Israel’s former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said he had drawn up plans to assassinate Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, but the idea was abandoned over fears it would trigger a war with Tehran. Soleimani was later killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in 2020.
Speaking to Channel 12, Cohen said: “I always wanted to be proactive, identify threats, neutralize them. But the prevailing approach was avoidance—‘Oh, what will happen next?’ For example, I had a full plan to eliminate Qassem Soleimani in Syria. Everything was ready—intelligence, surveillance, logistics—but I was told I couldn’t carry it out because it would spark a war with Iran.”
During the interview, aired Saturday evening, he recalled then US President Donald Trump accusing Netanyahu of cowardice for backing out of the strike.
Cohen said Israeli reluctance “wasn’t because of the prime minister -- but because [Netanyahu] accepted the army and military intelligence’s position,” referring to then chief of staff Aviv Kohavi.
He recalled a security meeting in which he proposed that the IDF strike a site linked to Qassem Soleimani that the military had itself labeled a serious strategic threat, without giving a date. “The chief of staff opposed me, right there,” he said. “I told the prime minister: ‘Instruct him.’ But no directive was given.”
Cohen said Netanyahu sided with the generals, a stance he described as a “policy of consequences.”
Asked if the generals intimidated the premier, he said: “Absolutely.”
On June 13, Israel launched surprise attacks on Iran, killing many senior military leaders and nuclear experts, and triggering a 12-day war that brought destruction to both sides.
After Cohen’s remarks were aired Saturday evening, Kohavi issued a statement saying the IDF had opposed a different operation proposed by Cohen to kill Soleimani, and had backed what proved to be a successful operation.
Asked if Netanyahu might have acted differently in another environment, Cohen replied: “Yes, absolutely.”
Under Cohen's tenure, from 2016-2021, Operation House of Cards saw Israel target dozens of Iranian targets in Syria in 2018.
During his Saturday interview, Cohen said one of his major successes was acquiring Iran’s nuclear archive.
He said he devised the “exploding beepers” tactic used against Hezbollah last year, when pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to the Iran-backed group were rigged to detonate simultaneously, killing and wounding hundreds of its fighters across Lebanon.
“I’m the father of the concept," the long-time agent said. "In 2004, I told then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan I wanted a special operations center that would also handle equipment sales.”
Haghshenas said restoring the wetland requires $300 million and called for measures to stop industrial, agricultural and household wastewater from flowing into it.
He warned that decades of untreated sewage, sediment and pollution, compounded by falling Caspian water levels, have left the wetland on the brink of ecological collapse.
The wetland, registered under the international Ramsar Convention in 1975, is a critical habitat for fish, birds and local livelihoods.
Environmental officials said invasive plants, shrinking water flow and mismanagement have deepened the crisis, but stressed that “Anzali is not dead and can recover” if pollution is curbed and water retained.
In August, a senior Iranian environment official warned that Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran, once the Middle East’s largest, will completely dry up by the end of summer if current conditions persist.
“The lake's water level on August 1, 2025, was 1,269.74 meters, its area had shrunk to 581 square kilometers, and its volume was down to about half a billion cubic meters,” said Ahmadreza Lahijanzadeh, deputy for marine and wetland affairs at Iran’s Department of Environment.
The prime minister’s office said the committee, composed of relevant government agencies, will review information and reports pointing to corruption and suspicious operations in Iraq’s ports and territorial waters.
The US Treasury on Tuesday imposed sanctions on a vast network accused of blending Iranian oil with Iraqi crude and selling it as exclusively Iraqi, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Islamic Republic.
Washington said the network covertly blended Iranian and Iraqi oil through ship-to-ship transfers in the Persian Gulf and in Iraqi ports.
The sanctions target Waleed Khaled Hameed al-Samarra’i, based in the United Arab Emirates, along with his firms Babylon Navigation DMCC and Galaxy Oil FZ LLC, and nine Liberia-flagged tankers.
The Treasury estimated the operation generated about $300 million annually for both Iran and al-Samarra’i.
“Iraq cannot become a safe haven for terrorists, which is why the United States is working to counter Iran’s influence in the country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“By targeting Iran’s oil revenue stream, Treasury will further degrade the regime’s ability to carry out attacks against the United States and its allies.”
The measures follow sanctions announced in July against another network accused of blending Iranian and Iraqi oil.
Two children were killed on August 5 in a village in northern Golestan province when a gas leak ignited as power was restored, the paper said.
Ten days later, two youths aged 16 and 18 in Fars suffocated after sheltering from the heat in a running car inside a garage; and a Tabriz resident died in an elevator-related accident as power disruptions multiplied,” according to Etemad.
“I wish we had never had electricity. It took the lives of my two children. They had just begun to live, had just stepped into society full of hopes and dreams. Suddenly, when the power came back, my house exploded. I came and saw the wall had collapsed on my daughter. Blood was coming from everywhere,” the bereaved mother said in a video shared after the Golestan blast.
Fatal incidents and urban hazards
Fire officials in Isfahan reported a 284% jump in elevator entrapments over a one-month period tied to outages. In the southwestern city of Yasuj, up to 20 people were trapped at once during blackouts, while reports from Khorramabad in west put such incidents at three to four times last year’s level, Etemad wrote.
Etemad interviewed 11 people across Yazd, Tehran, Ahvaz, Shiraz, Ardebil and Urmia, including patients with butterfly disease and people with spinal cord injuries.
A young woman in Shiraz said a routine 10-minute eye procedure stretched to over an hour because a surgical microscope repeatedly failed.
“Power fluctuations burned the microscope lamp in the middle of my eye surgery,” she said, adding that repeated replacements failed until the device was swapped out, leaving lasting damage to her right eye.
Patients with chronic conditions described blackouts as dangerous and costly. Frequent cuts forced daily dressing changes and purchases of pricier creams, A butterfly disease patient in Yazd said.
A man with a spinal injury in rural Urmia feared his anti-bedsore mattress would fail in surges: without it, he said, pressure ulcers were likely. Others said that when electricity goes, well pumps stop and mobile networks and home internet also drop, compounding risks for those needing help.
Strain on daily life and business
Shopkeepers and small businesses reported spoiled food and lost inventory; one confectioner filmed trays of discarded cakes, blaming a single outage for rent, labor and waste. Poultry farmers in Dezful, Khuzestan province, cited higher mortality and reduced chick placement amid daily cuts.
Etemad’s reporting underscores how prolonged outages—often four to five hours a day—are cascading through homes, clinics and city infrastructure. The accounts point to a growing public safety challenge where routine power cuts are now measured not just in inconvenience, but in injuries and deaths.
