Israel urges Iranian uprising while privately saying they’d ‘get slaughtered’

Israel urges Iranian uprising while privately saying they’d ‘get slaughtered’ by Sharon Zhang, The Real News Network March 18, 2026

This article was originally published by Truthout on Mar. 17, 20

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Israeli officials are reportedly urging the U.S. to join them in their public urging of Iranians to stage an uprising against their government, even as the Israeli government internally assesses that protesters would be “slaughtered” if they did so, demonstrating Israel’s blasé attitude toward Iranian lives amid its bombardments of the country.

According to reporting by The Washington Post published Tuesday, top Israeli officials relayed the message to U.S. diplomats in a cable that circulated in the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem on Friday. The cable said that Israeli officials assess that the Iranian government is “not cracking” and will “fight to the end” — despite hopes by U.S. and Israeli officials that they could “decapitate” the government and achieve collapse. The cable further said that if Iranians were to stage more protests against their government, as they did in demonstrations earlier this year, “the people will get slaughtered,” Israeli officials said.

According to UN Special Rapporteur on Iran Mai Sato, around 5,000 people were killed in the government crackdown on protests as of January, though it has been difficult to assess the precise number of deaths due to biases on all sides. The cable, which summarized recent meetings by top Israeli officials and U.S. officials, said that nonetheless, Israeli officials are hoping for a revolt and that the U.S. should support such an uprising as well. Critics have said that the cable demonstrates Israeli officials’ indifference toward whether civilians live or die, after years of Israel wantonly slaughtering civilians in Palestine and countries across the Middle East.

“This should not surprise anyone,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president for the Quincy Institute, in a post on social media.

“That the Israelis would use the Iranian people as cannon fodder in their war with the Islamic Republic was crystal clear to anyone who had followed the Israeli-Iranian rivalry in a clear-eyed way. Nor can anyone reasonably expect that Israel would act in the best interest of the Iranian people. Israel pursues its own interests, full stop.”

On the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s bombardments on February 28, U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both put out video addresses urging the Iranian people to take up arms against their government as they rained death and destruction from the sky. Since then, the U.S. and Israel’s bombardments have killed over 1,400 people in Iran and injured at least 18,500, according to Iranian health officials. Israeli intelligence and military officials have long urged Iranians to protest against their government, and the U.S. has meddled in Iranian politics for decades.

“I think a lot of people will feel very betrayed by this assessment,” Iran analyst and Johns Hopkins University assistant professor Narges Bajoli told The Washington Post, saying that it would be viewed as exploiting Iranian lives for political gain. This article first appeared on The Real News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.