Israel kills nuclear scientists, strikes sites in Iran: Who did it target?
Two key Iranian nuclear scientists are among six scientists killed in Israeli strikes on sites in Iran on Friday.
More than 200 Israeli Air Force fighter jets hit more than 100 nuclear, military and infrastructure targets across Iran, including its main nuclear facility in Natanz.
The Israeli army said it had damaged the Natanz uranium enrichment site's underground structures, including a multistorey enrichment hall with centrifuges, electrical rooms and additional supporting infrastructure.
It added that 'vital infrastructure at the site that allows for its continuous functioning and the continued advancement of the Iranian regime's project to obtain nuclear weapons was attacked'.
This came just a day after United States President Donald Trump said his administration was 'fairly close to a pretty good agreement' with Iran and that military action 'could blow it' and lead to a 'massive conflict'.
However, on Thursday, Washington also hinted at the possibility of an imminent escalation when it announced it was partially evacuating its embassy in Iraq and had authorised 'the voluntary departure' of dependants of US personnel from other locations across the Middle East.
On Thursday, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), declared that Iran had not complied with its nonproliferation obligations for the first time in almost 20 years. Tehran maintains that its nuclear programme focuses on peaceful purposes and is not developing weapons.
The spokesperson for Iran's armed forces, Abolfazl Shekarchi, warned that Israel would pay a 'heavy price' for its attacks, which also killed three senior military figures, including Mohammad Bagheri, the country's highest-ranking official.In total, six Iranian scientists have been killed in the Israeli strikes.
Iran's Tasnim news agency described two of the victims, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, as 'major nuclear scientists'.
Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist, was the president of the Islamic Azad University of Iran. He was added to the US Department's Entity List of actors 'acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests' in March 2020.
The building housing the residence of Tehranchi and several other Iranian scientists was severely damaged in Friday morning's attacks.
Abbasi was a former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and a former member of the Iranian parliament. He held a PhD in nuclear physics and had conducted nuclear research at the defence ministry.
In 2010, Abbasi survived twin blasts in Tehran that killed fellow nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari. Iran blamed Israel for the incident, although Israel neither confirmed nor denied the assassination.
The news agency identified the other slain scientists as:
Abdolhamid Minouchehr, holder of a PhD in nuclear engineering, who served as dean of the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University and conducted extensive research on improving the efficiency and safety of nuclear plants
Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari, professor of nuclear engineering at Shahid Beheshti University
Amir Hossein Faghihi, who belonged to the engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University and previously served as vice president of the AEOI and head of the Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute
Motallebzadeh, a nuclear scientist who was targeted and killed along with his wife
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the so-called 'Operation Rising Lion' had struck Iran's main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz.
The IAEA said there was no increase in radiation levels at the site following the strike. No casualties have been reported.
Natanz, a heavily fortified facility located outside the Shia holy city of Qom, houses an underground fuel enrichment plant and an above-ground pilot fuel enrichment plant.
The IAEA said it had not received reports of strikes or damage at other key Iranian nuclear sites, including a large nuclear technology centre on the outskirts of Isfahan, a nuclear power plant in Bushehr and a fuel enrichment plant in Fordow.
More sites could be targeted in the coming days, however. Netanyahu said the military operation aimed to 'roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival' and would 'continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.'
The killing of the six Iranian scientists is only the latest in a long line of assassinations blamed on Israel.
In 2020, top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead by a remote-controlled machine gun in the town of Absard, east of Tehran. Iranian authorities blamed the assassination on Israel, which again neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, an academic who worked at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was killed in 2012 by a magnetic bomb stuck to his car as he was driving in Tehran.
The explosion occurred on the second anniversary of the killing of Masoud Ali Mohammadi, another nuclear scientist killed by a remote-control bomb.
In November 2010, Majid Shahriari, a top nuclear scientist and a member of the nuclear engineering department of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, was killed in one of two explosions in Tehran. The then-president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused 'Western governments' and Israel of being behind the assassination.
The second blast caught Abbasi, the scientist killed in Israel's attacks on Friday, and his wife. Both were injured but survived the event.Yes. While Israel has never used missiles in direct attacks on Iran's nuclear military sites before, it has targeted Iran's primary nuclear facility at Natanz by other means.
In April 2021, Iran accused Israel of causing an explosion and power cut at the nuclear site that damaged centrifuges in its underground fuel enrichment plant. Ali Akbar Salehi, who headed the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said the attack was an act of 'nuclear terrorism' but did not specify who was responsible.
The same site was also damaged by an explosion in August 2020. Iran accused Israel of 'sabotage' on that occasion, but it did not specify what had caused the blast.
Israel has stepped up its cultivation of human intelligence sources inside Iran, and has improved its technological capabilities for spying with the help of European and US satellites.
Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor in critical security studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli attack was a demonstration of its progress in this sector.
'The Israeli side have already sent the message clearly to Tehran that we know where your leaders are, we know who they are, we have accurate intelligence, and we have the technological means to reach inside Iran,' he said.
'The significance is not about the type of weapons used, but the intelligence success that Israel has been able to achieve inside Iran,' he said.
Al Jazeera correspondent Dorsa Jabbari said Iran's civilian population had been caught off guard by the latest escalation. 'They have not seen anything like this since the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988,' she said. 'These scenes are very new to the new generation in Iran. It's something they've never seen before and something they thought they'd never see.'
Jabbari added that the scope and scale of Friday's attacks by Israel were much greater than the tit-for-tat missile attacks the two countries engaged in last year, when Israel targeted non-nuclear sites such as military facilities and infrastructure.
'This was completely by surprise. And the scale of this attack is much larger and broader,' she said. 'It's not a one-off. This is not a strategic in-and-out kind of attack, they are continuing as we speak, and we have no idea when they will end.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘Always a peacemaker': How Trump decided to hold off on striking Iran
By most accounts, President Donald Trump's attention for the past week has been consumed by the spiraling crisis playing out between Israel and Iran. In between meetings in Canada on Monday, he peppered aides for constant updates. He has spent more time in the basement Situation Room this week than at any point so far in his new presidency. So it was somewhat jarring Wednesday when the president emerged from the South Portico — not to provide an update on his crisis consultations, but to oversee the installation of two nearly 100-foot flagpoles. 'These are the best poles anywhere in the country, or in the world, actually. They're tapered. They have the nice top,' the president told a clutch of reporters and workmen. 'It's a very exciting project to me.' The break from his Iran meetings lasted about an hour, a moment for the president to literally touch grass on the South Lawn amid the most consequential period of decision-making of his term so far. A day later, the president decided not to decide. He dictated a statement to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing he would hold off ordering a strike on Iran for up to two weeks to see if a diplomatic resolution was possible. The decision was revealed after another meeting in the Situation Room, where the president has spent much of this week reviewing attack plans and quizzing officials about the potential consequences of each. After steadily ratcheting up his martial rhetoric – including issuing an urgent warning to evacuate the 10 million residents of Iran's capital – Trump's deferment provides the president some breathing room as he continues to work through options presented by his military officials over the past several days. It also allows more time for the divergent factions of his own party to make their case directly to the president for and against a strike, as they have been urgently doing since it became clear Trump was seriously considering dropping bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. The president has refused to pick a side in public and spent the last week alternating between militaristic threats issued on social media and private concerns that a military strike he orders could drag the US into prolonged war. Around the Situation Room table, he has relied principally on his CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine to discuss his options, according to people familiar with the matter. His foreign envoy Steve Witkoff has been corresponding with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to determine if room exists to restart the diplomacy that had been deadlocked before Israel began its campaign last week. Other officials have been publicly sidelined. Twice this week, Trump has dismissed assessments previously offered by his Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about the state of Iran's program to develop a nuclear weapon. Gabbard testified in March that the US intelligence community had assessed Iran was not building such a weapon; Trump flatly and publicly disputed that Friday. 'Well then, my intelligence community is wrong,' Trump told reporters in New Jersey, asking the reporter who in the intelligence community had said that. Told that it was Gabbard, Trump responded, 'She's wrong.' Yet as he weighs taking action that could have consequences for years to come, Trump appears to be relying mostly on his own instincts, which this week told him to hit pause on ordering a strike that could alter global geopolitics for years to come. When top national security officials told Trump during a meeting at Camp David earlier this month that Israel was prepared to imminently strike inside Iran, it wasn't necessarily a surprise. Trump's advisers had been preparing for months for the possibility Israel could seize upon a moment of Iranian weakness — its regional proxies have been decimated over the past year — to launch a direct assault. Trump's team arrived at Camp David having already drawn up options for potential US involvement. According to people familiar with the matter, his advisers resolved differences between themselves in advance before presenting possible plans to the president. From the mountainside presidential retreat, Trump also spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told the president he intended to begin a campaign in Iran imminently. Ten days later, with the Israeli campaign now in full swing, Trump was meeting in Canada with top American allies from the Group of 7, who hoped to decipher from him what the American plan was going forward. In closed-door meetings, leaders from Europe tried to ascertain whether Trump was inclined to order up a US strike on Fordow, the underground nuclear facility that has been the focus of attention for American war planners, western officials said. They also tried to convince a begrudging Trump to sign on to a joint statement, which urged that 'the resolution of the Iranian crisis leads to a broader de-escalation of hostilities in the Middle East.' Trump did not reveal his hand, either in private sessions with individual leaders or over dinner at the Kananaskis Country Golf Course, the western officials said. Instead, he left the summit early, leaving his counterparts in the Canadian Rockies and returning to Washington to deal with the matter himself. By midweek, with only vague signs from Iran that it was willing to restart talks, Trump's patience appeared to wearing thin for finding a diplomatic solution. And many of his allies believed he was on the verge of ordering a strike on Iran. 'It's very late, you know?' he said at Wednesday's flagpole event, the heat causing his forehead to glisten. 'It's very late to be talking.' In private meetings that day, Trump appeared convinced of the necessity of taking out the Fordow facility, according to people familiar with the conversations. And he said in public only the United States has the firepower to do it. 'We are the only ones who have the capability to do it, but that doesn't mean I am going to do it,' Trump said after coming back inside from his flag raising. 'I have been asked about it by everybody but I haven't made a decision.' He was speaking from the Oval Office, where he'd gathered players from the Italian soccer club Juventus to stand behind him. They mostly acted as a fidgeting backdrop to Trump's question-and-answer session on his Iran decision-making. At one point, Trump turned to the players amid a discussion of the B-2 stealth bomber — the only jet that could carry a bunker-busting bomb to destroy Iran's underground enrichment facility. 'You can be stealthy — you'll never lose, right?' he asked the team members, none of whom responded. 'It was a bit weird. When he started talking about the politics with Iran and everything, it's kind of, like… I just want to play football, man,' one of the players, Timothy Weah, said afterward. Amid the string of events, Trump continued to weigh the choices in front of him, and remained worried about a longer-term war. And he continued to receive messages from all sides of his political coalition, which has been divided over the wisdom of launching a strike that could embroil the US in a war for years to come. He's taken repeated calls from GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice in support of striking Iran who described the president as 'very focused, very calm' after a Tuesday night phone call. 'I feel like when he says no nukes for Iran, he means it,' Graham said the next day. 'He gave them a chance for diplomacy. I think they made a miscalculation when it comes to President Trump.' One of the most prominent voices opposing a strike, his onetime top strategist Steve Bannon, was at the White House midday Thursday for a lunch with the president that had been rescheduled from several weeks ago. He revealed nothing of his conversation with Trump on his 'War Room' show later Thursday. But a day earlier, he told a roundtable that getting involved in a drawn-out conflict with Iran would amount to repeating a historic mistake. 'My mantra right now: The Israelis have to finish what they started,' he said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. 'We can't do this again. We'll tear the country apart. We can't have another Iraq.' For Trump, the swirl of options, opinions and advice is nothing new. He has faced the Iran decision much as he has most every other major choice of his presidency, by soliciting advice and trying to arrive at a solution that will please the widest swath of his supporters. The answer this time may not be as simple, nor does Trump hold all the cards in a conflict that is playing out across the world. Israel's decision to launch strikes a week ago — while not a surprise to the president — still came against his public entreaties to hold off. And in Iran, he is confronting an adversary with a long history of hardening its positions under pressure from the United States. As he was arriving Friday at his home in New Jersey, Trump said it would be hard to ask Netanyahu to ease up on strikes on Iran in order to pursue diplomacy, given Israel's success in the conflict so far. And he said the two-week window he set a day earlier was the maximum period of time he would allow for diplomacy to work, reserving the option of ordering a strike before that time is up. The president couldn't say whether the decision now in front of him is the biggest he'd face as president. But as he tries to find the balance between ending Iran's nuclear ambitions and keeping the US from war, he did offer an evaluation of what he wanted his legacy to be on the other side. 'Always a peacemaker,' he said. 'That doesn't mean — sometimes, you need some toughness to make peace. But always a peacemaker.'
Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump: ‘Hard' for Israel to stop strikes now
President Trump said Friday it would be difficult for Israel to stop strikes on Iran at this point, a week into the intense conflict between the two nations and two weeks out from the president's decision on U.S. involvement. 'I think it's very hard to make that request right now,' he said when pressed about the Iranian foreign minister saying that the U.S. would call on Israel to stop airstrikes if Trump is serious about negotiations. 'If somebody is winning, it's a little bit harder to do than if somebody is losing, but we're ready, willing and able, and we've been speaking to Iran, and we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens,' Trump added. The president also said he might support a ceasefire but continued, 'it's very hard to stop when you look at it — Israel's doing well in terms of war, and I think you would say that Iran is doing less well.' As of Thursday, correspondence between the U.S. and Iran 'has continued,' according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who did not provide specifics about whether communications were direct or through intermediaries. Leavitt also said Thursday that Trump will make a decision 'in the next two weeks' on whether to intervene in Israel's conflict with Iran. Trump on Friday described the two-week timeline as the maximum he would give to Iran. 'We're going to see what that period of time is, but I'm giving them a period of time, and I would say two weeks would be the maximum,' he said. Additionally, he was asked if an aerial campaign in Iran would be enough or if ground forces would be necessary if the U.S. were to get involved. Trump pushed back on the idea of boots on the ground. 'Well, I'm not going to talk about ground forces. The last thing you want to do is ground force,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Where troops in Middle East are most vulnerable to Iran strikes
Tens of thousands of U.S. troops are within Iran's striking distance should President Trump decide to wade into Israel's conflict with Tehran and directly attack the country. More than 40,000 American service members and civilians — as well as billions of dollars in military equipment — are in the Middle East, spread out across bases in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Those working in countries closest to Iran, including Iraq and Kuwait, would conceivably have only minutes to prepare for an incoming Iranian strike, a likely outcome should Trump order the U.S. military to join Israel's bombing campaign, experts say. 'If [Iran] had the ballistic missiles ready to go, those strikes could happen in under 15 minutes. Launched to target,' retired Col. Seth Krummrich, vice president at security consultancy firm Global Guardian, told The Hill. 'They move very quickly.' Israel last week unleashed a barrage of airstrikes on Iran that set off the largest conflict ever between the two regional adversaries, with Tehran responding with its own attacks. The war has threatened to pull in the U.S., which says it supports Israel's right to defend itself but has not directly involved itself in the bombing. Trump has not yet decided on possible American military action against Iran, telling reporters through his top spokesperson that he would make his decision within two weeks. 'Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiation that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go in the next two weeks,' according to Trump's statement relayed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday. But Iran has already threatened to directly attack U.S. forces should they enter Israel's war campaign, with the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning Wednesday that 'Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.' Tehran's threats aren't idle, as the country has retaliated against Washington in the past, most notably in January 2020, when Trump in his first term ordered an airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force. The strike, which happened as Soleimani traveled to Baghdad, prompted a swift response from Iran, which days later hammered Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq and another U.S. base in Erbil with 13 ballistic missiles. While no Americans were killed in the largest ballistic missile attack ever against U.S. forces abroad, more than 100 were later diagnosed and treated for traumatic brain injuries. Now, with Trump reportedly considering using the GBU-57 — known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator or so-called bunker buster bomb — to damage Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, a similar attack from Tehran could soon be at hand. 'If there was to be a U.S. attack like they dropped the big bunker buster, if that happened, then I would assume that you would see an Iranian missile strike aimed at one or multiple U.S. bases,' said Krummrich, a former Special Forces officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the face of such a threat, military officials move to pull valuable assets out of the bases deemed most likely to be attacked, he said, pointing to the departure of some aircraft from Al-Asad Air Base, as seen in public satellite imagery this week. He guessed that Al-Asad Air Base, where many of the roughly 2,500 U.S. service members stationed in Iraq are located, as the most likely target given its close proximity to Iran and the fact that it's been hit in the past. Iran 'would tend to not want to poke the eye' of the United Arab Emirates, where 3,500 U.S. military personnel are located, or Qatar, home of Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. military site in the Middle East, Krummrich predicted. About 10,000 American forces are at Al Udeid, the regional headquarters for the U.S. Central Command (Centcom). In addition, 13,500 U.S. troops are stationed across five bases in Kuwait; 9,000 military and civilian personnel are at the Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain; and hundreds more troops are placed elsewhere on bases run by Jordan, Syria and Oman. The former head of Centcom, retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, told The Hill that Middle East bases have protective measures built into them to reduce risk, pointing to the aircraft moved from more vulnerable installations. 'But of course, we have a lot of diplomatic facilities, we have a lot of private sector interests there that could be vulnerable as well,' said Votel, now at the Middle East Institute. 'So, there's a lot of opportunity for Iran here.' U.S. bases and those that house American troops are also at risk of being attacked by Iran-back militias in the region, like in the case when three Army soldiers were killed in a drone attack on a small U.S. outpost in Jordan in January 2024. Following Israel's strikes on Iran on June 13, three drones were shot down near Ain al-Asad air base in western Iraq, The Associated Press reported. At least four other U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria have come under fire from Tehran-supported militants since Israel's bombing campaign began, including three installations in northeastern Syria between June 14 and 15, according to local reports. Asked about the attacks, a spokesperson from U.S. Central Command would not confirm or deny whether they took place. 'We are aware of these reports but have nothing operational to provide,' they said, pointing further queries regarding the conflict between Israel and Iran to the White House. U.S. officials this week have insisted that U.S. forces are well prepared to respond to any Iranian-launched attacks, surging more firepower to the Middle East including the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group. The Pentagon also has moved refueling tanker aircraft to the nearby European theater and placed warships in the Mediterranean Sea to help shoot down Iranian missiles targeting Israel. The Nimitz is set to take over from the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, currently in the Arabian Sea to provide security for U.S. forces near the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, but the two vessels will likely overlap for several days. More covertly, the Air Force earlier this week moved a dozen F-16 fighter jets from a base in Italy to Prince Sultan, Saudi Arabia, according to Aurora Intel, which reviews open source information in the Middle East. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to say Wednesday whether he had been asked to provide Trump with military options for Tehran, saying during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that he 'wouldn't disclose that in this forum.' But he added that his job is 'to make sure the president has options, is informed of what those options might be, and what the ramifications of those options might be.' Hegseth also on Wednesday told senators that 'maximum protection' measures were in place in the region. Asked by The Hill whether the protections could adequately repel an Iranian attack, a Pentagon spokesperson referred the outlet to Hegseth's post to social platform X on June 16, when the Defense secretary announced the 'deployment of additional capabilities' to the Middle East. 'Protecting U.S. forces is our top priority and these deployments are intended to enhance our defensive posture in the region,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
