Israel’s air defenses are crippled by the attack on Iran, the Associated Press and the Weizmann Institute of Science
Israel says it can now strike Iran’s targets at will because it has crippled their air defenses. Although Israel’s own defenses are largely intact, there are some missiles which are getting through with deadly results.
On social media, President Trump said the U.S. had “nothing to do with the attack on Iran, tonight,” but warned that if the U.S. was attacked by Iran in any way, that “the full strength of U.S. Armed forces will come down on [Iran] at levels never seen before.”
At least ten were killed and hundreds were injured last night, as it was the hardest night for Israelis since the start of the fighting.
The deadliest strikes hit a residential building in Bat Yam, a suburb south of Tel Aviv, killing at least six people including a 10-year-old boy and 9-year-old girl. Another 180 people were wounded and seven still missing, according to local police.
In the north, sirens blared and people ran for shelter as missiles struck the country’s largest oil refinery, located near the port city of Haifa. Four women were killed in Tamra, an Arab town of around 35,000 people, according to the Associated Press. Israel’s fuel structure was targeted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in a response to the strikes on its oil facilities in the south.
At least 42 people were injured and several campus buildings of The Weizmann Institute of Science were struck in the central city of Rehovot. The center said no one on campus was hurt, despite the extensive damage.
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Yemen’s Houthi rebels said Sunday that they had assisted Iran by launching more ballistic missiles at Israel. The missiles were launched at Israel on the same day as the Iranian retaliation for Israeli strikes.
The Israeli military said it “precisely struck” command centers belonging to Iran’s Quds Force — an elite military and intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — overnight, killing four officials, including the head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization
Iran’s Health Ministry says more than 200 people have been killed since the start of Israel’s offensive, including many women and children.
The Secretary General of the UN and the Pope both called for “sincere dialogue,” after the Pope said the situation between Israel and Iran had deteriorated drastically.
And the more threatened Iran feels, the more likely it is that Iran will conclude it has no option but to pursue a nuclear weapon, analysts said. Experts agree that it will likely retain that capability even after the Israeli attacks.
The strikes came a day after the U.N. nuclear watchdog declared that Iran wasn’t complying with nuclear nonproliferation agreements aimed at halting the spread of nuclear weapons. Iran said that it would create a new enrichment facility. Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, according to the country.
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On Saturday, the foreign minister of the United Kingdom said on social media that a meeting had been canceled. But he said “diplomacy and dialogue remain the only pathway to lasting peace.”
A quick deal now that would give up enrichment would be seen as a surrender, said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served in the State Department during the Obama administration. That could make the Iranian government more vulnerable at home. “They won’t give up enrichment, not this easily,” he said. “They’re not going to surrender.”
The Israelis have nothing to fear from Mr. Trump, who said he knew about the attack before it happened. When Washington announced last week that the talks would continue on Sunday, it is not clear whether it knew when Israel would attack, but the Iranians are convinced that Washington was complicit in trying to fool them into believing that any Israeli attack would come afterward.
In a post on his Truth Social site Sunday, President Trump renewed calls for Iran and Israel to make a deal, but later told reporters “sometimes, they just have to fight it out.”
Mr. Trump clearly sees the war as a form of diplomacy. He gave Iran a 60-day ultimatum to make a deal. They should have done it. Today is day 61. I told them what to do but they couldn’t get there. Now they have, perhaps, a second chance!”
The president said he wants negotiations to succeed. He thinks the attack will bring Iran back to the table in a weaker and more conciliatory position, and he’s willing to accept his latest demand that it stop all enrichment of uranium. But Iran insists that it has the right to enrich for civilian uses under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The prime minister of Israel believes that a deal that would allow Iran to make a bomb would lead to a nuclear-armed Iran in the future. It seems that he believes that a U.S.-Iran deal would have kept him from his ultimate goal of destruction of Iran’s nuclear program.
The American Embassy in Tel Aviv will not be closed until the next round of Iranian missile attacks comes to a close end: Iran is desperate for a nuclear weapon
The US Embassy in Tel Aviv was damaged by one missile and will remain closed on Monday, according to Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel. The United States personnel were not injured in the strike. Despite continued international calls for de-escalation, neither side showed signs it was prepared to enter talks.
We are committed to stopping things that will threaten our survival so I think we can achieve it, which is why the issue here is not ceasefire.
More rounds of strikes against Israel will be more powerful, precise and destructive than before, warned Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Monday.
Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said the Air Force had achieved “full aerial superiority” over the skies of Tehran on Monday. The military destroyed a third of Iran’s missiles.
“The irony in all of this is that Iran could still emerge from this conflict with a bomb,” Mr. Ostovar said. “Now, unlike the past, there’s a real explicit need for a nuclear weapon, because Iran has no deterrence left whatsoever.”
Many Iranians who already abhorred their theocratic and authoritarian rulers blame them for the sharp escalation of the conflict. As the civilian death toll rises, however, some may come to soften toward their leaders, or at least harden their attitudes toward Israel, Ms. Geranmayeh said. Patriotic posts, though not pro-regime ones, are already proliferating on Iranian social media.
Iran could still go after the ships in the Strait of Hormuz using drones, submarines or limpet mines. That would likely have little effect on the conflict and might encourage people to move to the US.
While the U.S. military has said Iran had about 3,000 missiles, it is not clear that all of them have the range to hit Israel. And Iran must shoot off so many at a time to penetrate Israeli air defenses that it will deplete its stockpile more quickly than it can manufacture more, analysts said.
Israel is using freedom of movement to go after Iranian missile launchers as well as the production facilities that will allow Iran to replenish its missile stocks.
Lacking anything close to the conventional military might of Israel or the United States, its longtime enemies, Iran tried a different approach. For years, its strategy for self-protection rested on the idea that the combination of its armed partners in the region and its own missile capabilities would be enough to deter attacks on Iranian soil.
Israeli intelligence managed to penetrate Iran so thoroughly that Israel was able to launch drone attacks on Iranian targets from inside Iran on Friday and to kill some of the most senior figures in the military’s chain of command.
The portrayal of Israel and Hamas has come into question since war erupted between the two countries in October of 2019. Over the year and a half that followed, Iran has suffered blow after blow.
One of those partners, Hezbollah, sat right on Israel’s northern border with an arsenal of rockets. In Iraq, Iranian-backed militant groups were in position to target American military installations there. Iranian short-range missiles could also threaten U.S. bases in the Middle East. And Tehran could launch a barrage of long-range missiles and drones into Israel that would potentially overwhelm Israeli air defenses and shatter the country’s sense of security.
“Iran has basically demonstrated that it was outgunned and outsmarted again by Israel,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Those humiliations accelerated on Friday with the start of an Israeli campaign that has gone after targets across Iran, crippled its air defenses and killed several of its top military commanders and a number of prominent nuclear scientists. There have been hundreds of deaths in Iran and at least 24 in Israel.
Several senior Iranian commanders were killed when an airstrike hit a building in Syria last year. The assassination three months later of one of Iran’s top militant partners while he was visiting Tehran. Israeli strikes on Iranian air defenses in October and April of next year. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah and President Assad of Syria are just a few of Iran’s most important allies in the Middle East.
Iran is often described as a rogue state that is threatening Israel and the United States and is considered to be one of the world most dangerous villains.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appearing Sunday on Fox News, also offered details of what he described as a successful Israeli intelligence operation to infiltrate western Iran and disable its remaining air defenses in the area. As a result of the Mossad operation, Israel has a “free highway to Tehran,” Netanyahu said.
President Trump has expressed strong support for Israel, but has made clear that the U.S. is not at the moment part of Israel’s operation, which has also included strikes that resulted in the deaths of top Iranian commanders and reportedly dozens of civilians.
As incoming Iranian missiles are hit by Israel’s defenses, they break up into large fragments that are still dangerous. So, Iron Dome is now being used to shoot down those falling fragments, according to Freilich.