Iran’s state media showed blasts across Tehran, with smoke and fire billowing from buildings. The skies were quickly cleared of civilian flights.
Residents in the Iranian cities of Isfahan, Arak and Kermanshah, which house military and industrial complexes, have also reported hearing explosions.
Mohammad Jamali, who was standing on a roof in Tehran, said he could see two Israeli jets attacking an air base of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
“What I can see is two massive flames and smoke coming from two military bases in eastern Tehran,” he said.
A senior Iranian official said that a compound in Tehran where senior military commanders live, Shahrak Shahid Mahalati, had been attacked, and that three residential buildings had been demolished.
Who was killed in the attack?
Iran’s state media reported that two prominent nuclear scientists, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, were killed when Israel attacked their homes.
The powerful commander in chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, General Hossein Salami, has also been killed in the Israeli strikes, Iranian state television reported, along with the deputy commander of Iran’s armed forces, General Gholamali Rashid, and Fereydoun Abbasi, a nuclear scientist.
Israel appears to have entered a new phase in its attacks on Iran’s critical personnel with these strikes.
For years, Israel targeted Iran’s senior military leadership and many of its top nuclear scientists with individual assassinations. Some of the strikes today appeared to be part of an effort to kill such personnel en masse.
Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported that at least a dozen civilians were also killed by the strikes in Tehran.
Why did Israel attack Iran?
Israeli officials said the strike was “pre-emptive,” although there was no immediate indication that Iran was planning to attack.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it acted “in response to the Iranian regime’s ongoing aggression against Israel” and suggested there would be more to come, calling its attack “the first stage”.
An Israeli military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to comply with protocol, said the strikes had targeted elements of Iran’s nuclear programme and the regime’s long-range missile capabilities.
He said that Iran has been advancing a secret programme to assemble a nuclear weapon, according to Israeli intelligence, and that it has enough material to assemble 15 nuclear bombs within days. The official did not provide details to support the assessment.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Iran’s nuclear programme “a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival” in a video statement.
Iran’s nuclear programme has advanced considerably over the past decade, analysts say.
Today the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution declaring that Iran was not complying with its nuclear non-proliferation obligations — the first such censure in two decades.
Iran condemned the vote, saying it “completely called into question the credibility and prestige” of the nuclear watchdog.
Was the United States involved?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the United States was “not involved in strikes against Iran”. He added that “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence”.
Rubio warned Iran against any form of retaliation aimed at the US forces in the region: “Let me be clear: Iran should not target US interests or personnel”.
The Israeli strike followed months of disagreement between President Donald Trump and Netanyahu over how to handle Iran. Trump has discouraged Israel from attacking Iran while US-Iran nuclear talks are ongoing.
Hours before the attack, Trump said an attack would probably destroy the chances for a diplomatic solution. “I think it would blow it,” he said, before adding, “might help it actually, but it could also blow it.”
Anticipating a regional escalation, the US withdrew diplomats from Iraq and authorised the voluntary departure of families of US soldiers posted elsewhere in the Middle East.
About 40,000 US military personnel are stationed in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East to defend US bases and interests in the region, including the defence of Israel. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, armed with F-35 attack planes, is steaming in the Arabian Sea.
A critical question is whether the US will play an extensive role in defending Israel from an Iranian counter-attack, as the Biden Administration did when those countries exchanged airstrikes last year.
In his statement, Rubio made no mention of such a role, saying that “our top priority is protecting American forces in the region”.
What’s the status of US-Iran nuclear talks?
American and Iranian negotiators have been planning to meet on Sunday (local time) in Oman for a sixth round of talks about Iran’s nuclear programme, although that meeting is now in doubt.
The two sides have been at an impasse over whether Iran should be able to continue enriching uranium within its borders.
During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that was signed by President Barack Obama, deriding the agreement as “one-sided”. This time around, he seems eager to avoid being sucked into a large-scale conflict in the Middle East.
This week, Trump said that Iran had adopted an “unacceptable” negotiating position, and has downplayed the prospects of a deal.
“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told the New York Post in a podcast yesterday. “They seem to be delaying and I think that’s a shame.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Patrick Kingsley, Aaron Boxerman, Farnaz Fassihi and Ephrat Livni
Photograph by: Arash Khamoosh
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
