“With the Strength of a Lion.”

That was the codename for a yearslong Mossad intelligence-gathering operation which culminated Friday in extensive Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program and military apparatus.

The casualty inventory reads like a guest list for a VIP Iranian military dinner. Most notably, the IRGC lost its blustering boss, Hossein Salami. A legendary sh-t-talker with few peers in the hectoring department, Salami was among the only surviving top officials across the Iranian axis who counted as a “household name.”

By “household name” I obviously don’t mean your average American citizen would know of Salami. I just mean that after 2024, Iran and its proxies were down to maybe five people whose faces were intimately familiar to Westerners who count themselves keen observers of conflict in the region, Khamenei included.

Also killed Friday: Salami’s boss, Mohammad Bagheri, “missile guy” Amir Ali Hajizadeh, and two preeminent nuclear scientists in Fereydoun Abbasi and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranji.

Abbasi ran the country’s nuclear agency for a couple of years under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel tried to kill him on November 29, 2010. That morning, Abbasi was driving to work in Tehran when someone pulled up beside him on a motorcycle and stuck a bomb on the door of his car. He grabbed his wife and bailed just before the device exploded. They both survived. His colleague, Majid Shahriari, wasn’t so lucky.

Tellingly, perhaps, Friday’s strikes also targeted Ali Shamkhani. In addition to being very close to the big man personally, Shamkhani was in charge of Khamenei’s nuclear talks with the Trump administration. Simply put: Benjamin Netanyahu just killed Khamenei’s nuclear negotiator. How’s that for a message to Washington?

Tehran tried to put on a brave face. The country won’t give up its nuclear program, a spokesman for the atomic agency Abbasi used to lead said Friday. That’s just as well for the Israeli right. I can assure you that Netanyahu — and particularly the zealots to whom he’s beholden — would rather Iran hold out to the bitter end so Israel has an excuse to finish this job once and for all.

Israel was still at it Friday, bombing Tabriz for a second time. This “isn’t going to be a short one,” UN ambassador Danny Danon said. “I wouldn’t say months. But it can take days or weeks.”

No one’s quite sure what “it” is just yet, but by appearances, Israel’s going after everything: The ballistic missiles, the nuclear program, all of it. Maybe they’ll spare the oil so that some future Iranian government not bent on the destruction of the Israeli state-building project has a means to generate revenue, but everything else looks like fair game.

As far as anyone knows, Israel doesn’t have the conventional weapons needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites entirely. Only the US possesses the munitions capable of that particular feat. I can only assume the IDF has a plan to overcome that logistical impediment.

As for Trump, he said what needed to be said, frankly: That Iran’s leadership is all bark and no bite. “Certain Iranian hardliners spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen,” the man who assassinated Qassem Soleimani wrote, on social media Friday. “They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!”

In the same post, Trump said Israel has already planned its next strikes and urged Iran to “make a deal before there is nothing left.” “JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” he beseeched. “God Bless You All!”

On May 9, Salami issued to Israel what he called “a serious warning.” “If you make one wrong move,” he told Netanyahu, “we will open up the gates of hell on you.” Fast forward five weeks, and Salami’s strategizing with Soleimani and Nasrallah in that glorious war room in the sky.