Long before the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Israeli intelligence had assembled what one official described as an intimate knowledge of Tehran. "We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem," the official told the Financial Times. "And when you know a place as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that's out of place."
According to the FT report cited by "Hvylya", this picture was built through three pillars: Unit 8200's signals intelligence, including hacked traffic cameras and penetrated phone networks; human assets recruited by Mossad; and massive volumes of data processed by military intelligence into daily briefs.
A critical tool was social network analysis - a mathematical method used to parse billions of data points and uncover unlikely centers of decision-making gravity. The technique helped identify fresh targets to surveil and kill, feeding what one source described as "an assembly line with a single product: targets."
Tracking individual targets had once required painstaking visual confirmations and manual cross-referencing. But Israel's algorithm-driven data collection had automated much of that work in recent years. For the Khamenei operation, signals intelligence showed the meeting was on schedule, with senior officials heading to the location near Pasteur Street.
Itai Shapira, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserves with 25 years in the intelligence directorate, framed the operational philosophy. "Targeting intelligence is the most essential tactical issue - it is designed to enable a strategy," he said. "If the decision maker decides that someone has to be assassinated, in Israel the culture is: 'We will provide the targeting intelligence.'"
Israel's intelligence capabilities were already on display during the June 2025 war, when more than a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists and high-ranking military officials were assassinated within minutes in an opening salvo. The infrastructure that made that possible - the same hacked cameras, penetrated networks and algorithmic targeting - was now turned on the supreme leader himself.
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