Israel’s losing some people. Not nearly as many as Iran and certainly no top officials, but people all the same.

Nearly two-dozen Israelis have been killed during Tehran’s largely hapless efforts to counter the IDF’s precision-targeted bombardment of strategic Iranian assets and energy infrastructure with what, by comparison, are random missile volleys, each of which depletes the IRGC’s stockpile.

The death toll in Iran as of Monday morning was 225, give or take. So, for every one dead Israeli, Iran’s losing more than 10 people, and the tally on the Iranian side includes at least six top military officials. Over the weekend, the IDF killed the head of Khamenei’s intelligence service, his deputy and, subsequent reports suggested, a pair of lesser officials in the unit.

On Monday, Israel went after the Quds headquarters. If anyone at all (even a secretary or a janitor) was there, the regime’s completely derelict. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the strike killed important people. Time after time this past year, Iran and its proxies have demonstrated an unfathomable penchant for bumbling naivety when it comes to keeping critical personnel in harm’s way.

It’s one thing to discover, after the fact, that Mossad knew the location of a Hezbollah commander’s apartment in Beirut. It’s another thing entirely to ignore the writing on the wall as Iran did last week when, according to sources close to the regime, IRGC commanders failed to take even basic precautions despite knowing Israeli airstrikes were imminent.

Anyway, the Quds “command center,” as the IDF called it, is in some state of disrepair now, which is to say it’s probably charred concrete and billowing smoke. There’s still no official word on whether Esmail Qaani’s alive or dead, and it doesn’t matter. He was ineffective — to the point of being a liability by the time Israel went after the Hezbollah political leadership in September — and if he’s not dead now, he will be before this is over.

Worryingly for locals, Israel started running the Beirut playbook in Tehran on Monday, advising Iranians in one part of the capital to evacuate posthaste because IDF warplanes would be bombing nearby “military infrastructure” “in the coming hours.” Tehran’s not Gaza, but it’s not Menlo Park either, and it’s under siege. People are confused and panicked. Even if the internet’s working, and notwithstanding that everyone has smart phones, Israel’s evacuation warnings won’t reach everyone in a given blast radius. More Iranian civilians will be killed in the days ahead not because they refused to flee, but because they didn’t get the message in time.

Israel’s ambassador to the US on Monday said the IDF has complete freedom of movement through Iran’s airspace. “We have achiev[ed] near-air superiority,” he said. A former Mossad official who spoke to The New York Times claimed Israeli warplanes are operating over Iran more or less as easily as they do over Syria and Lebanon.

That state of affairs speaks rather loudly to the idea that “expert” assessments — which, over the years, suggested sustaining an air campaign over Iran would be difficult, if not impossible — grossly overstated the regime’s air defense capabilities. “Let’s say I have a target that I missed or that I’m not happy with the result,” the Mossad veteran told the Times. “I can go back tomorrow and the day after tomorrow again, again and again.”

As it turns out, those late-October IDF strikes which everyone described at the time as “measured” and “restrained,” were in fact strategic: Israel knocked out Iran’s S-300s. In “better” times, Russia might’ve replaced them, but the Kremlin’s a little busy, and strapped for hardware.

In mid-November — so, just weeks after the IDF damaged or destroyed Iran’s S-300s — Davood Sheikhian, the IRGC’s commander of air defense, said Iran had no need for the newer Russian air defense systems. “Our current systems offer far superior capabilities compared to the S-400,” Sheikhian declared.

He was lying. First because the S-300s aren’t superior, and second because Iran’s were anyway disabled. On Friday, Sheikhian was killed with his boss, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, in an Israeli airstrike.

I said over the weekend the regime’s doomed. I stand by that assessment. As noted in the editorial accompanying Sunday evening’s mailer, disputed reports suggested Israel was ready to assassinate Khamenei on Saturday but held off after Donald Trump expressed his opposition to the plan.

I wonder if that’s true. After all, Israel could’ve killed Khamenei and then just lied to Trump: “The old man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can’t make Shakshouka without breaking a few eggs. What do you want from us?”

Israel said the story was “fake news.” Maybe — and I’m just tossing this out there — The White House leaked that story as a kind of final warning to Khamenei: “Cut a deal right now, or we’ll let Israel kill you. They know where you are.”

Whether Khamenei survives or not, Israel’s crossed the Rubicon. They’ve bombed the nuclear sites, they’re plainly intent on killing everyone from the top three layers of the IRGC command structure (which is the exact same strategy they employed with Hezbollah and Hamas) and now the IDF’s issuing evacuation orders for entire neighborhoods in Tehran.

And they’re just going to… what? Stop? With the current governing structure (i.e., a fervently anti-Zionist, theocratic military dictatorship) intact? Color me skeptical.

My guess is that Israel wants to do to Iran basically what they did to Hezbollah: Wipe out the military leadership three levels deep such that it’s operationally defunct, kill the ideologues who run the show and leave the underlying political structure (in Iran’s case, the legislature) with the hardliners on implicit notice that anyone attempting to reconstitute the former arrangement will be killed.

We’ll see how it goes but, again, it’s difficult for me to understand how the regime in Tehran can come back from this. And I don’t think Israel intends for it to.