Interesting article recently published in Israeli newspaper YNET, the article is in Hebrew but most browser's can translate it.
https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/yokra14748698
Sina Toussi (https://sinatoossi.com/) has summarised the article:
A VERY important piece today in Israel’s Ynet by Nahum Barnea & Ronen Bergman on the botched regime change plan in the Iran war.
It confirms regime change was “the heart of the plan,” with Netanyahu and the Mossad driving it and Trump on board: decapitate the leadership, foment protests, and back a Kurdish incursion from the west.
What stands out most is the admission of how central Israeli influence ops in Iran became. Under Mossad chief Barnea, in recent years shaping Iranian public opinion shifted to a core priority, “driving influence moves” inside Iran and effectively turning it into a “weapons system” with effects “far beyond social media.”
The strategy was explicit: topple from above and below, “lean on senior officials” while “fostering mass protest and armed resistance of minorities,” in "parallel."
"The organization" for this op "began four years ago," the piece states, and "reached operational maturity two and a half years ago."
The piece also acknowledges “immense” Israeli work in the “background” of the January protests, which were met with a violent crackdown killing thousands by Iranian authorities, who portrayed them as foreign-backed.
The regime change war was itself was advanced because of these protests. The war was originally slated for June but expedited as conditions seemed to “ripen.”
Yet it didn’t bear out to say the least.
No mass uprising. No collapse. The regime “restored command and control” and survived what planners evidently thought would end it within days.
Even more striking, the piece says the US was caught off guard by Iran’s Hormuz closure in part because Trump seemingly believed “the war would end within three days.” (!)
The Kurdish component is especially revealing. It reflects a fundamental misreading of Iran’s internal dynamics, where an externally backed incursion involving separatist groups would more likely have triggered a nationalist backlash and unified much of the country against a perceived partition threat, rather than spurred mass uprising.
In their own telling, Israel invested heavily in influence operation in Iran, fomenting unrest, and regime decapitation, but the core assumption that the system would collapse proved false.
Now, after all this, the US is back to negotiations, with the goal of a likely narrower deal focused just on the nuclear file and sanctions relief.
The piece ends with: “What started as a far-reaching Israeli move, rich in imagination, final in its solution, ends in heartache.”
https://x.com/SinaToossi/status/2049176455154688326?s=20
This is corroborated by Trump who recently admitted to Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst that “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8WNy_5gQto4
Fox News quoted Trump as saying late on Sunday, adding that the US president believed that the Kurds kept the guns for themselves. and also by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who at the time of the protests posted on X: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them...”