Issued on: 02/03/2026 - 16:28Modified: 02/03/2026 - 16:31

As the US and Israel wage war on Iran, Israeli opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid told FRANCE 24 he backs the current offensive, despite being "Netanyahu's biggest rival". Calling it "a just war," he argued that Tehran has "miscalculated" by attacking the Gulf states and that this has become "a war of the entire region against Iran."

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"There's no ambiguity about the difference between good and evil here. This is us trying to make sure that Iran does not become a nuclear power," Lapid said.

Asked whether this was a war of choice, he was categorical: "Of course not – unless the choice is to wait until they fire at us a shower of ballistic missiles, or use against us an atomic bomb (...) We needed to go out there and prevent those things from happening before they are happening."

Iran's decision to strike Gulf neighbours hosting US military bases – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait – has backfired, Lapid argued.

The Iranian regime has itself "created a regional coalition against Iran," he said, adding that the Saudis and the Emiratis "are not going to sit on their hands when somebody is firing upon their own people."

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Asked about what comes next, Lapid acknowledged that regime change was "up to the Iranian people", while admitting that "very rarely" does a change of regime occur through air strikes.

"Nothing can be worse than what we had so far," he said, referring to the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli strike on Feburary 28. "It can only get better."

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