Netanyahu: Iran’s missile and drone arsenals ‘massively degraded’ and ‘will be destroyed’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opens the English part of his press conference with foreign media by mocking recent rumors about his condition, saying, “First of all, I just want to say, I’m alive.”

Netanyahu says Israel and the United States are “protecting the entire Middle East – and I venture to say, the entire world,” as he outlines progress in the ongoing war against Iran.

Netanyahu asserts that after 20 days of fighting, “we are winning, and Iran is being decimated,” pointing to what he describes as significant damage to Tehran’s military capabilities, particularly their nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

He says Iran’s missile and drone arsenals are being “massively degraded” and vowed they “will be destroyed,” framing the campaign as a continued effort to eliminate the threat posed by the Islamic Republic.

Netanyahu sets out three goals for the campaign against Iran: “One, removing the nuclear threat. Second, removing the ballistic missile threat and removing both of these threats before they’re buried deep underground and become immune from aerial attack. And third, this means creating the conditions for the Iranian people to grasp their freedom, to control their destiny.”

He says the regime is “not only attacking America, not only attacking Israel, not only attacking the Iranian people, it is attacking the entire Middle East and beyond. They’ve attacked civilians and Americans and American assets in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and they’ve even attacked through their proxies Cyprus and Europe.”

He notes that “We’ve warned for decades that their ballistic missile program would be used to attack these targets far and wide, and if they’re not stopped, that’s just the beginning. The death cult in Iran is trying to blackmail the world by closing a key international maritime route, the Straits of Hormuz. It won’t work,” he vows.

He asks the assembled media to “imagine how the ‘ayatollah regime’ would be able to blackmail the entire world if they had ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads… international-range ballistic missiles and nuclear-tipped warheads. Imagine what a great threat that would be.”

He says that hundreds of Iran’s launchers have been destroyed. Their stockpiles of missiles are being hit hard, and so are the industries that produce them… In [Operation] Rising Lion [in June], we destroyed missiles and we destroyed a lot of the nuclear infrastructure. But what we’re destroying now are the factories that produce the components to make these missiles and to make the nuclear weapons that they’re trying to produce. We’re wiping out their industrial base in a way that we didn’t do before.”