Off Ramps?
The Weekend Edition.
1. The Institute for the Study of War:
The combined US-Israeli force killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and it is unclear who is currently ruling Iran. US President Donald Trump confirmed on February 28 that Khamenei was killed. The Iranian constitution stipulates that the President, the Judiciary Chief, and a member of the Guardian Council will take over the responsibilities of the Supreme Leader until Iran’s Assembly of Experts convenes to select a new leader. Khamenei was reportedly making plans prior to the current conflict for who he wanted to rule Iran in the event of his death, however.
The combined force conducted nearly 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours of its campaign, according to an unspecified US official speaking to Fox News. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated that it struck 500 Iranian targets. The regime’s internet shutdown has almost certainly limited the amount of information about US and Israeli strikes coming out of Iran. ISW-CTP’s strike data, therefore, only reflects a portion of the total amount of US and Israeli strikes.
The United States and Israel are pursuing several lines of effort to achieve their stated campaign objectives: 1) suppressing Iranian air defenses, 2) degrading Iranian retaliatory capabilities, and 3) disrupting Iranian command-and-control.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) stated that Iran’s retaliation in response to the joint US-Israeli air campaign has not inflicted US casualties or caused meaningful damage to US military installations used to conduct offensive operations against Iran. CENTCOM said that US forces have successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Iran has not attacked vessels in the Strait of Hormuz at the time of this writing, despite warning vessels against transiting through the strait. A European Union official told Reuters on February 28 that the IRGC warned vessels transiting through the strait that “no ship is allowed to pass the Strait of Hormuz.” ISW-CTP has not observed any reports of Iranian naval forces taking kinetic measures to harass or attack vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
Several members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, including Hezbollah and the Houthis, have condemned the US and Israeli strikes in Iran but have not conducted retaliatory attacks as of ISW-CTP’s 04:00 PM ET data cutoff. These Axis of Resistance members could decide at any time to attack the United States or Israel in response to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, however.
The Islamic Resistance of Iraq, which is a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, claimed on February 24 that it conducted 16 unspecified “operations” with “dozens” of drones targeting “enemy” bases in Iraq and the region. The Iraqi Joint Operations Command also reported on February 28 that Iraqi air defenses intercepted nine drones that unspecified actors launched at Iraqi military sites in Dhi Qar and Basra provinces. No group has claimed responsibility for these attacks at the time of this writing. (Source: understandingwar.org)
2. The Ayatollah Alireza Arafi was appointed as a jurist member of the leadership council tasked with temporarily fulfilling the Supreme Leader’s role, the Iranian ISNA agency reported. This profile of Alireza Arafi is worth reading. (Sources: haaretz.com, mei.edu)
3. Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said on social media that Iran would hit the U.S. and Israel on Sunday with unprecedented force. “Yesterday, Iran fired missiles at the United States and Israel and they did hurt,” he said in a post on X. “Today, we will hit them with a force that they have never experienced before.” Larijani has emerged as Iran’s new military strongman after the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior director at the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (Source: wsj.com)
4. Times of Israel:
US President Donald Trump threatened early Sunday morning to hit Iran with unprecedented force after Tehran warned it would step up attacks in retaliation for the killing of its supreme leader and fired successive volleys of rockets at Israel for a second consecutive day Sunday.
In Iran, the Israel Defense Forces continued to carry out strikes on military sites, including a massive blast in Tehran. The army announced that it had dropped over 1,000 pieces of munition in just over 24 hours of attacks that kicked off Saturday morning with a strike that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials.
“Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social network. “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!” (Sources: timesofisrael.com, truthsocial.com)
5. Axios:
President Trump told Axios on Saturday that he has several “off ramps” from Operation Epic Fury, the extraordinary U.S. military campaign against Iran that he launched early Saturday morning. “I can go long and take over the whole thing, or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians: ‘See you again in a few years if you start rebuilding [your nuclear and missile programs],” Trump said in a five-minute phone interview from Mar-a-Lago. “In any case, it will take them several years to recover from this attack,” he predicted.
The comments offer the first real window into Trump’s thinking about how this ends — and suggest he’s still open to a diplomatic solution, even after U.S.-Iran nuclear talks collapsed in Geneva. A short operation followed by new ultimatums would be a dramatically different outcome than the regime change that some U.S. and Israeli officials have described as the goal. Trump is facing domestic pressure, including from his MAGA base, to avoid a prolonged Middle East intervention. (Source: axios.com)
6. Jerusalem Post:
Having already dropped 1,200 bombs on Iran, the IDF, along with the US Air Force, is close to achieving air supremacy in Iranian airspace.
This shift could mark an increased capability for Israel and the US to help anti-regime protesters by targeting specific regime forces that have been used to oppress and mass murder them for the last two months and during prior rounds of protests in recent decades.
In June 2025, it took several days for the air force to achieve such supremacy, which signifies that essentially Iran’s anti-aircraft defenses have been so battered that Israeli aircraft and drones can hover over target areas for extended periods without worrying as much about whether air defenses might target them.
Once this is achieved, the ability of the air force to target a wider range of targets constantly exponentially increases.
In light of that trend, as of 10:15 a.m. on Sunday, the air force launched its first major wave attacking specifically Iranian regime targets in Tehran. (Source: jpost.com)
7. An enormous explosion rocked Iran’s capital earlier today as the Israeli military said it was targeting the heart of the city. Earlier, Iran fired missiles at an ever-widening list of targets in Israel and Gulf Arab states in retaliation for the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by the United States and Israel. The blast in Tehran — whose target was not immediately clear — sent a huge plume of smoke into the sky and shook the ground. It appeared centered in neighborhoods home to the country’s police headquarters and Iranian state television, as well as Tehran’s Revolutionary Court and a Defense Ministry building. (Source: apnews.com)
8. Loud blasts were heard in Dubai and Qatari capital Doha for a second day (today) and Oman was hit for the first time as retaliatory strikes on neighbouring Gulf states in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic widened. Iran had said it would target U.S. bases in the region but it has hit a range of other targets across Gulf cities. (Source: reuters.com)
9. The U.K. Maritime Trade Operations agency said Saturday it had received multiple reports from vessels operating in the Gulf that they had been notified of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure. This came after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, and Tehran said it had closed navigation. There was no immediate confirmation from Iran. The strait is the world’s most vital oil export route, linking major Gulf producers – including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates – to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. (Source; haaretz.com)
10. Iranians gathered in Tehran and other cities overnight to celebrate that Khamenei had been killed. From Tehran, two residents described scenes unfolding in their neighborhoods: large crowds of men and women dancing and cheering, drivers honking horns and fireworks as loud Persian dance music filled the streets. Residents watched from windows and balconies and joined in chants of “freedom, freedom”. Sahar, a 27-year-old Tehran resident, said that upon hearing the confirmation of Khamenei’s death she screamed, hugged her mother and friends, danced and cursed him loudly. “The entire neighborhood was shouting for joy,” she said. A month earlier she and others had been among protesters who took to the streets against the government, during which security forces beat her and her mother with batons, dragged them on roads and fired tear gas into their eyes. “Khamenei went to hell,” a man shouted from his rooftop in a video cited by BBC Persian. (Source: thetimes.com)
11. The remarkably swift removal of Iran’s supreme leader reflected the close coordination and intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel in the run-up to the attack, and the deep intelligence the countries had developed on Iranian leadership, especially in the wake of last year’s 12-day war. The operation also showed the failure of Iran’s leaders to take adequate precautions to avoid exposing themselves at a time where both Israel and the U.S. sent clear signals that they were preparing for war. The C.I.A. passed its intelligence, which offered “high fidelity” on Ayatollah Khamenei’s position, to Israel, according to people briefed on the intelligence….Israel, using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders. (Source: nytimes.com)
12. David Ignatius:
A Bahraini security adviser told me Saturday afternoon that 14 Iranian drones had struck the port facility that’s home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. In videos from the scene, you can hear the eerie mosquito buzz of a Shahed UAV and then see the burst of flame as it hit its target. That kind of attack usually strikes the other side in wars that America fights. The security adviser said that Bahrainis were puzzled why U.S. forces seemed powerless to stop the drones. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
13. Russia has said it would accept proposals for Ukraine’s postwar security guarantees, according to President Zelensky’s chief of staff. Kyrylo Budanov said in an interview aired on Ukrainian television: “At the last talks, the Russian side said, for example, that they would accept the security guarantees offered to Ukraine by the United States.” The agreement has not yet been confirmed by the Kremlin, but it could signal the biggest breakthrough in ceasefire negotiations since the start of the full-scale invasion four years ago. (Source: thetimes.com)
14. What sparks the biological changes that come with age?
(I)n a study published in Science, researchers at The Rockefeller University have created the most comprehensive atlas yet of how aging affects thousands of cell subtypes across 21 mammalian tissues. By profiling nearly 7 million individual cells from mice at three different ages, the team identified which cells are most vulnerable to aging and what drives their decline.
“Our goal was to understand not just what changes with aging, but why,” says Junyue Cao, who heads the Laboratory of Single Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics. “By mapping both cellular and molecular changes, we can identify what drives aging. That opens the door to interventions that target the aging process itself.”
Among the most surprising takeaways from the new study was that many age-related changes are synchronized across organs, and that nearly half of all changes are different between males and females. (Sources: science.org, rockefeller.edu. Italics mine.)
15. Scientists at Texas A&M are turning an everyday pick-me-up into a high-tech medical switch. By combining caffeine with CRISPR gene editing, researchers have created a system that allows cells to be programmed in advance — and then activated simply by consuming a small dose of caffeine from coffee, chocolate, or soda. The approach, known as chemogenetics, lets scientists precisely turn gene-editing activity on and off inside targeted cells, including powerful immune T cells that can fight cancer. (Sources: sciencedaily.com, stories.tamu.edu)
Quick Links: Richard Haass on the war: A baker’s dozen worth of initial thoughts. Wall Street Journal Editorial Page: The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran that began Saturday morning is a necessary act of deterrence against a regime that is the world’s foremost promoter of terrorism. Trump threatens criminal action against AI giant Anthropic. Anthropic to sue Trump administration after AI lab is labelled security risk. Chinese team’s flexible organic battery could change the face of wearables. Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. The week the dreaded AI jobs wipeout got real. The Wall Street Journal on how the Skydance Paramount-Warner Bros. deal went down. The newly merged company will now need all the cash flow it can muster to service a substantial debt load (estimated at $100 billion). For what it’s worth, we agree that Netflix emerges as the winner overall. On the other hand: Analysis from Equilar suggests the sale to Paramount values Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s shares and outstanding equity at approximately $790.5 million. So maybe he’s the biggest winner by a country mile.