Israel yesterday bombed nuclear targets in Iran and Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital overnight, as the week-old air war escalated with no sign yet of an off-ramp.
Following the strike that damaged the Soroka Medical Center in Israel’s southern city of Beersheba, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tehran’s “tyrants” would pay the “full price.”
Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said the military had been instructed to intensify strikes on strategic-related targets in Tehran to eliminate the threat to Israel and destabilize the “Ayatollah regime.”
Photo: Reuters
Netanyahu has said that Israel’s military attacks could result in the toppling of Iran’s leaders, and Israel would do whatever is necessary to remove the “existential threat” posed by Tehran.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has kept the world guessing about whether Israel’s superpower ally would join it in airstrikes.
Israel said it had struck Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites.
Photo: Reuters
A military spokesperson initially said it had also hit Bushehr, site of Iran’s only functioning nuclear power plant, but a spokesperson later said it was a mistake to have said that.
Trump has veered from proposing a swift diplomatic end to the war to suggesting the US might join it, and on Wednesday he said nobody knows what he will do.
A day earlier he mused on social media about killing Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender.
Photo: Majid Asgaripour, West Asia News Agency via Reuters
A week of Israeli air and missile strikes against its major rival has wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military command, damaged its nuclear capabilities and killed hundreds of people, while Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed at least two dozen civilians in Israel.
The Israeli military yesterday said it targeted the Khondab nuclear site near Iran’s central city of Arak overnight, including a partially built heavy-water research reactor.
Heavy-water reactors produce plutonium, which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it had information that the heavy-water research reactor had been hit, but did not contain radioactive material, adding that it had no information that a separate plant there that makes heavy water had been hit.
Israel, which has the most advanced military in the Middle East, has been fighting on several fronts since a Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, triggered the Gaza war. It has severely weakened Iran’s regional allies, the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and bombed Yemen’s Houthis.
The extent of the damage inside Iran from the week-old bombing campaign has become far more difficult to assess in the past few days, with the authorities apparently seeking to prevent panic by limiting information.
Iran has stopped giving updates on the death toll, and state media have ceased showing widespread images of destruction. The Internet has been almost completely shut down. The public has been banned from filming, with the authorities citing a risk of espionage.
Arash, 33, a government employee in Tehran, said a building next to his home in Tehran’s Shahrak-e Gharb neighborhood had been destroyed in the strikes.
“I saw at least three dead children and two women in that building. Is this how Netanyahu plans to ‘liberate’ Iranians? Stay away from our country,” he said by telephone.
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