For months last year, the toll mounted, with repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles.

The head of the elite special forces, the head of the drone unit, the head of the missile unit. All of them killed. The same for the intelligence chief and the head of the southern front — more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total.

In assassinating numerous top Iranian officers, the Israeli attacks on Iran, which continued Sunday, seemed to be following the script from last fall, when Israel decimated the Lebanese militia and degraded its military arsenal.

“It’s the same playbook that they used with Hezbollah: Let’s eradicate the top leadership,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Also in Gaza, Israel has sought to eliminate Hamas, in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people. Over the past 20 months of fighting, Israel has killed one leader of the Hamas organization after another and tried to destroy its capacity to fire homemade rockets into Israel.

On Saturday night, Israel targeted a meeting of Houthi leadership, including the military chief of staff, according to an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of lack of authorization to discuss operational details. The result was not clear. In May, Israel had threatened to eliminate the head of the Houthis.

All three organizations were long established as Iranian proxy forces, Iran’s first line of defense against Israel if a war erupted. All three are now much diminished, and none of them have responded to the Israeli attack on Iran with anything more than strong verbal condemnations. Nor have the Iran-allied militias in Iraq.

However, the proxy forces are nonstate militias, lacking the muscle to challenge the powerful Israeli military except through guerrilla tactics, analysts noted. Hamas staged an attack against Israel in October 2023, killing more than 1,200, and Hezbollah once drove the Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon after a prolonged occupation.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, with more than 90 million people, is a different story, experts said. It has among the largest 20 armies in the world, with almost one million men under arms. The fact that it was able to lob heavy ballistic missiles into downtown Tel Aviv and elsewhere, even if many were deflected by air defenses, was proof of a far more potent enemy.

Israel’s strikes on Iran’s military infrastructure seem to have reduced the number of missiles Iran could fire back, just as its earlier attacks on Hezbollah did. Both the operations against Iran and Hezbollah were preceded by years of intense intelligence operations, including placing agents on the ground.