Letter to the Supreme Leader: Yoav Gallant Issues Warning to Khamenei

Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant issued a public letter today (Thursday) to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, warning him that any further agression against Israel will spell disaster for his country and that he has only a small window to change course:

Supreme Leader Khamenei,

We have never met, but I believe we know much about each other. I have known you for almost three decades, studying every critical moment in your leadership.

I have followed your decisions, your doctrine, and the architecture of proxies you built throughout the region. I watched you replace Khomeini, accumulate political power, and attempt to build Iranian regional hegemony. I understood not only your goals but also the methods you believed would achieve them.

As Defense Minister, I was responsible for turning decades of Israeli intelligence, Air Force capabilities, and strategic doctrine into one coordinated military plan. The plan that cut through your "Ring of Fire" like a hot knife through butter and ultimately caused its collapse. A plan that culminated in the twelve-day war that Israel and the United States waged against the Iranian nuclear program, air defense, missile production, and senior military leadership.

What happened in June 2025 was not just a military campaign. It was the strategic collapse of a system you built over four decades.

Your "Ring of Fire" was designed to surround Israel with pressure points and distractions: Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, Syria and Iraq in the east, and the Houthis in the southeast. (Fortunately for us, the Mediterranean Sea lies to the west.)

You planned to activate proxies and wage a war of attrition against Israel, while developing terror armies that would one day conquer and destroy it. You sought to build an arsenal of heavy, precise, and long-range missiles to bring large-scale destruction in a coordinated attack. And at the center of this architecture stood your main effort: developing nuclear weapons that would grant Iran immunity from regime change and enable it to achieve regional dominance and deterrence, first with Israel, then with others.

But this ring did not surround us. It failed.

Sinwar's attack on October 7, 2023, relied on the ammunition, training, intelligence, and financing that you and your proxies provided to Hamas. Perhaps his actions exceeded your intentions. But you had to bear the consequences. The massacre he committed was not met with fear, but with determination, defiance, and ultimately, with cold faith that Israel would do whatever necessary to defend itself against the satanic forces seeking to destroy us, regardless of the cost.

The Israeli public, despite the pain and loss, did not break. Our people held firm. As you now know well, we responded.

You underestimated not only our determination, but also the capability of our forces and the precision of our weapons. In many cases, even now, you do not know how you were attacked, from where, or with what.

What followed was not a single blow. It was a sequence.

Israel systematically dismantled Hamas leadership, Hezbollah's weapons depots and command, and missile production facilities. We flew over Tehran as we did over Tel Aviv. We eliminated key military leaders and scientists. We attacked the S-300 systems. We destroyed your air defense system. Your nuclear program and infrastructure were set back years.

Your shield, long advertised, failed to protect.

But more than physical damage, something deeper was exposed:

We see everything. We hear everything. We are everywhere.

We knew your timetables. Your sites. Your communications. Your conversations with your closest allies, most of whom are no longer with you, in Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. Your schedules. Your replacement plans. And your blind spots.

In more than one sense, we knew more about you than you knew about yourselves.

And now the questions must be asked:

Can you build a secret nuclear program when you have no secrets?

To pursue nuclear weapons now is not a gamble. It is a dream. An act of faith in systems that have already failed you.

Hope is not strategy. Will you risk your future and your country's future in a race you cannot hide and are unlikely to finish?

To protect a nuclear program, you need conventional defense and offensive capabilities. But these capabilities have already been proven ineffective.

Again and again since October 7, Nasrallah requested permission to enter the war. And again and again, you refused. You made it clear that Hezbollah is your strategic reserve, to be activated only if Iran itself is attacked or if Iran attacks Israel directly. But when the moment came, when your core infrastructure was damaged and your doctrine collapsed, it was not there. The shield you relied on was never removed.

Hezbollah's weapons arsenal lies in ruins, buried with its commanders. Hamas is neutralized. Assad is gone. His successor chose a different path. The Gulf states are now aligning against you, not with you. Iraq opposes your grip. The region has moved on.

You are a nation of 90 million people, with an area 60 times larger than Israel's. Yet today, you are more exposed than ever.

Your proxy network, the center of your regional strategy, is now your vulnerability. Their atrocities gave us legitimacy. Their failure gave us freedom of action.

You have options. But none of them are easy. And all are far from perfect.

You can rebuild your proxies. But we will destroy them. Now we can dismantle in months what took you decades to build.

You can accelerate nuclear development. But what you build, we will likely see. What we see, we will strike. And what we strike, you will struggle to replace.

You can negotiate. But is your regime, built on resistance and ideological rigidity, capable of withstanding the compromises such a path would require?

This is not a question of tactics. This is structural reality. Nuclear programs require people, facilities, and coordination. You built yours in an analog era. Today, satellites, cyber tools, human resources, and data analysis expose what once remained hidden.

And with each passing month, the gap widens. Our knowledge deepens. Our target array expands. Your options narrow.

You still have time. But not much.

You have faced moments of restraint before. You avoided war with the United States during the 2003 Iraq War. You maintained stability even during regional upheavals. You sacrificed allies when survival demanded it.

This is one of those decisive moments.

As you contemplate your next steps, consider how we knew who your people were, what positions they held, and where they lived. As you look around the room, ask yourselves: who is truly loyal?

With that in mind, you must now choose:

Continue pursuing nuclear weapons, without cover, without defense, and with limited offensive capability? We will know. We will thwart it. And we will exact a heavy price.

Try to rebuild your conventional arsenal, knowing it will take decades? We will delay it, sabotage it, and dismantle it again.

Or,

Abandon your war against a small and determined nation, a thousand miles from your borders, and focus instead on the welfare and future of your people.

But if you choose wrong again, we will be there, waiting.

General Yoav Galant, Former Defense Minister