Mapping strikes in the Israel-Iran conflict
The airstrikes continued for a sixth day amid the most intense faceoff in the history of the Israel-Iran conflict.
The confrontation that began Friday, when Israel launched an air campaign targeting Iran's nuclear program and its military leaders, has since escalated, prompting Donald Trump to consider possible U.S. involvement.
The Israeli strikes in Iran have killed over 200 people and injured hundreds of others, Iran's Health Ministry said Sunday. Human rights groups say the numbers are probably much higher. Iranian media reported explosions and heavy air defense fire in the capital of Tehran and explosions in the northwestern city of Tabriz on Tuesday.
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WIRED
12 minutes ago
- WIRED
What Satellite Images Reveal About the US Bombing of Iran's Nuclear Sites
Brian Barrett Andrew Couts Jun 22, 2025 5:41 PM The US concentrated its attack on Fordow, an enrichment plant built hundreds of feet underground. Aerial photos give important clues about what damage the 'bunker-buster' bombs may have caused. Six impact craters are visible at Iran's Fordow nuclear site the day after a US bombing campaign. Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters When the United States bombed Iran in the early hours of Sunday local time, it targeted three facilities central to the country's nuclear ambitions: the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, the Natanz nuclear facility, and the Isfahan nuclear technology center. Newly released satellite images show the impact of the attack—at least, what can be seen on the ground. The brunt of the bombing focused on Fordow, where US forces dropped a dozen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators as part of its 'Midnight Hammer' operation. These 30,000-pound 'bunker-buster' bombs are designed to penetrate as deep as 200 feet into the earth before detonating. The Fordow complex is approximately 260 feet underground. That gap accounts for some of the uncertainty over exactly how much damage the Fordow site sustained. President Donald Trump shared a post on his Truth Social platform following the attack that declared 'Fordow is gone,' and later said in a televised address that 'Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.' His own military, however, was slightly more circumspect about the outcome in a Sunday morning briefing. 'It would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there,' said general Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Satellite imagery can inherently only tell you so much about a structure that is situated so far below the surface of the earth. But before and after imagery is the best publicly available information about the bombing's impact. A satellite image from before the US bombing of Fordow. Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters A satellite image from after the US bombing of Fordow. Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters 'What we see are six craters, two clusters of three, where there were 12 massive ordinance penetrators dropped,' says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. 'The idea is you hit the same spot over and over again to kind of dig down.' The specific locations of those craters matter as well, says Joseph Rodgers, deputy director and fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Project on Nuclear Issues. While the entrance tunnels to the Fordow complex appear not to have been targeted, US bombs fell on what are likely ventilation shafts, based on satellite images of early construction at the site. 'The reason that you'd want to target a ventilation shaft is that it's a more direct route to the core components of the underground facility,' says Rodgers. That direct route is especially important given how deep underground Fordow was built. The US military relies on "basically a computer model' of the facility, says Lewis, which tells them 'how much pressure it could take before it would severely damage everything inside and maybe even collapse the facility.' By bombarding specific targeted areas with multiple munitions, the US didn't need bombs capable of penetrating the full 260 feet to cause substantial damage. 'They're probably not trying to get all the way into the facility. They're probably just trying to get close enough to it and crush it with a shockwave,' Lewis says. 'If you send a big enough shockwave through that facility, it's going to kill people, break stuff, damage the integrity of it.' A closer satellite view shows the impact craters and a nearby support structures. Photo: MAXAR Technologies/Handout via Reuters It's also notable what US bombs didn't hit. The oblong white building in satellite images of Fordow is likely key support infrastructure for the facility, potentially providing everything from air conditioning to backup power generation. 'The US didn't even bother targeting it. That clearly indicates to me that they weren't trying to temporarily shut down the facility,' Rodgers says. 'We targeted these apparent ventilation shafts so that we could structurally destroy or do as much damage as we could rather than temporarily try to shut down Fordow.' Once a long-held secret, the Iranian government officially acknowledged Fordow's existence in 2009. The facility is believed to be capable of enriching uranium to 60 percent. From there, experts say, it can relatively quickly be further enriched to 90 percent, the level needed for constructing nuclear weapons. The US bombing came more than a week after Israel launched a series of attacks on Iran with the stated goal of stopping Tehran's nuclear program. Israel lacks munitions capable of reaching deeply buried facilities like Fordow, which appears to be why the US entered the fray. It is currently unclear how impactful this weekend's bombing campaign will be on Iran's long-term nuclear ambitions. Lewis says the strike was 'tactically brilliant, but strategically incomplete,' because Iranians still have nuclear material that can be enriched to weapons-grade levels. 'They still have underground facilities where they could do that, and they still have the ability to produce centrifuge components, so they can still make the centrifuges for the facilities.' Further complicating the assessment of the Fordow damage is that satellite images from earlier last week show a significant amount of activity at the site, including over a dozen dump trucks going to and from it. 'I think there were some defense operations going on,' says Rodgers. 'They probably brought those dump trucks in to try to seal off the tunnel entrances, to help protect against attacks.' There's also the possibility that Iran was able to move nuclear material out of the facility before the attack, limiting the bombing's usefulness. Ultimately, Iran's nuclear program has likely 'been damaged,' Lewis says. 'It has not been eliminated.' Additional reporting by Lily Hay Newman.
Washington Post
19 minutes ago
- Washington Post
MAGA is divided over Trump's decision to bomb Iran. Will it last?
Stephen K. Bannon sounded uncertain as he absorbed President Donald Trump's strike on Iran and his national address explaining it. 'An interesting talk,' Bannon said warily on his 'War Room' podcast, adding that he was not quite sure that it was what 'a lot of MAGA wanted to hear.'
CNN
28 minutes ago
- CNN
Early assessments raise questions over whether US destroyed bulk of enriched Iranian nuclear material
President Donald Trump declared that Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities were 'completely and totally obliterated' following this weekend's air strikes, but the US appears to have held back its most powerful bombs against one of the three facilities included in the operation, raising questions about whether it finished the job. In Isfahan, where nearly 60% of Iran's stockpile of already-enriched nuclear material is believed to be stored underground, according to a US official, a US submarine hit the site with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said Sunday. But unlike the other two Iranian facilities targeted in the operation, B-2 bombers did not drop massive 'bunker-buster' bombs on the Isfahan facility, multiple sources told CNN. The damage to the facility appears to be restricted to aboveground structures, according to Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who has closely reviewed commercial satellite imagery of the strike sites. Even if the US was successful in destroying Iran's facility at Fordow — another underground site that housed centrifuges needed to enrich uranium, which the US hit with 12 bunker busters — the obvious survival of Isfahan has raised questions about whether Trump achieved his stated goal of 'a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's No. 1 state sponsor of terror.' 'This is an incomplete strike,' Lewis said. 'If this is all there is, here's what left: the entire stockpile of 60% uranium, which was stored at Isfahan in tunnels that are untouched.' A satellite image taken by Airbus shows significant damage to the Isfahan site and signs that the underground portion of the facility was hit, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, which analyzed the image. But there are layers of tunnels at the facility, so it's unclear how far the damage goes. When reached for comment, the office of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told CNN, 'We do not have anything additional to share at this time.' Vice President JD Vance told ABC News' 'This Week' on Sunday that the administration plans to 'work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that's one of the things we're going to have conversations with the Iranians about.' 'What we know is they no longer have the capacity to turn that stockpile of highly enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium, and that was really the goal here,' Vance added.'Enriching uranium up to the point of a nuclear weapon — that was what the president put a stop to last night.' But multiple sources familiar with the latest US intelligence on both sites and the Trump administration's objectives in launching the strikes told CNN that Isfahan's underground facilities — which likely remain intact — must be addressed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And on Thursday, the UN nuclear watchdog said that Iran was building a new nuclear enrichment plant at Isfahan that Tehran has said it will soon bring online. The Iranians 'have the material, they still have the capacity to make centrifuges, and they still have at least one giant underground centrifuge facility where they can install their centrifuges,' Lewis added. 'So, it's just not done.' It remains unclear why US military planners decided against using bunker busters — officially known as Massive Ordinance Penetrators, or MOP, on Isfahan. The bombs are designed to penetrate deep underground, and sources say the tunnels under Isfahan are even deeper than those at the other two locations. But even before the strikes were carried out, some US officials had raised pointed doubts about whether the MOPs was even capable of destroying the deeper tunnels. While there were some questions about whether US bunker busters were capable of destroying the underground portions of Fordow — which had been the focus of the administration's planning for the operation — multiple sources familiar with the discussions told CNN the likelihood of successfully doing the same at Isfahan was an even bigger question. At Fordow, the depth of the facility almost certainly requires several MOPs that impact in nearly the exact same spot, something that would normally be a tall order except that Iran's air and missile defenses are functionally disabled, one US official familiar with the matter said. But, 'Isfahan is a challenge,' another source familiar with the latest US intelligence told CNN. 'The tunnels at Isfahan are just so deep,' Lewis said. The MOP was designed to handle a site like Fordow. 'If they put something deeper, we either gotta design a new bomb or we have to use a nuclear weapon.'
