Defense Minister Israel Katz told media that Israel would have killed Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei during the war between the two countries if the opportunity had presented itself.
"If he had been in our sights, we would have taken him out," Katz told Israel's public radio station Kan Thursday evening, adding that the military had "searched a lot.”
"Khamenei understood this, went very deep underground, broke off contact with the commanders... so in the end it wasn't realistic," Katz told Kan.
He told Israeli television Channel 13 Thursday that Israel would cease its assassination attempts because "there is a difference between before the ceasefire and after the ceasefire.”
Katz had said during the war that Khamenei "can no longer be allowed to exist,” just days after reports that Washington vetoed Israeli plans to assassinate him.
But on Kan, Katz advised Khamenei to remain inside a bunker.
"He should learn from the late Nasrallah, who sat for a long time deep in the bunker,” he said, referring to Lebanese Hezbollah's former leader Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel killed in a Beirut airstrike in September 2024.
The movements of the supreme leader, who has not left Iran since he took power, are subject to the tightest security and secrecy.
Katz said Thursday that Israel maintained its aerial superiority over Iran and that it was ready to strike again.
"We won't let Iran develop nuclear weapons and threaten (Israel) with long-range missiles,” he said.
In his Channel 12 interview, Katz admitted that Israel does not know the location of all of Iran's enriched uranium, but that its airstrikes had destroyed the country's uranium enrichment capabilities.
"The material itself was not something that was supposed to be neutralized," he said of the enriched uranium.
