Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expressing frustrated that a Mossad-backed plan to ignite a popular revolt inside Iran has not come to fruition, according to a report published by The New York Times, citing current and former American and Israeli intelligence officials.

The plan, presented to Netanyahu by Mossad chief David Barnea in the lead-up to the war, envisioned that a targeted assassination campaign against Iranian leadership would create an opening for the agency to “galvanize the Iranian opposition” — fomenting riots and acts of resistance through covert intelligence operations, and ultimately triggering the regime’s collapse.

Barnea reportedly presented a version of the plan to the White House as well, and Netanyahu used it as part of his case to bring President Donald Trump into the conflict.

That vision has not taken shape. Iran’s leaders have dug in, its security forces remain intact, and the streets have stayed quiet — much as U.S. officials had privately predicted. In one early wartime security meeting, Netanyahu “complained that the plan was not working,” the Times reported, and expressed concern that Trump “could decide to halt the campaign at any moment.”

American and Israeli officials now view regime change as unlikely in the near term. Proposed efforts to mobilize Kurdish militias from outside Iran to help bring down the government have also stalled without advancing into action.

Analysts point to two key factors suppressing potential unrest. Before the war, mass protests inside Iran were crushed in a bloody government crackdown that killed thousands. And Trump, in a speech at the war’s outset, urged Iranians to take to the streets only after shielding themselves from the bombing campaign — an instruction many took as reason to stay home.

Nate Swanson, a former member of the Trump administration’s Iran negotiating team, told the Times he had never seen a “serious plan” for fomenting revolt. “A lot of protesters are not coming into the street because they’ll get shot,” he said. “They’re going to get slaughtered.” He estimated that roughly 60 percent of the Iranian public — people who dislike the regime but are unwilling to risk their lives opposing it — would remain on the sidelines.

The shift in expectations has been quietly reflected in both leaders’ public messaging. Netanyahu has said several times this month that he cannot guarantee the Iranian public will rise up, though he stressed at a press conference last week that one war aim remains “creating the conditions for the Iranian people to grasp their freedom, to control their destiny.”

Israeli officials insist hope is not lost. “I think that we need boots on the ground but they’ve got to be Iranian boots, and I think they’re coming,” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, told CNN on Sunday. “What we have to focus on now is degrading to the point where they have no power left in this regime.”

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