Following a fragile cease-fire in the 12-day conflict, it was predictable that the United States and Israel would move the war to Iran’s streets. Concurrently with intensified economic sanctions targeting ordinary Iranians, American and Israeli media outlets were churning out daily reports and analyses portraying widespread public discontent. These reports were further fueled by climate-related water shortages, painting a picture of Iranian society on the brink of explosion. Behind the scenes, Mossad and the CIA were reportedly recruiting terrorists, outlaws, and opponents of the Islamic Republic to stir up an armed conflict.
By Afifeh Abedi, International relations expert
Much of what transpired in January was a pre-planned scenario designed for January and February. However, Iran was not caught off guard. It must be emphasized that the hybrid war waged against the Islamic Republic is one of the most complex subversion projects in international politics, encompassing vast intelligence, security, economic, social, and even psychological dimensions – a comprehensive analysis of which would fill hundreds of pages.
However, after navigating the recent crisis, two short-term steps that represent the initial next moves by the US and Israel against Iran can be described as follows: persuading Donald Trump to take further action against Iran and launching a campaign to tarnish the Islamic Republic’s image internationally.
1. Wooing Trump for aggressive action: After Iran’s decisive response to US and Israeli aggression in June, which involved precise targeting of Israeli military and intelligence centers in occupied Palestinian territories, Tel Aviv has largely accepted that any unilateral attack on Iran could trigger a far more regret-inducing response. As seen during the 12-day conflict, Israel couldn’t hold its own without US and European support, and any new conflict will require significant external backing for survival. Consequently, during the recent crisis, Israel admitted Mossad’s involvement in the killings of Iranians in the streets while publicly stating it would not intervene in an attack on Iran.
However, Israel’s efforts to play mind games with Trump to incite the US president against Iran continue. Trump, meanwhile, has fallen for the Israeli trap. Regardless of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which can be seen as a Mossad file against Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu has used various psychological tactics and exploited Trump’s personality traits to push the US president into a direct and reputational confrontation against Iran.
One of Trump’s characteristics is that he views all global equations as win-or-lose scenarios and is unwilling to accept any form of defeat. During the 12-day conflict, Trump was talked into an illegal and highly dangerous attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, after which he trumpeted a victory on social media. However, the recent crisis, which has once again put Trump in Netanyahu’s trap, has yielded no major gains. Consequently, Israel’s game of goading him into an unpredictable and aggressive action against Iran continues, as evidenced by recent claims about Iran’s alleged plot to assassinate Trump.
The NewsNation journalist’s question to Trump about the possibility of Iranian assassination was not accidental and it is clear that Israeli propaganda is behind it to continue inciting Trump against Iran.
Israel and Europe are jointly carrying out a project to provoke Trump against Iran, with different objectives. Europeans are keen to drag Trump into a devastating war with Iran so that the US will be diverted from the issue of Greenland’s annexation. Europeans are well aware that the next war between the US and Iran will cost Washington dearly and Trump will be forced to back down from his claims about Greenland.
2. Marring Iran’s image: Following a failure to pull off a coup in January 2026, American and Israeli propaganda has taken the issue of Iranian unrest to human rights organizations. Few in the world remain unaware that the killings of Iranians in the streets of Tehran were a joint Mossad-CIA scenario designed to ruin the relationship between the government and the people of Iran.
The “fatality creation” project, as one component of the hybrid war against the Islamic Republic, has a long history. This project should be analyzed under a “cognitive-perceptual operation”; an operation whose goal is not only to tarnish the international image but also to disrupt internal decision-making systems, erode social capital, and create a rift in the government-people relationship through the production of threatening perceptions. One strategic advantage of this pattern for domestic opponents and their Western-Israeli supporters is that even in the event of tactical failure, the project leaves at least a form of “perceptual residue” in the minds of the audience. This residue acts as a pre-assumption in later stages and provides the necessary ground for activating and facilitating further projects against the Islamic Republic.
From the perspective of cognitive warfare, each narrative operation has a cumulative effect and is defined in a continuous chain. In this regard, after the terrorist events of January 2026, Israeli-affiliated media outlets, selectively citing figures from the identification number on the body bag of one of the victims, began to claim “thousands of casualties” in these events. However, a constant principle exists in the fatality creation project: the higher the numbers announced, the more successful the project appears to public opinion. In other words, statistical exaggeration is not a media mistake, but part of the deliberate plan of this campaign; a plan that even in some informal documents and confessions of its masterminds, refers to targeting a much higher death toll.
Statistics in this project serve two simultaneous functions: first, to reignite unrest and continue the cycle of unrest and casualties; and second, to convey success and “return on investment” to American and Israeli supporters of this campaign, who assess public opinion and social destabilization as a measurable project. The criminals who have killed more than 70,000 people in the Gaza Strip and for whom the people of Gaza have become meaningless numbers whose slaughter continues, are certainly not well-wishers of the Iranian people and will not be. For them, the more victims Iran suffers, the more successful their fatality creation project will be.
