Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has stated that the air attack on Iran last month hit an element of Tehran’s nuclear programme while degrading its defence and missile production capabilities.
“It’s not a secret,” Netanyahu said in a speech in parliament. “There is a specific component in their nuclear programme that was hit in this attack”. He did not identify the component, but added that Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon had not been blocked.
On October 26, Israeli fighter jets carried out three waves of attacks on Iranian military targets, a few weeks after Iran had fired a barrage of about 200 ballistic missiles against Israel. This followed a previous exchange of direct attacks in April.
Netanyahu, in his speech, offered a few more details on what Israel had targeted. Israel’s April strike, he said, was narrower, taking out one of four Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defence batteries around Tehran, the Iranian capital. He said that in October, Israel destroyed the remaining three batteries and caused serious damage to Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities and its ability to produce solid fuel, which is used in long-range ballistic missiles.
Multiple agencies and individuals are working to identify targets struck by the Israelis in their attacks on Iran. An American researcher said an airstrike on October 26 hit a building that was part of Iran’s defunct nuclear weapons development program, and he and another researcher said facilities used to mix solid fuel for missiles were also struck. The assessments based on commercial satellite imagery.
Iran’s military said the Israeli warplanes used very light warheads to strike border radar systems in the provinces of Ilam, Khuzestan and around Tehran.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and U.S. intelligence say Iran shuttered the program in 2003. Iran denies pursuing nuclear weapons.
Team Bharatshakti
(With inputs from Reuters)
