An explosive-laden drone struck an Iranian Kurdish opposition camp northeast of Erbil in Iraq's Kurdistan Region on Saturday, Reuters reported, citing security sources.
The Kurdistan Komala Party of Iran said one of its bases in the Alana Valley of Erbil province was targeted, causing material damage but no casualties.
The group has faced repeated drone and missile attacks on its bases in Iraq's Kurdistan Region in recent months.
Nazanin Sharifian, an Iran-born former Mossad officer running for Israel’s parliament with Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party, told Iran International that Israel should step up military and economic pressure on the Islamic Republic’s leaders and work to end their rule.
“We must do everything we can to bring down the leaders of the Islamic Republic, so this regime is gone and the people of Iran are free,” she told Iran International’s Babak Eshaghi.
Sharifian, a Persian speaker who was born in Iran in 1982 and lived there until she was seven, is a candidate for the Knesset in Tuesday’s election. If Yashar joins the next coalition, she could hold a role in government.
‘The last hope of Iran’
Sharifian called the Islamic Republic Israel’s greatest enemy and an enemy of Iranians as well. Iran’s wealth, she said, goes to Hezbollah and the Houthis instead of to the people it belongs to.
Asked what Yashar’s policy toward Tehran would be, she said it would continue the course set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Eisenkot’s main rival.
“We must intensify this pressure on the leaders of the Islamic Republic,” she said. “We do not want to put pressure on the people of Iran. The people of Iran are the last hope of Iran.”
She called for every available means to be used to end the Islamic Republic’s rule. “I have great faith in the people of Iran,” she said.
Her emphasis on pressure differs from her party leader’s. Eisenkot, a former military chief, said this month that the Islamic Republic’s fall is necessary but cannot be achieved by military action, and that it must come from within Iranian society.
From Tehran to the Mossad
Sharifian was born into a Jewish family. After the 1979 revolution, some relatives left for the United States and Israel, but her father, who ran businesses in Tehran and Isfahan, refused at first to leave. The family fled when she was seven.
In Israel she served in the army, then in the Shin Bet internal security service and the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. Her Persian, she said, was one reason she was moved to the Mossad. She has since taught Persian and Middle East strategy to hundreds of Israeli students.
“I am very proud that my being is Iranian,” she said. Representing Iranians in Israel would be a great honor, she said, adding: “I expect to speak Persian in the Israeli parliament in the future.”
She hopes to bring more people of Iranian origin into Israel’s state institutions, she said, and that one day Iran will be returned to its people.
In 1987, with Khomeini still calling for Israel’s destruction, Israel’s defense minister called Iran its best friend. Today every candidate for prime minister wants the Islamic Republic gone. Israel’s leaders have changed their minds about Iran’s rulers, but seldom disagreed.
That is the thread through 47 years of Israeli policy toward the Islamic Republic, and it runs straight into next Tuesday’s election. Whoever wins, the goal will be the same. What changes is how hard, how openly and with whom Israel pursues it.
Before 1979, Iran was Israel’s most important partner in the region. Under David Ben-Gurion’s “periphery doctrine,” Israel courted non-Arab neighbors to outflank hostile Arab states, and the Shah’s Iran was the prize.
Tehran recognized Israel de facto in 1950, sold it oil through a jointly owned pipeline, and let its intelligence services work with Israel’s Mossad. Israeli engineers, farmers and arms dealers worked across Iran. The relationship was discreet, profitable and close.
The revolution ended it overnight. Islamic Republic's founder Rouhollah Khomeini cut ties, and Israel’s mission in Tehran was handed to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Israel’s first leaders after 1979 did not try to bring the new order down. They sold it weapons.
When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Menachem Begin’s government shipped arms to Tehran, and Israeli sales ran to an estimated $500 million between 1981 and 1983, according to Tel Aviv University’s Jaffe Institute. Saddam Hussein was the threat, and Iran was the counterweight. In 1985 and 1986, under Shimon Peres, Israel was the go-between in the Iran-Contra affair, passing American missiles to Tehran.
Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, explained the logic in October 1987. “Iran is Israel’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran, because Khomeini’s regime will not last forever,” he said. The expectation that the Islamic Republic would fall was already there. Israel simply did not think at the time that it was its job to hasten it.
Rabin was also the one who turned. Back as prime minister in 1992, he received the first intelligence reports on an Iranian nuclear program and concluded, aides recalled, that only a nuclear Iran could pose an existential threat Israel could not answer. Part of his case for peace with the Palestinians and Jordan was to clear the near front before facing the far one.
Ariel Sharon took the same view further. In November 2002, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, he told The Times of London that Iran should be put under pressure “the day after” Baghdad fell, calling it a center of world terror.
As prime minister he carried aerial photographs of Iranian sites to George W. Bush and said Israel “cannot accept” a nuclear Iran. Ehud Olmert, his successor, kept the military option on the table while, according to later reporting, the first cyberattacks on Iran’s centrifuges were set in motion with Washington.
None of them spoke of regime change. Their target was the bomb.
Benjamin Netanyahu made Iran his signature cause. Across 15 years in office before 2021, he drew a cartoon bomb at the United Nations, addressed the US Congress against the 2015 nuclear deal, and displayed an archive of Iranian nuclear documents his agents had smuggled out of Tehran.
He also began speaking past the government to the people. He recorded messages to Iranians, offering water technology during the drought and insisting that Israel’s quarrel was “not with the Iranian people.”
The message was new: the problem is not Iran, it is the people who rule it.
Naftali Bennett, prime minister in 2021 and 2022, turned that view into a doctrine. Israel, he argued, had spent decades fighting the arms of the octopus, Hezbollah and Hamas, while leaving the head untouched.
He said he launched about 30 operations against the Islamic Republic with the Mossad and other agencies, not all of them military, and predicted it would collapse like the Soviet Union.
Yair Lapid, who succeeded him for six months, spent his term lobbying against a revived nuclear deal.
Since returning to power at the end of 2022, Netanyahu has moved from hoping to aiming. In June 2025, as Israeli jets struck Iran in the 12-day war, he told Iranians that “as we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.”
The war that began on February 28 this year, fought with the United States, killed former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Last week Netanyahu went further than any Israeli leader before him: “This regime must fall and I will topple it.”
Netanyahu, leading Likud, has made bringing down the Islamic Republic his campaign’s primary objective and says he has told the security services to work toward it. He has also said he opposes a preemptive strike before the vote.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose Yashar party is Likud’s main rival, says the Islamic Republic’s fall is necessary but cannot be achieved by force. “This must come from within the Iranian people,” he said, and he would strike again only if Tehran raced for a bomb.
Bennett and Lapid, running together on the Together list, want to hit harder, not softer. Bennett says attacks by Tehran’s allies should be answered on Iranian soil. Lapid has called for striking Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the Kharg Island oil terminal.
Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu has long called for overthrowing the Islamic Republic and says past efforts fell short. Itamar Ben-Gvir of the far-right Jewish Power backs military operations until Israel’s goals are met. Mansour Abbas, whose Ra’am party draws Arab Israeli voters, has set out no position on Iran.
From Rabin’s prediction that Khomeini’s rule would not last to Netanyahu’s promise to end it himself, the conclusion has barely moved. What Israelis will choose on Tuesday is not whether to want the Islamic Republic gone, but how loudly to say it and how much to risk to get there.
Armed Baluch groups in Iran’s southeast are adding one more strain on the Islamic Republic’s security forces just as war has stretched them thinnest, with 18 attacks in the 18 days to October 10, more than in any full month this year.
At least 63 armed incidents were documented across Sistan and Baluchestan and neighboring Kerman province between March 31 and October 10, leaving at least 94 people dead and 33 injured, according to the rights group HRANA. The attacks have grown more complex as well as more frequent: coordinated ambushes, roadside bombs and heavier weapons.
The question is whether a decades-old insurgency, long contained by force, can become a wider problem for a state fighting on other fronts.
Several Baluch armed organizations joined forces in December 2025 under the People’s Fighters Front. The coalition includes Jaish al-Adl, which Iran and the United States both list as a terrorist organization.
The front has increasingly framed its goal as ending the Islamic Republic’s rule rather than winning concessions for the Baluch. Whether it can draw support beyond the southeast is unproven.
Its timing is not accidental. Iran’s security services are absorbing the consequences of war with the United States and Israel while still needing the forces they rely on to suppress dissent at home.
Rahim Bandoui, an Iranian-Baluch human rights activist and senior member of the Balochistan People’s Party, said the conflict itself is nothing new.
Speaking on Iran International’s Eye for Iran podcast, he traced it to decades of repression, arguing that Tehran has long treated peaceful political activity and armed resistance in the province as the same security threat.
What has changed, he said, is the state’s position. A government weakened by war presents armed groups with an opening they did not have before.
If the attacks keep growing, Tehran will have to send more personnel and resources to the southeast at a time when its security forces are already stretched. Those forces have contained unrest there before through military operations, mass arrests and lethal force. A sustained insurgency adds a cost on top of the war.
That cost could be felt elsewhere. Every unit tied down in Sistan and Baluchestan is one not available against protests or other opposition in the rest of the country.
The limits are real, though. There is no evidence the coalition can take and hold territory or threaten the central government’s control. Its political ambitions face a further obstacle across the border: Baluch armed groups in Pakistan differ considerably from their Iranian counterparts in ideology and aims, so a unified cross-border movement is unlikely without substantial change on both sides.
The insurgency sits on grievances that successive crackdowns have failed to address.
Sistan and Baluchestan, home to a mostly Sunni Baluch population, is among Iran’s poorest provinces despite its position on the Pakistani and Afghan borders and its natural resources. Residents face discrimination, few jobs and poor access to schools, clinics and other basic services.
Tens of thousands of people in the province have no official identity documents, Sabah Baluch, a human rights advocate with Iran House, told the podcast, which shuts them out of basic services and legal rights. For some families that has meant generations without formal schooling or work.
Hardship pushes residents into dangerous informal work, above all carrying fuel across the border, where they risk being shot by security forces or burning to death in vehicle fires.
The province has also seen some of the Islamic Republic’s deadliest violence against dissent. On September 30, 2022, during the nationwide protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, security forces killed at least 87 people in Zahedan, the provincial capital, most of them Baluch worshippers, in what became known as Bloody Friday.
Baluch prisoners are also executed out of all proportion to their numbers. According to Iran Human Rights, they accounted for 20 percent of recorded executions in 2023, 11 percent in 2024 and 9 percent in 2025, from a group that is a small fraction of Iran’s population.
For now the Islamic Republic retains the military and security capacity to hold the southeast, and nothing suggests the insurgency can change the balance of power on its own.
The larger question is not whether armed groups can defeat government forces in Sistan and Baluchestan. It is whether a state that has relied on lethal force against its opponents for decades can go on containing several challenges at once while war makes new demands on the forces it uses to do so.
For Iran’s wider opposition, the answer will matter well beyond the southeast.
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Pakistan is mediating between Iran and the United States even as it sends troops to defend Saudi Arabia against attacks by Tehran’s allies, placing Islamabad in the conflicting roles of peace broker and military partner to Iran’s rivals.
On Tuesday, Pakistan's military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and security chief Mohsen Rezaei in Tehran.
Munir has also cultivated a close relationship with President Donald Trump, including meetings at the White House.
Islamabad helped broker the June agreement between Washington and Tehran. The truce did not last, but Pakistan has kept its mediation channel open.
Commitment to Saudi Arabia
Pakistan has taken a direct military role in Saudi Arabia's defense.
Reuters reported in May that Islamabad had deployed approximately 8,000 troops, a squadron of fighter jets and air-defense systems to the kingdom under a bilateral agreement. Saudi Arabia financed the deployment, according to Pakistani officials cited by Reuters.
Pakistan’s commitment to Saudi security deepened in August when Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement, treating an attack against one member as an attack against all.
This week, Islamabad announced that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had completed ratification, while Turkey's remained pending. The partners have also discussed further military mobilization following attacks by Iran-aligned Houthis on Saudi territory.
On Wednesday, Pakistan signed another defense agreement, this time with Turkey, Qatar and Indonesia. The Badr agreement, signed in Doha, offers opportunities for industrial cooperation and defense production.
Together with Makkah, the agreements deepen Pakistan's military, diplomatic and economic ties across countries pursuing different regional agendas.
Pakistan's balancing act
That tension was evident during Munir's Tehran visit. Pakistani government sources told Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency that the talks focused more on stopping Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia than on reviving US-Iran negotiations.
Munir pressed Iranian leaders to use their influence over the Houthis, citing Pakistan's commitment to defend the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states supply much of Pakistan’s energy, while millions of Pakistani workers live in the region. Defense cooperation brings financial support and industrial opportunities, while diplomacy helps protect relations with competing partners.
Pakistan appears to be carving out an unusual role: mediating between Iran and the United States, helping defend Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, and joining new regional defense ventures while retaining direct access to Iranian leaders.
But the same network could become harder to manage if regional tensions escalate. The more security commitments Pakistan assumes, the greater the chance that relationships which currently give Islamabad leverage could eventually force it to choose between them.
A possible resumption of US strikes on Iran would serve an increasingly economic war, weakening Tehran’s ability to challenge a blockade that Washington appears prepared to maintain for the foreseeable future.
A strike on Iran could "absolutely" come this weekend, the US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, said Friday, and the administration hasn’t said what it would be for.
The New York Times reports that US and Israeli planners have drawn up a short, intensive campaign for after the November 3 midterms, aimed at Iran’s missile and drone arsenal, nuclear sites and energy infrastructure.
Critics read the reports as proof that there is no strategy anymore. That reads the war through the lens of February, when the economic campaign existed to support the war. Whether the administration designed it this way or simply ended up here, the strikes now serve the economic campaign, which is proving more harmful to the regime than the strikes ever were.
Washington has committed to the blockade and treats the strikes as optional. Speaking to reporters Friday, President Trump said the choice was whether to finish it off or let it wither, and that with oil moving through Hormuz the US was getting everything it wanted. Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told the Financial Times the same day that the president and the Navy can maintain the blockade for the foreseeable future while the administration keeps tightening economic pressure.
The US is now running a siege. It has sharply restricted Iran’s access to oil buyers, international finance and regional trade. The job of the military is to keep the cordon from being broken. The shift in strategy came in July, when the US restored the blockade after the June memorandum collapsed and the strikes that followed were about the strait.
Central Command said its July strikes were meant to degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping. The next round of strikes would be the first planned campaign since the blockade and the sanctions began doing real damage to the regime.
Iran’s imports since the war began show its priority — bringing in the supplies it needs to be able to fight its way out of the blockade. It is bringing in truck parts, missile fuel ingredients and missile and drone components to rebuild the launchers and stockpiles. The Wall Street Journal counted about 1,300 shipments of dual-use components from Chinese suppliers to Iran’s defense ministry in the first half of the year.
On October 1 the Treasury sanctioned Iran’s truck and auto makers, which it called an essential part of Iran’s defense industrial base, and the suppliers in Turkey, the Emirates and East Asia feeding them parts. Iran is assembling missiles from stockpiled components in small numbers, the Journal reported in September, and the blockade has made the solid-fuel components it can’t make harder to import.
Iran loaded no crude oil onto tankers in September, according to Bloomberg. CENTCOM says the blockade has stopped $25 billion in oil exports. The United Arab Emirates halted all trade and financial dealings with Iran in August. The regime has no way to persuade its own base or the Persian Gulf states that it has an answer.
That leaves Tehran a short list of cards to play against the blockade and the sanctions.
The first is attacking commercial shipping in the strait. Maritime security sources recorded at least 12 attacks on tankers around the Strait of Hormuz in the week to October 5, the highest weekly total of the war.
The second is pressuring its neighbors. Iran threatens Persian Gulf energy infrastructure, US bases and undersea cables, and it has the Houthis at Bab el-Mandeb, all meant to push the Persian Gulf states to lobby Washington to end the blockade.
The third is to strain US munition supplies. Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s security chief, said this week that a long war favors Iran because the test is which side can sustain a cycle of production, deployment and response.
The fourth is to keep offering a deal that it likely won’t make. Tehran’s standing offer is to reopen the strait in seven days in exchange for ending the blockade, easing oil sanctions and releasing frozen assets.
The fifth is the nuclear program, which the regime can negotiate to death over enrichment and dangle in front of Washington for the same price.
A strike goes down that list. The missile and drone arsenal the Times describes, and the launchers, mine-layers, naval sites, radars and air defenses CENTCOM has hit since July, are the hardware behind the regime’s threat to the strait and its neighbors.
Fewer launchers means fewer ships hit and a weaker threat to the Persian Gulf. Hitting stockpiles and production sites limits its ability to strain and outlast US munition supplies, and a strike tests Rezaei’s claim directly. Destroying enough of those capabilities would weaken Iran’s offer to stop attacking shipping in exchange for lifting the blockade.
Washington would have less reason to pay for a threat Iran could no longer credibly sustain. Hitting Pickaxe Mountain doesn’t end the nuclear program, but it leaves Tehran less to bargain with when it asks for sanctions relief.
Holding a blockade is expensive. Destroyers are doing work that cheap systems should do, and the Navy is stretched thin. Fewer Iranian launchers firing at the escort mission means the Navy can hold the line longer without forcing a decision in Washington.
The regime has shown it will take the strikes. Ali Khamenei and Ali Larijani are dead, Mojtaba Khamenei succeeded his father, and Tehran still won’t concede on any deal the US could accept. What it can’t take is the economic war.
The blockade turned the clock against Tehran. The regime’s strategy since February has been to wait — for the administration to lose patience, for the midterms, for the next policy swing.
The US can hold a blockade for the foreseeable future at a cost it can carry. A prolonged loss of oil revenue will make Tehran’s strategy of waiting out Washington increasingly difficult to sustain. The strikes exist to keep that clock running.
