Israel lulled Iran into a false sense of security in the hours leading up to Ali Khamenei’s assassination with a fake Jewish Shabbat dinner trap, the IDF has revealed.
The joint US-Israeli operation to take out the Ayatollah on Saturday was years in the making, and included hacking into Tehran’s traffic camera network and disrupting mass communication infrastructure.
The aim of the operation was to take the Iranian despot by surprise, to ensure that he and other top officials had no time to react and escape.
The IDF used a little-known ballistic missile that arcs into space before crashing down on targets, known as a Blue Sparrow, to kill the Iranian leader.
As the eleventh hour approached, the IDF and the US ‘conducted a psychological operation’ to ensure that Iran’s leadership were blindsided by the attack.
Concerned that a buildup of activity around the IDF’s central military complex in Tel Aviv would indicate to Iran that a major operation was imminent, a plan of deception was executed.
The military said: ‘On the Friday of the attack, the IDF deliberately gave the impression that the military was shutting down for the weekend.
‘We released photos and information suggesting that IDF personnel and top leadership were going home for [Shabbat] dinner.’
A satellite image shows a view of the damaged Presidential Complex in Tehran, Iran, March 3, 2026
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei (pictured) was killed on Saturday in Tehran
The IDF said its generals deceived Iran by having high-ranking officials pretend to go home for the Shabbat
High-ranking generals made sure they were seen leaving the headquarters and back to their families.
But they did not stay home for long, instead discreetly returning later, with many going back to the headquarters in disguise.
On Saturday morning, Israeli jets, including F-15s took off at 7.30am Iran time, arriving in position two hours later.
IDF jets launched the Blue Sparrow missiles at 9.40am, with at least 30 being sent to the Ayatollah’s compound in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Blue Sparrows, which are produced in Israel and have a range of 1,240 miles, weight around 1.9 tonnes and were originally created to test air defence systems.
But since their creation in 2013, they have been adapted to be used as an air-to-surface missile due to their high speeds.
Their ability to exit and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere makes them incredibly difficult to intercept.
After being launched from fighter jets, booster rockets take the missile into space. The re-entry vehicle separates from the booster and locks onto a target.
After this, the missile re-enters the atmosphere and hits the target.
The Sparrow series of missiles, which also include Black and Silver variants, take inspiration from USSR Scud missiles, as well as Iranian Shahab-3 missiles.
Saturday morning, Pasteur Street, central Tehran. Inside a vast walled compound sits the armoured and labyrinthine residence of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Pictured: A satellite image shows smoke rising and heavy damage at the compound after the US-Israeli strike on Saturday
Tehran has been pummelled by US and Israeli air strikes since Saturday, when they killed Ayatollah Khamenei
As the missiles were fired, the IDF simultaneously disrupted around a dozen mobile phone towers near Pasteur Street, making phones appear busy when called and preventing Khamanei’s security from receiving possible warnings.
During the strike, senior Iranian national security officials were in another part of the building.
Two high-level military leaders – Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani, and commander of the IRGC Maj. Gen. Mohammad Pakpour – and Khamenei’s daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law and son-in-law were also obliterated in the Tehran strikes.
The wife of Iran’s Supreme Leader, 79-year-old Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, was also killed. As was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
They had also gained access to almost all of Tehran’s cameras, which are used extensively by Iran to spy on regime opponents and its own population, and tracked the movements of key bodyguards.
Images were said to be transmitted back to Tel Aviv and southern Israel, allowing Mossad to develop intimate knowledge on the guards’ addresses, work schedules and who they were assigned to protect.
One camera angle proved especially helpful and allowed agents to track where bodyguards parked their personal cars when arriving at the Supreme Leader’s compound on Pasteur Street in the heart of Tehran.
The hacks were part of a years-long intelligence campaign which eventually led to the killing of Khamenei.
‘We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,’ an Israeli intelligence official told the Financial Times.
‘And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.’
The CIA also had a human source who provided vital intelligence, according to the newspaper.
A man carries an injured woman at the site of US-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran, Iran, on Monday
Combined with Israeli AI tools and algorithms which sifted through a vast mountain of data on Iran’s leadership and their movements, the source allowed them to trace Khamenei to the meeting where he was hit.
Once Israel and the US became aware of where Khamenei was holding his meeting, they decided they had to act.
On the sixth day of the bloody war in the Middle East, the IDF said that its military campaign against Iran had ‘shaken’ the country’s clerical leadership, adding that it was continuing to ‘deepen the damage’.
‘The goal of the operation is to inflict severe damage on the Iranian terror regime until it removes the existential threat… And we continue to deepen the damage to the regime,’ military spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin said in a televised briefing.
‘It is important for me to say that it is already shaken. It was shaken by the first strike on Saturday morning, when the leadership was thwarted. And every day we continue to destabilise it more and more, to deepen the damage to it until the existential threat is removed,’ he added.
Alongside strikes on Iran, Israel also continues to attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, where its forces pushed into several southern border towns on Wednesday.
Lebanon was drawn into the Middle East war on Monday, when Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during US-Israeli strikes over the weekend.
‘Hezbollah is an arm of Iran. It serves the terror regime inside Iran,’ Defrin said in the briefing on Thursday, but added that the coordination between the two ‘is not that tight.’
‘So far, we have struck more than 320 Hezbollah terror targets, about 80 of them in the last 24 hours alone,’ Defrin said.
‘There are many commanders and soldiers who are working around the clock to hit Hezbollah and exact a heavy price from it.’
