As the war with Iran continues, Israel continues to kill Iran’s elite. This is how they do it.

Since the US and Israel launched their strikes on Iran at the end of February, the Israeli military has announced the killing of many Iranian officials, from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, to the spokesman of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Friday.

Israel says these strikes are intelligence-led strikes.

Intelligence that reveals the locations of people who are targeted falls into two distinct categories, according to Glen Segell, an Israel-based academic and political analyst with a background in operations and information security.

The first phase is “where you actually have an informant on the ground relaying information to say this is the person’s current location, and the second is going to be some form of electronic tracking, whether it’s by cell phone or landline or even satellite or drone surveillance,” Segell said. “If you look at the situation in Iran, there are many people on the ground reporting to each other.”

Segell told CBS News that, in addition to informants, Israel gathers intelligence in Iran in cooperation with allies, “including Iran’s neighbors, including the United States and various NATO sources. You can also monitor the monitoring of other countries on Iran. For example, the communication between Russia and Iran. So it becomes a much bigger picture of what is happening.”

He also said there are “numerous” domestic opposition groups inside Iran that help provide information on the whereabouts of targets and equipment.

It is a problem in the Iranian regime that the new leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei may have addressed on Friday, saying in a statement posted on social media that “security must be removed from internal and external enemies” of the Islamic Republic.

But Israel can’t do the exact same intelligence gathering in Iran that it does elsewhere, Segell told CBS News, because of the country.

“The distances involved make it very difficult for a small country like Israel to do the kind of intelligence that it does in Gaza. In Gaza, it’s a neighborhood and there’s a lot of flow of individuals between the two sides. So, I would say that Israel is actually looking for other sources, but the other sources are very good, very good, and they also consider Iran as a major figure, in a big conversation.”

One of those sources, Segell said, is Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia is probably the biggest collector of intelligence on what’s going on in Iran, especially behind Iran launched drones against Saudi oil fields a few years ago,” he said.

Regardless of how the intelligence was gathered, “it was the Israelis who did most of that campaign against Iranian officials,” Mark Cancian, a retired US colonel and senior adviser to the Department of Defense and Security for CSIS, told CBS News.

He said to carry out these murders, “you have to know where [the targets] they arrived on time. You won’t know where they are and hit them after three hours, because they will be gone. You have to have a very short period of time, what they call the ‘kill chain,’ from the time your sources report that the target is in a certain location and the time you can strike.”

The attack could take the form of a “missile launch, it could be a surface-to-air plane or something like that. But that’s what fast communication you need, and the Israelis, Iran, have sources on the ground and they know how to do that.”

Cancian said Israel carried out many targeted strikes on Iranian officials in part because “their intelligence is so much better. They can stop this series of killings in such a way that [the U.S.] I don’t know.”

But he said it also has to do with how the US and Israel have “divided the war, at least geographically. We’re doing what the Pentagon calls the ‘southern front,’ which is the coastal base and the southeastern part of the country. [Iran]. And Israel makes up the northern and western part of the land.

What that means, retired four-star US Army Gen. Joseph Votel told CBS News, “right now the United States is very focused on targeting down the coast, and it certainly has to do with the Straits of Hormuz. That’s probably less of a concern for the Israelis … They continue to focus, I think, on leadership. Disrupting leadership.”

Segell said Israel’s focus on eliminating Iranian military and intelligence leaders hinges on the hope that “the person who replaces him is more rational … He hopes that the person who replaces him will say, ‘Let’s talk, let’s negotiate, let’s have negotiations, find a way out of this.’ And in most cases, it does. I mean, if you take out the terrorist leader, you’ll find that things get a lot better… The organization is still there, because it has a vision, but the person who takes over is not that powerful. We have seen this with al-Qaeda. We see this with ISIS. And this was also a goal in terms of getting Nasrallah out of Hezbollah.”

“This was also the idea of ​​removing the ayatollah,” Segell said, adding that in his view, the IRGC continues to hold a lot of power in Tehran, “that’s why [we see] This is a massive killing against the military leadership, intelligence officials, various people involved in the launch of ballistic missiles and so on. And as soon as the Iranians reach that stage of understanding, you may not need a revolution. You can actually have a change in the government’s view of the country without a change in their government, which is perfectly acceptable to everyone.”

But some analysts have raised concerns that the people killed in Iran could be replaced by inexperienced, and less willing to negotiate, subordinates.

Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms told the British newspaper The Independent this week, citing past experience from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, that violence against civilians by authoritarian regimes often escalates after targeted killings by foreign countries.

“The dissolution of the leadership is dangerous,” he told this newspaper. “If you take a leader who likes to hold back to a certain degree and has authority over subordinates, there’s a good chance that, when that person dies, you’re going to see even more extreme tactics.”

And some analysts note that, so far, there has been no public indication of the rift that exists within the rest of the Iranian regime, nor any sign of a major public uprising that will overthrow it.

Some past conflicts that saw the US and its Western allies rely heavily on air power, however, such as the NATO war in Libya in 2011, show that the situation can change suddenly for unpopular governments under the increasing effect of constant attacks.

There are also concerns that the overthrow of a regime that has firmly ruled the country for almost a century, with no new administration waiting to take over, could cause chaos.“

I think the Israelis, their idea is that if they take out enough of the top officials, that eventually those who will come into office will not have the legitimacy and connections that the first leaders had, and that will cause them to agree to a solution in our favor, or to break the regime so that you have different parties,” Cancian told CBS News. “So far, that has not happened, but I think that is their strategy.”