Strike by strike, how Israel cleared a path to Iran's nuclear fortress

Telegraph

5 hours ago

A week into Israel's Operation Rising Lion, its jets are able to criss-cross Iran and strike targets with impunity.
Waves of Israeli aircraft fly sorties against Iran's military and nuclear sites, untouched by Tehran's air defences and air force after they were hammered in the first days of the assault.
The extent and ease of the air superiority achieved in those first hours of the campaign have surprised even Israel's security figures and now allow commanders almost free reign to hit the regime's most important strategic sites as they choose.
'We thought it would be much harder,' Zohar Palti, a former Mossad intelligence director, said this week. 'It was much faster than we anticipated.'
Satellite images of the aftermath of air strikes are now disclosing how Israel cleared a path to Tehran's missile and nuclear programmes.
Taking Iran's airfields out of action
The early hours of Operation Rising Lion saw heavy attacks on Iranian air defences and its air force to put them out of action for good, including direct strikes on runways.
While Iran's decades-old F-14A Tomcat and revamped F-5 Tigers would pose little threat to Israel's aircraft, the strikes quickly made sure they could not even get off the ground.
Images of Tabriz Air Base and Hamadan Air Base, both in western Iran, show main runways and taxi runways cratered by strikes.
The same images reveal extensive damage to hardened aircraft shelters nearby.
Elsewhere, the Israel Defense Forces posted infrared targeting camera footage of a pair of F-14A Tomcat fighters being destroyed next to hardened aircraft shelters at Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran.
As well as air strikes, Israeli special forces and intelligence services claimed to have infiltrated Iranian territory to hit air defences with a swarm of short-range drones, in attacks likened to Ukraine's recent audacious attack on Russia's long-range bomber bases.
Destroying air defences
Overall, the Israeli assault is said to have destroyed dozens of air defence missile launchers and radar sites within the first few days of the campaign.
This destruction then allowed Israeli planes to approach closer without fear of being shot down and to stop relying on long-range missiles to hit strategic targets in the capital, and at nuclear sites including Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow.
Iran has a wide variety of air defence systems, including Russian-supplied S-300PMU-1/2 long-range and SA-15 short-range surface-to-air missiles, as well as homemade Sayyad-2 and 3 missiles.
Yet Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said when the assault came, Iran had 'few technical answers' to the combination of Israeli F-35i stealth fighters that could quickly find and jam missile defences, and a wave of supporting F-16s and F-15s that could launch precision missile strikes from a distance.
'The speed with which the Israeli Air Force has established sufficient air superiority to use free-fall bombs rather than stand-off missiles against targets in Tehran, Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow has been impressive,' he told The Telegraph.
Satellite imagery of one of the country's oldest missile bases, operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) near the western province of Kermanshah, shows significant damage.
Several buildings appear destroyed along with two mountain-side tunnel entrances.
Iran is known to keep its missiles buried deeply and in underground silos for precisely this reason, but the imagery suggests Israel was still able to target them.
At another military site about 20 miles west of Tehran, at Bid Kaneh, which has long been associated with the missile programme, images reveal damage to multiple buildings.
In one image, the roof of one large building appears to have been penetrated. The facility was the site of a large explosion in 2011, when several staff working on the country's missile programme were killed. There has been speculation that the explosion was the result of sabotage.
Israeli military officials say their air dominance and their resulting ability to hit ballistic missile stores and launchers have stemmed the number of missiles Tehran can launch.
Israel estimates it has destroyed more than a third of Iran's total missile launchers.
Opening a path to nuclear facilities
Central among Israel's targets are Iran's nuclear facilities.
Israel has long warned that Iran is racing towards a nuclear bomb and has said its current attacks are needed to stop the imminent production of a weapon. However, America's own intelligence agencies have concluded Tehran is not building a nuclear weapon.
The underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was an early target for the campaign, having been struck on Friday.
Nuclear experts have estimated the strike destroyed the overground section of the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, where cascades of centrifuges were producing enriched uranium.
Images also show four 'critical buildings' were damaged in Isfahan, including a Uranium conversion facility and a fuel plate fabrication plant.
Iran's petrochemical industry has also been targeted. On Saturday, Israel hit the Shahran fuel and gas depot north-west of Tehran.
Yet despite the air superiority, Israel may now find the limits of what it can do by air alone, military analysts said.
One key site, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, located 20 miles from the ancient clerical city of Qom, is still thought to be untouched.
The site's hardened underground halls are thought to be impervious to all but America's most powerful 'bunker buster' munitions.
With Donald Trump, the US president, reported to have approved the plan of attack should America wade into the conflict, a strike of Fordow could be imminent.
Thanks to Israel's efforts, any attempt to strike the nuclear fortress will likely go unchallenged.
However, Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King's College London, told Reuters that while Israel had achieved 'quite a lot of operational and tactical successes... translating that into a strategic success will require more than what air power can deliver'.