How Israel decapitated Iran's military & nuke programme in just ONE NIGHT as years of planning revealed by IDF insiders
ISRAEL'S audacious blitz of Iran that killed top generals and targeted its nuclear sites took years of planning, IDF sources have revealed.
Intelligence agents spent months tracking senior commanders before taking them down in pinpoint strikes in the dead of night.
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Smoke rises above Tehran after an attack by Israel
Credit: AP
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Incredible images appear to show Mossad commandos inside Iran
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Smoke billows from a building in Tehran after the Israeli air strike
Credit: AFP
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Israel dealt a major blow to Iran's chain of command - with Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, the second-highest commander after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei among those eliminated.
Revolutionary Guard chief Hossein Salami and Gen. Gholamali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces were also wiped out.
Their inglorious deaths came as Israel unleashed an unprecedented attack, dubbed Rising Lion, on Iran's nuclear sites - with blasts first heard in Tehran around 3.30am local time (1am BST).
Missiles pounded Iran's main nuclear enrichment site, the Natanz atomic facility, and the regime's ballistic missile arsenal.
More on Israel-Iran
At least six of Iran's top nuclear scientists were killed during the sweeping assault.
Iran has already fired around 100 drones at Israel
Senior military and political sources in Israel
Retired IDF general Miri Eisin today said Israel has been planning to blitz Iran for at least a decade - and this exact plot would have been months in the making.
Most read in The Sun
Eisin, who advised Benjamin Netanyahu's PM predecessor Ehud Olmert, told The Sun: "[The attack] is years in the making.
"But this is something which evolves, meaning it isn't that the specific plan that is still being enacted today is necessarily the one that they started thinking of years ago.
Unprecedented vid shows Israeli commandos directing drone strikes from on ground INSIDE Iran to blow up missile bases
"But Israel has been planning as a plan to attack the nuclear and projectile facilities for many years because of the Islamic regime's threat.
"That plan evolved over the years, meaning you're always looking at what happens in the Islamic regime, the new nuclear sites, the new capabilities that they built, and you have to adapt all of the time."
Israel's decision to strike comes after a senior diplomatic source in Jerusalem told The Sun Iran was 'much closer than anyone can be comfortable with' in developing a nuclear weapon.
Fears have been rising internationally about Iran's nuclear programme as its progress has become more and more cloak and dagger in recent years.
The UN watchdog this week confirmed the country is breaking its obligations for the first time in 20 years.
Israel's attack overnight - aimed at diminishing the regime's nuclear threat - was spearheaded by Mossad commandos who smuggled kamikaze drones and precision weapons into Iran.
Their daring mission paved the way for Israeli forces to hammer 100 targets using 200 war jets - eliminating military chiefs and scientists and striking atom sites.
Which Iranian military chiefs and scientists have been killed?
ISRAEL has dealt a major blow to Iran's command chain - wiping out several of its top brass.
Key nuclear scientists have also been eliminated in Israel's overnight strikes.
Those killed include:
Generals
Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri
, chief of staff of the armed forces and the second-highest commander after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Gen. Hossein Salami
, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
Gen. Gholamali Rashid
, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces
Ali Shamkhan
, key adviser and confidant of Khamenei
Amir Ali Hajizadeh
, commander of the IRGC Aerospace Forces
Nuclear scientists
Fereydoun Abbasi
, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
Dr Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi
, theoretical physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran
Eisin, who served in the IDF for 20 years and has a background in military intelligence, said a combination of different security and intelligence capabilities would have spent months tracking senior commanders.
Speaking from Tel Aviv, she said: "You have to find them and you're attacking them all at the exact same time.
"So it's putting together that intel picture of where they are and knowing that at that specific time you're getting all of them.
"In addition, you have to gather intel on all of the different nuclear sites and air defence sites and projectile sites. Those are three different elements.
"It's the intel of knowing where they [commanders] are, and then it's the operational decision of doing it, because you understand that they're all where you want them to be simultaneously.
"It is very complex."
An IDF source, speaking to The Sun in Israel earlier this year, said its forces had been working for months to clear the path for a major strike on Iran.
They told how three air campaigns in Iran have eliminated strategic aerial defences which were 'the main obstacle' protecting the rogue nation's nuke facilities.
The insider said the IDF has also worked to significantly downgrade the threat posed by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi - effectively leaving Iran isolated.
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Iranian weapons systems are blown up by drones
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A building a that was hit by an Israeli strike in Tehran
Credit: AFP
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Fire burns in a building damaged in an Israeli blast
Credit: Reuters
Vitally, this allowed Israeli aircraft to get to Iran's borders without fear of being blasted.
The overnight attack is just the first phase of what is set to be two weeks of action aimed at ran's atom threat.
Ex-military intelligence agent Dr Raz Zimmt, whose work on
focussed on
Iran
,
previously told The Sun
it
But he conceded it would be highly unlikely Iran's nuclear scheme could ever be fully wiped out.
"It's too scattered, the knowledge and technology are already inside Iran," Dr Zimmt said.
The Sun last month
IDF Brigadier General Effie Defrin today confirmed it will be a "long campaign" against Iran - but that the military was "well prepared" to continue until achieving its goal.
Eisin said the IDF will be continuing to gather intel and launching pre-emptive attacks.
She said: "It isn't that we destroyed everything that Iran has. It's the beginning of the campaign.
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"I think that we will continue to attack. They will try to attack us.
"We have our defence systems, but it isn't over. We're still right at the beginning of this."
Israel hoped to coordinate an attack with the US after enraged Donald Trump gave Iran 60 days to thrash out a nuclear deal - a deadline that passed on Wednesday night.
Trump
had warned Israel not to undermine talks with Tehran that could jeopardise his administration's efforts
.
But Nadav Shtrauchler, who previously advised Netanyahu, said the PM wanted to cement his legacy.
He The Sun: "Eliminating Iran, the head of the snake, is his life mission.
"He sees them as the immediate threat and as today's Nazis.
"He said that he will not stop until he strikes the head of the snake.
"And after so many years of planning it started with a very strong offensive opening.
"He planned it and waited for the right timing and I'm sure it was not an easy decision to go without the US - but it had come to a place that we had to do it."
The US has publicly distanced itself from the Israeli operation and Trump today urged Iran to make a deal before it's too late.
Writing on Truth Social, the president said: "I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal.
"There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end.
"Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left."
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Commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Hossein Salami was killed
Credit: Getty
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Iranian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri was eliminated
Credit: AFP
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Israeli attacks may give Iran's nuclear programme greater impetus
While the sudden and devastating Israeli attacks on Iran 's nuclear programme of the past 48 hours raise fears of a wider conflagration in the Middle East, the events of the past two and a half years seem to dictate a limited Iranian response at least in the short term. This is notwithstanding the scale of the Israeli assault – the attacks hit dozens of targets in Iran, in particular nuclear facilities and missile sites, including the Natanz nuclear facility which is one of the key sites for uranium enrichment in Iran. Senior military figures, including the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the army chief of staff and several nuclear scientists were killed. The attacks came at a time when US president Donald Trump was offering optimistic prognostications concerning the likelihood of a deal on Iran's nuclear programme following talks earlier this year, the first round of which took place on April 12th in Oman. As recently as Thursday Omani authorities were confirming the sixth round of talks would take place on Sunday even as the US was ordering an evacuation of its Iraqi embassy and authorising the departure of military dependents from locations across the Middle East. In a telephone call on June 10th, Trump warned Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu he opposed military action in Iran. He expressed scepticism at Israeli claims that Iran should be presented with a credible military threat, and instead told Netanyahu the Iranians could be convinced to make a deal. All of this is in line with Trump's own vision of himself as a peace broker, despite his limited success to date in that regard. [ Most Israelis view a nuclear Iran as an existential threat Opens in new window ] Notwithstanding the announcement of more talks and Trump's expressions of optimism regarding the possibility of a deal, negotiations had stalled over US demands that Iran end all uranium enrichment and destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium. Iranian officials indicated they would be willing to stop enrichment at higher levels used for nuclear weapons and scrap its stockpile but would not agree to stop enrichment entirely, arguing it had the right to do so for civilian purposes under international law. READ MORE Trump's renewed interest in a negotiated deal with Iran was in stark contrast to his decision, during his first term in the White House, to pull the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The deal, reached in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, bound Iran to limiting its nuclear weapons programme in return for sanctions relief and other measures. There are clear indications the regime has been significantly penetrated by Israeli intelligence while its capacity to defend itself from aerial bombardment appears to be quite diminished For Netanyahu, who opposed negotiations with Iran from the outset, the decision to strike was prompted by a ruling issued by the board of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) on Thursday that Iran was in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years. This followed a recent report from the IAEA which stated Iran had enough uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity to make nine nuclear bombs. Iran denies having ever sought to produce nuclear weapons. Indeed, its supreme leader reportedly stated in 2010 that the use of such weapons was contrary to Islamic precepts. In a television broadcast, Netanyahu justified the attacks, stating that Iran has recently taken steps to weaponise enriched uranium, which was 'a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival'. This wasn't the first time Netanyahu suggested Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. As far back as September 2012, he told a US audience Iran was six months away from having enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. In any case, while the ruling of the IAEA may have provided Netanyahu with the immediate motivation for Israeli action, it is clear from the scale and complexity of the attacks that these were many months in the planning. This in turn raises the obvious question as to how Iran may respond. The options available to the regime in Tehran are more limited than ever. In the first instance, Iran is undoubtedly possessed of a significant military capacity. Its armed forces are among the largest in the Middle East – 580,000 active-duty personnel and a reserve force of 200,000 in the conventional army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In addition, it has one of the largest arsenals of missiles and drones in the region – cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles and ballistic missiles with a range of more than 1,200 miles. Its bases and storage facilities are buried deep underground and difficult to destroy from the air. Many Iranian leaders feel that a bomb would provide them with protection as it has for North Korea However, there are clear indications the regime has been significantly penetrated by Israeli intelligence while its capacity to defend itself from aerial bombardment appears to be quite diminished. 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But, while the Israeli ambition is to degrade Iran's nuclear capability, the most significant impact of the attacks may be the strengthening of the position of those in the leadership who oppose negotiations on the nuclear issue. In its response to the attacks, the Iranian government stated that the world now better understands its insistence on 'the right to enrichment, nuclear technology and missile power', in an indication that it may feel a more urgent need to develop nuclear weapons in response to Israeli attacks. Many Iranian leaders feel that a bomb would provide them with protection as it has for North Korea. For some, this is an existential issue for the Islamic Republic. Ironically and worryingly, Netanyahu's project for the eradication of the nuclear threat may have the opposite effect of giving Iran's nuclear programme greater impetus. Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East politics in the UCD School of Politics and International Relations
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
‘This isn't just about a visa. It's about lost futures': Job offers for Iranian scientists in Ireland hit roadblock
Some of Iran 's top medical and scientific professionals say they are 'desperate' to take up work offers in Ireland but are being thwarted by inordinate and 'discriminatory' delays in visas being processed by the Department of Justice's immigration services. Following overnight strikes by Israel against Iran, many say their desperation to take up posts in Ireland has only intensified. Universities and hospitals which want to employ them say delays of up to 20 months are 'very disappointing', 'just wrong' and 'incongruous' given the need for the cohort's skills. Delays have jeopardised important research projects, they add. READ MORE 'Iranian visas [are] just not getting through, at all,' one PhD supervisor said. Job offers to Iranians, including in pharmaceuticals, hospitals, artificial intelligence and financial software development, have had to be withdrawn due to extreme delays. 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For a long time Israel and its defenders have dismissed the charges as strident, unserious or mischievous, even or perhaps especially, after South Africa brought a genocide case against Binyamin Netanyahu 's government at the International Criminal Court later that year, a case which Joe Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken both described as 'meritless' . Despite the mounting evidence of a willingness and desire to exterminate Gazans coming from both Israeli soldiers on active duty and senior members of society, who have been issuing declarations with all the rhetorical discipline of a post-pub social media user, there are still those who tut away, like high-minded broadsheet opinion columnists desperate to plumb a line somewhere down the middle, at the notion that Israel could possibly be carrying out a genocide. British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim cites a litany of calls for massacres from Israeli politicians, entertainers and members of the public in his book Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine. These range from exhortations to leave 'not a stone upon a stone' in Gaza, to 'turn Gaza into a parking lot' and to 'exterminate the roaches'. It's more than just a few bad eggs. Shlaim himself admits he was initially wary of using the term 'genocide' but now has little compunction in putting it in the title of a collection of essays and introductions that appears to take over from where his similar 2009 volume, Israel and Palestine, left off. The two other books under review here similarly mention either 'genocide' or ' Nakba ' in their titles. READ MORE Whether the serious centrist voices like it or not, the charge is very much out in the open now. These essays, which date back to just after 'Operation Cast Lead' in 2008-09, plot the deterioration of the Oslo Accords, as Israel was allowed to carry on as before in its construction of West Bank settlements, while the Palestinians made tangible, and painful, concessions. Netanyahu's Likud, the heir of the extreme maximalist Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky, cannibalised the Israeli body politic to make the country its ideological fief over the past five decades. Israel is now Jabotinsky's land, more than eight decades after his death. Shlaim shrewdly notes that Ehud Barak's comment that 'there is no Palestinian partner for peace' after the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000 effectively finished Labor off as an electoral force, as it told Israelis they might as well now vote for the hard-right party bent on war. 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There is far too much overlap in content, and reading Shlaim make the very same point for the third, fourth or fifth time (often word for word) sadly dilutes the force of the book. Irishman Fintan Drury, a one-time journalist covering the Middle East, in Catastrophe: Nakba II, gives his own personal reaction to and assessment of the pummelling of Gaza, an account that he admits at the outset will be avowedly pro-Palestinian. It's a humane and briskly argued treatise that, despite its stated inclination, is even-handed in its analysis of Israeli society, despite his prediction in the introductory note that it will be profiled in some quarters as anti-Semitic. Unlike many on the pro-Palestinian side in this country, Drury is genuinely interested in Israel and how it has become increasingly in thrall to far-right ideology, even before the trauma of October 7th hit. His contention that the genocide in Gaza will be a second Nakba is persuasive, not least because the death toll has already far outstripped that suffered by Palestinians in 1947-1949. Even if Donald Trump 's wild plans for real estate deals in Gaza are unlikely to have legs, the licence given to Israel to try to empty the exclave of its inhabitants looks like it could materialise. Drury is also rightly scathing of the failures of many western media outlets, particularly the BBC , in their default willingness to accept the Israeli line during the war (though such obliging coverage does appear to be belatedly abating in recent months). Some of the western governments that effectively countenanced the destruction of Gaza on account of the horror of the Hamas attacks have also begun to waver of late, but Drury is in no doubt that their culpability is long-established. [ Inside the tunnel underneath Gaza hospital where Hamas commander allegedly met his death Opens in new window ] Drury is unfortunately let down at times by careless editing: the prose needs tightening in places, with a number of hapless syntactic repetitions, and there are also factual infelicities – the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks did not take place 'almost two decades ago' and Tony Benn, whom Drury cites, was not speaking about the war with Iraq in the House of Commons in February 1998 but rather registering his opposition to the expected imminent allied bombing of Iraq, which ultimately didn't take place until 10 months later. It might seem like churlish nit-picking to point these out but they do contribute to an overall impression of a slipshod production that mars what is at times an engaging read. Gilbert Achcar's The Gaza Catastrophe is, like Shlaim's book, a collection of essays published over the past two decades combined with newer reflections written since the start of the war. Achcar, a Franco-Lebanese former professor of international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, offers the best of these three books, written in a lively, often withering style, and providing a left-wing materialist perspective that has faded in prominence in the Arab world in recent times. The earlier essays cover the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel's manoeuvrings in exploiting peace talks following the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and also what he calls the misuse of Holocaust memory, in a foreshadowing of Pankaj Mishra's recent The World After Gaza. [ One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and The World after Gaza: holding the West to account Opens in new window ] The more recent ones are incisive, particularly in his assessment of Netanyahu, who, Achcar says, is not perpetuating the war simply to keep himself in power and out of prison (though that is a consideration) but because he is a true believer in the expulsion of Gazans and the annexation of the West Bank. For Netanyahu, the overarching historical stakes greatly outweigh even his own personal interest. Achcar, like Shlaim, sees the current Israeli government as fascist, and goes even further, calling it 'Nazi'. This might be a rhetorical exaggeration, but one he presumes is necessary to set it apart from other governments in the 'Neofascist International' he mentions, given Israel's wanton barbarism and cruelty in its war on Gaza. The war, for Achcar, is 'indisputably the worst episode in the Palestinian people's long ordeal', far worse than the 1948 Nakba, to such an extent that he suggests using a stronger Arabic word for catastrophe, Karitha, to name it. Like many contemporary observers, Achcar is terminally pessimistic about the fate of Gaza, seeing it as prey to two scenarios: a second, more final Nakba, or a mediated Oslo-style situation, which, like the original one, will benefit only Israel anyway. The authors of all three books are unequivocal in their disgust at the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks on Israel on October 7th. However, each places it in the context of what Palestinians and particularly the people of Gaza have endured over decades, the cynical dispossession, the rampant poverty and the enforced humiliations of living under an apartheid system in the West Bank. There are also nuances proffered that will sit uneasily with and perhaps outrage some readers. Drury contests the notion Hamas is a terrorist group, given it is also a broad social movement with widespread support (it is perfectly possible for it to be both, and also to be a grimly reactionary social movement that many in Gaza resent living under, however much they might support the resistance it incarnates). Shlaim, meanwhile, rejects the urge by Zionists to place October 7th in the lineage of the Holocaust, saying it was an uprising motivated by anti-colonial resentment rather than anti-Semitism, another argument one could rebut by saying it can be both. A similar argument is made by Achcar, who compares the Hamas attack to a massacre of Portuguese colonists by Angolan guerrillas in 1961 that the Salazar regime answered by slaughtering more than 50,000 Angolans, razing entire villages in the process. He says the Hamas attack was a strategic error as much as the Angolan one was, which forced the FLNA to change their tactics in the war of liberation. These three books are only the latest in a slew of volumes to have emerged about the war in Gaza, which is rapidly being accepted in public opinion in many parts of the world as a genocide, with even Israel-friendly leaders such as Emmanuel Macron swerving the question rather than outrightly dismissing it. There will undoubtedly be many more to follow, including some that try to build a case for Israel in the prosecution of its war, something that the Israeli government has bothered to do only in the most cursory fashion in its dealings with international media. [ More than 160 academics call for 'immediate halt' to trade with Israel over conflict in Gaza Opens in new window ] And though there has been a definite shift in recent weeks in the way both European governments and public figures are talking about the war (the word 'genocide' is no longer a hot potato for many artists and writers who previously steered clear of the Palestine issue), little of substance has been done to try to bring Israel to heel. And, given the steadfast support and influence Israel enjoys in Washington, and a number of competing issues elsewhere in the world, it may be a long time before Netanyahu and his government feel compelled to stop.
