The pattern in Gaza was regime change dressed as counterterrorism: dismantle Hamas, and with it, any Palestinian governing authority capable of resisting Israeli control. That same pattern has now been exported to Iran—and Washington supplied much of the firepower.
On February 28, 2026, a joint U.S.-Israeli strike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with several members of his family, at his Tehran compound. Donald Trump confirmed the killing and called it “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country”—language of regime change, not self-defense. Legal scholars writing in Just Security have since called on Congress to investigate the operation, arguing it was a textbook political assassination that effectively ended a decades-old American norm against killing foreign heads of state.
The killing wasn’t an Israeli operation that the United States merely blessed after the fact. American intelligence made it possible. The CIA tracked Khamenei’s movements for months and passed precise location intelligence to Israel, reportedly moving the strike’s timing forward to catch him at a leadership meeting. The UK wasn’t involved in that intelligence but moved quickly to align itself politically and militarily with the operation. It deployed the RAF defensively after Iran struck British bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and Cyprus, while UK Defense Secretary John Healey said publicly that “few people will mourn” Khamenei.
The hardware behind all of this keeps flowing from the same source. Since the February strikes began, the United States has delivered more than 115,600 tons of military equipment to Israel in over 400 cargo flights and sea shipments arriving at the ports of Haifa and Ashdod, under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Sales program. Many transfers have moved on an expedited track that bypasses standard congressional review.
The war that followed has cost thousands of lives on both sides and pushed the region toward broader crisis. Iran has repeatedly threatened to and then closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes. A fragile framework agreement signed in June has failed to stick.
Meanwhile, the same playbook continues next door. Israeli forces have spent 2026 demolishing entire towns along Lebanon’s southern border—Naqoura, Bint Jbeil, Khiam, and dozens of others. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has told troops, “we are removing the threat just as we did in Gaza.” Journalists, UN officials, and human rights monitors have explicitly drawn the comparison to Gaza’s destruction: a UNDP assessment counted more than 11,000 buildings completely destroyed, and satellite analysis by the French outlet Le Monde found 45 percent of urban areas in southern Lebanon damaged or leveled since March alone.
The United States has had real leverage to stop this and has largely declined to use it. Only this week did the State Department announce a limited “pilot zone” withdrawal from three villages. But two of those, per reporting from The National, were already empty of Israeli troops, meaning that the actual on-the-ground change is smaller than the announcement suggests. Israel has said it intends to remain in parts of southern Lebanon for months or years to come.
The pattern across Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon is consistent: Israeli military action has been accompanied by American and allied intelligence and diplomatic cover, while the U.S. government has been unwilling to condition its support on the fighting actually stopping.
The Trump administration and Israeli officials defend the Khamenei strike as necessary self-defense against Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and other armed groups. That defense is weak: even the international law scholars who called Khamenei a “lawful target” under the laws of armed conflict stopped short of calling the strike legal self-defense under the UN Charter. Other legal experts have been blunt in their assessment that the operation had no security rationale and a political assassination that a democracy should never treat as routine policy. On Lebanon, Israel maintains that its demolitions target Hezbollah infrastructure rather than civilians, though UN monitors on the ground have documented the same pattern of destruction seen in Gaza.
None of this has to be the permanent shape of the region. Two developments already underway point toward a different path.
First, the Lebanon withdrawal framework, however small its first steps, is real. Although this week’s pilot zone pullback covers only three villages, two already empty, it’s the first Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory since the ground invasion began in March, and it exists because Lebanon, Israel, and the United States sat down in Rome and negotiated it. Sustained diplomatic pressure to expand that framework, rather than let it stall at three villages, is a concrete, achievable next step that Congress and the American public can push for by name.
Second, a congressional investigation into the Khamenei strike could still happen and would matter beyond this one case. Just Security’s call for hearings isn’t only about assigning blame. It’s about whether the United States rebuilds the guardrail it just broke so that this kind of decapitation strike doesn’t become normal practice for future administrations, of any party, in future conflicts. That’s a fight that’s still winnable in Washington.