How Israel’s Operation Rising Lion Dismantled Iran from Within: A Case Study in the Art of Deception
Zineb Riboua
On June 13, the Islamic Republic of Iran experienced a strategic collapse that altered the balance of power in the Middle East. Israel eliminated key Iranian military and scientific personnel, degraded the country’s missile infrastructure, and neutralized its early-warning systems. But more consequentially, Israel’s strike—dubbed Operation Rising Lion—shattered the Iranian regime’s confidence in its own security apparatus.
This outcome was the result of years of sustained intelligence preparation, real-time intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) dominance, and deep operational infiltration. Israeli planners achieved full-spectrum disruption by dismantling Iran’s command and control networks, severing high-level communications, and injecting uncertainty into the regime’s decision-making processes.
By the time Tehran could react, the damage was already done. Its upper command was dead, its defensive systems were disabled, and its internal threat assessments were in disarray. Crucially, Israel did not rely on cross-border operations. It had pre-positioned remote-activated strike platforms inside Iran and deployed them with surgical precision.
Israel’s operational concept combined a decapitation strike with cognitive disruption. The psychological warfare element—that the strike had come from Iranian soil—amplified the attack’s kinetic effects, leaving Tehran paralyzed. Unable to determine whether it had been infiltrated or outmaneuvered, the regime’s ability to respond collapsed before it could launch a single countermeasure.
https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/how-israels-operation-rising-lion-dismantled-iran-within-case-study-art-deception
