In an interview with Newsmax, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the war with Iran is “beyond the halfway point” and that he believes the regime will “collapse internally” from the sustained pressure of the United States’ and Israel’s attacks on Iran.

When asked about a timetable, Netanyahu clarified that “halfway point” was not a measure of time but of goals, explaining that Israel had achieved about half of those. He added that regime change was not included in Israel’s war aims.

The prime minister said that thousands of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been killed and the operation was “close to finishing [Iran’s] arms industry.”

“I think this regime will collapse internally,” he added. “But at the moment, what we’re doing is just degrading their military capacity, degrading their missile capacity, degrading their nuclear capacity and also weakening them from the inside.”

Netanyahu spoke to U.S. media shortly before the Wall Street Journal broke the story that President Donald Trump mentioned to aides his desire to pull out of the war once “its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks” are achieved, even if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

The strait represents the world’s most vital waterway for shipping oil, and its closure has sent oil prices around the world soaring. The WSJ cited someone from Trump’s “inner circle” as saying that reopening the strait would prolong the war, extending it beyond his preferred timeline of four to six weeks.

Other reporters say that regime change is off the table.

Amit Segal, a Channel 12 News reporter, said that Israel “has given up on the dream of toppling the regime through air power.”

“Israel has become convinced that Trump may try to end the war soon, and therefore shifted most of its airstrikes from targeting the destabilisation of the Iranian regime to inflicting severe damage on its military,” he added.

“Regime change in Iran is now off the table, as the opposition is not organised and is successfully repressed, sources tell me,” reported Jake Wallis Simons, former editor of the Jewish Chronicle and podcast host of The Brink.

“Israeli targeting is therefore shifting from regime repression apparatus to its military capabilities. Looks like this thing will end with a deal after all. One Israeli source says: ‘I believe we are in a better place, but it’s not a win,'” he concluded.