From the Liveblog of
Sunday, March 22, 2026
Israeli envoy to US: Strikes must go on until Iran’s regime has ‘no power,’ Iranians can rise up
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Israel’s ambassador in the US, Yechiel Leiter, says the US-Israeli war with Iran must continue until the Islamic Republic’s regime is degraded to the extent that it has “no power” and the Iranian people can rise up and topple it.
The campaign will end, he says in an interview with CNN, when “there is not an entity in Tehran that’s going to threaten the region.”
He says that such an outcome could come about by “this regime having a change of heart,” though he says that is “hard to imagine.”
He says a popular uprising is more likely: “Probably, it’s going to take place because the Iranian people have had enough,” he says.
“I think that we need boots on the ground but they’ve got to be Iranian boots, and I think they’re coming,” he adds. Asked to elaborate, he compares the situation to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of Romania’s communist government, in the late 1980s.
“There’s a point of combustion,” he says. “Look, nobody knew when the Soviet Union would collapse. Nobody knew when the Romanians would turn their guns against their… government. But it happened at some point. And if we degrade them enough, the people of Iran are going to say, we’ve had enough and we want a different regime.”
US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both called for the Iranian people to rise up, following mass anti-regime protests there in January that were put down in a deadly crackdown.
Leiter adds, “What we have to focus on now is degrading to the point where they have no power left in this regime. Hopefully, that will trigger this combustion point where the people are able to take charge of their own lives. Our focus has to be on degrading this regime to the point where they no longer pose a threat to us, to the region, to the world.”
He says that such an outcome can be achieved through US-Israeli airstrikes. The campaign “is not something that goes on forever,” he says at another point.
The U.S. and Israel planned this operation together, we’re executing it together, and we will bring this terror regime to its knees – together. ????????????????
Watch my full interview with @DanaBashCNN ???????? pic.twitter.com/h2LcTjQxzU
— Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter (@yechielleiter) March 22, 2026
The Times of Israel Community.