Revolutionary Guards chief killed in Israeli strike, confirms Iran.
The Israeli military has attacked at least six military bases around Tehran, the New York Times reports, citing four unnamed senior Iranian officials.
The sources said the Parchin military complex was targeted, as well as residential homes at two highly secure complexes for military commanders and multiple residential buildings in what appear to be targeted assassinations.
Iran state TV said nuclear scientists Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi were killed in an Israeli strike on Friday.
The state media also confirmed on Friday the killing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Commander Hossein Salami in an Israeli strike.
US senator slams Israeli airstrikes on Iran as ‘reckless escalation’
Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticises the Israeli attacks on Iran and calls on Trump to push for de-escalation.
“Israel’s alarming decision to launch airstrikes on Iran is a reckless escalation that risks igniting regional violence,” Reed said in a statement.
“I urge both nations to show immediate restraint, and I call on President Trump and our international partners to press for diplomatic de-escalation before this crisis spirals further out of control.”
Israeli strikes seek to hurt Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and military capabilities: Netanyahu
Israel’s strikes on Iran are aimed at hurting its nuclear infrastructure, its ballistic missile factories and many of its military capabilities, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
“This operation will take as long as is needed to complete the task of fending off the threat of annihilation against us,” he added in a recorded video message.
“Moments ago, Israel launched operation Rising Lion, a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival,” Netanyahu said in a televised address.
“This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat. For decades the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly, openly, called for Israel’s destruction.”
He said Iran had a program to develop nuclear weapons and claimed it “could produce a nuclear weapon” if not stopped.
“This is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival,” Netanyahu said.
“We struck at the head of Iran’s nuclear weaponization program,” he added. “We targeted Iran’s main enrichment facility in Natanz. We targeted Iran’s nuclear scientists working on the Iranian bomb. We also struck at the heart of Iran’s ballistic missiles program”
Netanyahu added: “In defending ourselves, we also defend others. We defend our Arab neighbors. They, too, have suffered from Iran’s campaign of chaos and carnage.”
