883, the year of the banquet, America’s Jews were largely German immigrants. (Though newer waves of immigration had begun to bring in more traditionally observant Russian Jews fleeing pogroms.) Some of them had been associated with the Haskalah in Europe, a progressive Jewish education movement that advocated for secular education, modern dress and assimilation into wider society. By and large, these Jews were urban, educated and middle-class, having left the shtetl Judaism of their elders behind when they left the village.

These Jews began to develop a modernized form of Judaism, largely based in Germany. They changed the liturgy, axing concepts they found backwards, such as the idea that, in a coming Messianic era, Jews would return to Zion and resume sacrificing animals in a restored temple. They recited prayers in German instead of Hebrew and lightened many of the restrictions involved in observing Shabbat, kashrut and festivals. They took on a Christian aesthetic, exchanging synagogue chanting for an organ and choir. Sermons emphasized universal ethical themes instead of Jewish rituals. Some rabbis even argued for allowing both intermarriage and eating pork, though these topics remained hotly debated.

Once imported to the U.S., this newfangled Judaism got more popular.

“Part of the Reform ideology is to get away from all of the laws, all the do’s and don’ts of Judaism, which are considered primitive and superstitions almost,” said Jane Ziegelman, a Jewish food historian and curator of food talks at the Tenement Museum.

Instead, these Reformers wanted to turn Judaism into a more introspective, morally and socially focused religion. And thanks to its roots in the Haskalah, science was core to this new, modern Judaism. Oysters made for a perfect example. At the time, bivalves were considered an aphrodisiac and a health food, and they were both plentiful and popular. (So popular, in fact, that they got over-harvested, which is one of the reasons they’re so expensive today; the mountains of shells from the oysters eaten by New Yorkers were so large they posed a sanitation challenge.) These modernizing Jews understood kashrut to be, fundamentally, about health and ethics, which meant that anything healthy should be kosher.

“The idea was that the unhealthy categorization of the oyster had been proven wrong by modern science,” said Ziegelman.

American Reform Jews saw kosher rules, which they dismissively referred to as “kitchen Judaism,” as a contrast to their more noble pursuit of an intellectual, moral and scientific Judaism. Embracing the oyster was a way to live out their ideals about assimilation, modernization and religious ethics.

“It was the oyster because of its prevalence in American food culture,” Ziegelman told me. “To adopt the oyster was seen as both acculturation — that you really were American — but also you really were a modern person. You weren’t relying on these old kashrut superstitions.”

The shellfish scandal

Not everyone waxes poetic about oysters’ subtle marine nuances so much as their textural similarities to mucus. Personally, I don’t get that — I find them silky, or buttery, or meaty — but I get that oysters can seem a bit gross, and not just because of their texture.

Though on the farm, the oysters float on the surface of the water in bags, they are, at least naturally, bottom dwellers. They’re also “filter feeders,” which means they filter water for their food. This makes them an excellent resource in cleaning up polluted waterways — the Billion Oyster Project in New York City works restoring oyster reefs to the rivers around the city to help clean them and encourage biodiversity. But that also means that oysters aren’t always safe to eat because they’re consuming whatever bad stuff there is in the water. They can purify themselves given enough time in clean water, but they get polluted easily by their environment, perhaps one of the reasons they were originally forbidden under the laws of kashrut.

And even when they’re from clean water, there’s a lot to manage to make them safe. My partner and I run an oyster shucking side hustle with some friends, popping up at bars and events and turning out trays of raw oysters on the half shell. Preparing for each event takes many hours. You have to scrub the mud off each shell with a stiff-bristled brush. Then, since you want your oysters alive until you eat them lest they spoil, you pack them in coolers on ice — but you can’t bury them in too much ice lest they freeze to death. And since they’re salt-water dwellers, you have to drain the coolers regularly to prevent them from drowning in the freshwater ice melt.

On top of that, as a saying goes, oysters are best in the months that contain the letter R — September through April. Some of that is because they are plumpest during colder months when they build up their fat stores. But some of it is because colder waters reduce the risk that a raw oyster will carry a virus or bacteria like Vibrio or norovirus.

Today, farms take the temperature of their water daily and regularly test it for bacteria, so raw oysters aren’t particularly dangerous, but you can still easily get food poisoning from a mishandled oyster. As much as I love them, they’re work. I understand that, to some people, they’re not worth the risk — spiritually or physically.

Perhaps the subversive and literal danger of the oyster is what led to the legend that rabbis at the banquet threw down their napkins and stormed out. The public flouting of kashrut, at a religious event, could symbolize the end of Judaism. The Highland House Affair, as the feast is also known, has become infamous among Jewish historians and rabbis in the century since it occurred as a moment of schism. But in fact, most contemporaneous descriptions of the event make no note of any drama around the menu.

An account of the feast in The New York Herald briefly mentions the non-kosher menu, but does not say that any of the attendees were upset — in fact, to the author’s palpable distaste, quite the contrary. “Instead of rising in a body and leaving the hall, they sat down and participated,” they wrote of the rabbis in attendance.

Only one account at the time, written in New York’s Jewish Messenger by Henrietta Szold (who would go on to found the Jewish women’s society Hadassah) observed that some attendees hadn’t partaken of the food, though, she noted, it was only “a surprisingly small minority.”

“There was no regard paid to our dietary laws,” she wrote of the catering, “and consequently two rabbis left the table without having touched the dishes, and I am happy to state that I know of at least three more who ate nothing and were indignant but signified their disapproval in a less demonstrative manner.”

Wise, the Hebrew Union College founder who had organized the meal, at first defended it, saying he had hired a Jewish caterer who regularly served a Jewish association and had no idea the meal served would not be kosher. Eventually, however, Wise and his supporters changed their strategy and began to defend the non-kosher components. They railed against the idea of kashrut; one rabbi argued that it was the perfect occasion to put “kitchen Judaism to the antique cabinet where it belongs.”

When the 500 members of the Free Sons of Israel, a Jewish fraternal order that Wise belonged to, gathered and supped on oysters, the rabbi reprinted the menu in the newspaper he ran, The American Israelite. He repeated the tactic when another Jewish fraternal order put oysters on a meeting menu. Jews were not accidentally consuming oysters, he pointed out. This was how Jews were eating, and why should they pretend otherwise?

Yet ironically, given his vociferous rejection of tradition, Wise also provided Talmudic arguments as to why the meal may have in fact been kosher; even as he chose assimilation he used Jewish wisdom to justify his choice. In the pages of The American Israelite, he argued “that the oyster shell is the same to all intents and purposes as the scales to the clean fish” and referenced both Moses’ and Maimonides’ statements on the topic. Elsewhere, he called the oyster an “ocean vegetable” to explain why it might be kosher. (Today many vegans take a similar stance; oysters have no nervous system and some vegans are more willing to consume the bivalves than they are honey.)

Others wrote back, citing their own raft of Jewish sages. One B. Younker wrote in to The Jewish Voice to reference Talmudic debates over what constitutes a scale, concluding that the oyster’s shell does not count.

But amid the debate, everyone else kept eating oysters. Sussman’s article in The American Jewish Archives Journal notes oyster-filled menus from the double wedding of two rabbis, a synagogue dedication and a banquet for a Jewish fraternal order; the last even used the same caterer as the Trefa Banquet. Apparently, there was something to that luxurious menu they planned — it was impressive enough to earn them repeat customers.

Today, many Jewish historians look to the Trefa Banquet as the beginnings of the Conservative movement in Judaism, as some of those horrified Jews rejected the idea of kosher oysters and decided they needed to develop a middle ground between the Reform and Orthodox movements. The debate the banquet set off over kashrut, as well as Wise’s liberal interpretations of Jewish law, concerned some Jews who wanted to protect tradition. Soon after the great oyster debate began, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement, opened its doors as a place to retain some amount of tradition in text and theology.

Fishy Jewish cooking

In my time manning the pop-up, I’ve come to believe that shucking an oyster is an art form. First, there’s the basic problem of opening the oyster. Usually that means inserting an oyster knife at the narrow hinge of the shell — though some people shuck from the side — and wiggling until you feel the point of the knife settle in deeper. Then you lever the knife down to pop the shell, slice along the flat top shell to separate the oyster, and then scoop the knife underneath the oyster to sever the adductor muscle. Personally, I prefer a Duxbury-style knife, which comes to a sharper point, but many people prefer the more classic New Haven-style knife, which curves slightly at the tip, providing a bit more leverage and a bit less likelihood of stabbing yourself in the palm.

Every oyster is different, not only in taste, but in shape, so finding the right spot to pop open the oyster is difficult; it takes practice. And that’s just the first challenge. A well-shucked oyster must be clean, free of shattered shell or sand. Just as importantly, it cannot be pierced by the knife (“scrambled”) and should retain all the liquor inside the shell. Ideally, it’s served on pebble ice, not just cubes, so that it doesn’t tip over and spill.

There’s something meditative to running the oyster pop-ups, trying for the perfect shuck with every oyster. They’re rushed and busy and stressful — there’s always a line and shucking a dozen without scrambling or shattering is hard to do when you’re working fast. You have to reach a sort of zen state to fly through them, finding the right point on each shell to insert the knife, cleanly severing them from the shell and cleaning out any sand inside. No one wants that grinding sensation you get when you have a snack at the beach and feel the grit between your teeth. And you can’t appreciate the unique texture and taste of each varietal if they’re a scrambled mess inside.

The oyster should be a plump, pearly arc in the shell, with lacy frilled edges. It should be beautiful.

Apparently everyday Jews saw the beauty in the bivalve. They largely left the debates over kashrut to the pages of The American Israelite and continued to eat oysters by the bushel.

A 1911 blurb in the J. Jewish News of Northern California excitedly announced the beginning of oyster season, listing several of the area’s best “oyster houses,” as did Jewish newspapers across the country over the next few decades.

Jews even ran their own oyster stands. An 1892 article in the B’nai Brith Messenger wrote a brief piece marveling at the success of one Al Levy, whose Southern California oyster cart did so well he was able to open cafes and “cocktail rooms.” Despite Levy’s obvious disregard for kashrut, the piece notes that he “has been one of the most progressive, honored and beloved Jews in this community, popular alike among Jews and gentiles.”

Some of the most popular Jewish cookbooks from the era are full of oyster recipes, literally writing the bivalves into Jewish food history alongside kugel and latkes.

Aunt Babbette’s Cookbook, a Jewish cookbook that remained in print for 25 years, featured 11 oyster recipes in its fish section; the rest of the fish, all kosher, are given one preparation apiece. A dish that sounds an awful lot like kugel — though the cookbook doesn’t use that term — includes an option to add oysters. (Notably, other seafood like clams and shrimp are omitted from most Jewish cookbooks of the era.)

For all the enthusiastic embrace of oysters, though, there was still one line that wasn’t crossed: pork, which even the Trefa Banquet did not serve.

“The debate over selective kashrut centered on two issues: pork and oysters,” wrote Sussman, the rabbi and historian, and the line was drawn, for the most part, between the two. Pigs have long been a metonym for kashrut and Judaism, and centuries of antisemitic caricatures pictured Jews riding pigs. Eating pork, apparently, was instinctively understood by most American Jews as a step too far, a symbolic denial of identity.

The power of ‘kitchen Judaism’

The oyster has always been the perfect metaphor for American Jewish life.

There’s a Judaism of purity, hewing to the safety found in tradition: keeping kashrut, retaining a degree of separation from the rest of society. But most American Jews opted for a Judaism of experimentation, in which the rules get bent, reinterpreted and altered to adapt to the ways of a new culture and new country. It’s more dangerous; one might eat a bad oyster. But in the meantime one also gets to enjoy the good ones. Yet even as Jews debated how far Judaism could stretch and remain Jewish, they did so Jewishly. Even the Jews who, over a century ago, rejected Jewish tradition and embraced shellfish justified their choices with Talmudic citations and biblical exegesis. They used Jewish law to justify why Jewish law was wrong about the oyster. What debate could be more Jewish?

Food, since then, has become both more and less central to Jewish identity. Plenty of Jews now will eat bacon or ham, and a celebration of the Trefa Banquet’s centennial in 2018 served a menu of mostly pork, connecting to Judaism specifically through a rejection of its strictures. Kitchen Judaism has become aspirational instead of pejorative as food traditions have become a rich and beloved way to connect with Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the Reform tradition has actually tipped back toward kashrut observance; in 2001, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement added in a recommendation that Jews follow “some element of Jewish dietary discipline.”

Through it all, the oyster has remained the perfect symbol of the decision confronting American Jews: How much should they assimilate to their new country, and how much tradition must they retain to stay Jewish?

This summer, I think I might have to miss the oyster farm; life has gotten in the way and I just don’t have the time. Still, I’m sure I’ll be shucking up trays for friends and customers somewhere (including at my Jewish wedding).

And most importantly, I’ll be carrying on the proud tradition of the oyster debate. I’ll admit that I don’t really buy the idea that shells are the same as scales, though I’m sympathetic to the idea that they should be categorized as vegetables. But the discussion I’m more interested in is how to eat them. The right answer is raw and plain. Maybe a drop of lemon. Maybe.

Cocktail sauce or horseradish or hot sauce, though? That’s heresy.

The post If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster appeared first on The Forward.

US President Donald Trump speaks on the day he honors reigning Major League Soccer (MLS) champion Inter Miami CF players and team officials with an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, March 5, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

US President Donald Trump claimed the right to join Iran in deciding its next leader as the war escalated on Thursday, with US and Israeli jets hitting areas across the country and Gulf cities coming under renewed bombardment.

In a phone interview with Reuters, Trump said Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – a hardliner who has been considered a favorite to succeed his father – was an unlikely choice.

“We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future,” he said.

Trump also encouraged ​Iranian Kurdish forces to go on the offensive.

“I’d be all for it,” said Trump, whose administration has had contact with Iranian Kurdish groups since the US-Israeli strikes began. He would not say whether the United States would provide air cover for any Kurdish offensive.

The attack is a major political gamble for the Republican president, with opinion polls showing little public support and Americans concerned about the rise in gasoline prices caused by disruption to energy supplies. Trump dismissed that concern.

He said later in the day that Tehran was reaching out to the United States about making a deal amid US and Israeli strikes on Iran, adding that further action to reduce pressure on oil was imminent.

“They’re calling, they’re saying ‘how do we make a deal?’ I said you’re being a little bit late,” said Trump, speaking at an event with the Inter Miami soccer team at the White House.

Trump touted the US military actions in Iran, saying they were destroying Tehran’s missile and drone capability and that “their navy is gone – 24 ships in three days,” as he called on Iranian diplomats to request asylum and help shape a better country.

“We also urge Iranian diplomats around the world to request asylum and to help us shape a new and better Iran,” he said.

ISRAELIS WARN TEHRAN RESIDENTS

On the war’s sixth day, Iran launched a series of attacks on Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Fire crews in Bahrain extinguished a blaze at a refinery following a missile strike.

Two drone attacks targeted an Iranian opposition camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as an oil field operated by an American firm, security sources said.

The Israeli military warned residents to evacuate areas including eastern Tehran, while Iranian media reported blasts were heard in various parts of the capital. An air attack killed 17 people in a guest house on a road northwest of the capital, Iranian state television said.

MANY MUNITIONS, IRAN‘S ATTACKS DROPPED

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Admiral Brad Cooper, who leads US forces in the Middle East, said that the US has enough munitions to continue its bombardment indefinitely.

“Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation,” Hegseth told reporters at Central Command headquarters in Florida. “Our munitions are full up and our will is ironclad.”

Cooper said the US had now hit at least 30 Iranian ships, including a large drone carrier that he said was the size of a World War Two aircraft carrier. He added that B-2 bombers had in the past few hours dropped dozens of 2,000 penetrator bombs targeting deeply buried ballistic missile launchers, and that bombings were also targeting Iran‘s missile production facilities.

Iran‘s ballistic missile attacks had decreased by 90% since the first day of the war, while drone attacks had decreased by 83% in that time frame, he said.

WARNING SIRENS BLARE IN MULTIPLE NATIONS

Azerbaijan on Thursday became the latest country drawn in, as it accused Iran of firing drones at its territory and ordered its southern airspace closed for 12 hours. Iran, which has a significant Azeri minority, denied it had targeted its neighbor, but the episode underlined how rapidly the war has spread since the surprise US and Israeli airstrikes that killed Khamenei on Saturday.

Along with the gleaming cities of the Gulf, in easy range of Iranian drones and missiles, Cyprus and Turkey have both been targeted. European nations have pledged to deploy ships to the eastern Mediterranean and hostilities have been seen as far afield as waters off Sri Lanka, where a US submarine sank an Iranian warship on Tuesday, killing 80 crew members.

In Iran, at least 1,230 people have been killed, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, including 175 schoolgirls and staff killed at a primary school in Minab in the country’s south on the first day of the war. Another 77 have been killed in Lebanon, its Health Ministry says. Thousands fled southern Beirut on Thursday after Israel warned residents to leave.

NETANYAHU SAYS ‘MUCH WORK STILL LIES AHEAD’

Shares on Wall Street fell on Thursday, weighed by surging oil prices, as the economic impact of the campaign intensified, with countries around the world cut off from a fifth of global supplies of oil and liquefied natural gas and air transport still facing chaos and global logistics increasingly snarled.

On Thursday, Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said they had hit a US tanker in the northern part of the Gulf and the vessel was on fire, the latest of numerous reports of such attacks.

Visiting an air force base in the south of the country, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s achievements so far in Iran had been “great” but that “much work still lies ahead.”

Iran‘s foreign minister said Washington would “bitterly regret” the precedent it had set by sinking a ship in international waters without warning. A commander of the Revolutionary Guards, General Kioumars Heydari, told state TV: “We have decided to fight Americans wherever they are.”

The body of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in the first hours of the US-Israeli air campaign in the first assassination of a country’s top ruler by an airstrike, had been due to lie in state in a Tehran prayer hall from Wednesday evening to launch three days of mourning.

But the memorial, expected to draw many thousands of mourners to the streets, was abruptly postponed.

Two sources familiar with Israel’s battle plans said that Israel, having killed many Iranian leaders, was now planning to enter a second phase when it would target underground bunkers where Iran stores its missiles.

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias make statements to the press, at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki

Israel took the decision to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in November and was planning to carry out the operation around six months later, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday.

Khamenei was killed in the first hours of the US-Israeli air campaign that began on Saturday in the first assassination of a country’s top ruler by an airstrike.

The joint air assault is nearing the end of its first week after opening salvos killed the country’s leaders and set off a regional war, with Iranian attacks in Israel, the Gulf and Iraq, and Israeli attacks against Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“Already in November we were convened with the prime minister in a very tight forum and the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] set the goal of eliminating Khamenei,” Katz told Israel‘s N12 TV news. The timing was set for mid-2026, he said.

The plan was eventually shared with the Washington and brought forward around January after protests broke out Iran, when Israel was concerned its pressured clerical rulers might launch an attack against Israel and US assets in the Middle East, Katz said.

Israel has said its aim is to eliminate the existential threat it sees in Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile project, and to bring about regime change. Iran’s rulers have so far shown no sign of relinquishing power.