Satellite images show damage from Israeli attack at 2 secretive Iranian military bases

An Israeli attack on Iran damaged facilities at a secret military base southeast of the Iranian capital that experts have linked in the past to Tehran's former nuclear weapons program and another base linked to its ballistic missile program, according to satellite images analyzed on Sunday, the Associated Press reported, UNN writes.

Details

According to the newspaper, "some of the damaged buildings were located at the Iranian military base of Parchin, where the International Atomic Energy Agency suspects Iran has tested explosives in the past that could have detonated nuclear weapons." Iran has long insisted that its nuclear program is peaceful, although the IAEA, Western intelligence agencies and others say Tehran had an active weapons program until 2003.

Other damage, the newspaper writes, "can be seen at the nearby Khojir military base, where analysts believe an underground system of tunnels and missile production sites are hidden.

The Iranian military did not acknowledge any damage in either Khojira or Parchin from the Israeli attack on Saturday morning, although it did say that four Iranian soldiers working in the country's air defense systems were killed in the attack. Iran announced on Sunday that a civilian was also killed, but did not provide any details.

However, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told an audience on Sunday that the Israeli attack "should be neither exaggerated nor understated," without calling for an immediate retaliatory strike. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu separately said on Sunday that Israel's strikes "caused serious damage" to Iran and that the shelling "achieved all its goals.

It is reported that it remains unclear how many facilities were attacked by Israel. So far, the Iranian military has not released any images of the damage.

Iranian officials have identified the affected areas in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran provinces. Satellite imagery from Planet Labs PBC showed scorched fields around Iran's Tangeh Bijar natural gas field in Ilam Province on Saturday, although it was not clear if this was related to the attack. Ilam Province is located on the Iran-Iraq border in western Iran.

The most visible damage could be seen in Planet Labs' imagery of Parchin, about 40 kilometers southeast of downtown Tehran, near the Mamalu Dam. There, one building appeared to be completely destroyed, while others appeared to be damaged by the attack.

In Khojira, about 20 kilometers from the center of Tehran, satellite images show damage to at least two buildings.

In Parchin, the Albright Institute for Science and International Security identified the destroyed hillside building as Talegan 2. The report says that an Iranian nuclear data archive previously seized by Israel identified the building as "an extended explosives chamber and pulsed X-ray system for studying small-scale explosives.

"Such tests could include the compression of a natural uranium core with explosives, simulating the initiation of a nuclear explosive," the institute's 2018 report says.

In a message posted on the X social media platform early Sunday, the institute added: "It is unclear whether Iran used uranium at Taleban 2, but it may have been studying the compression of natural uranium hemispheres, which explains its hasty and secretive reconstruction efforts following the IAEA's 2011 request for access to Parchin.

It is unclear what, if any, equipment would have been inside the Taleban 2 building on Saturday morning. Israel has not carried out any strikes on Iran's oil industry, nuclear enrichment sites or the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

Rafael Grossi, who heads the IAEA, confirmed this on X, saying that "Iran's nuclear facilities were not affected.

Other buildings destroyed in Khodjir and Parchin likely included those where Iran used industrial mixers to create the solid fuel needed for its large arsenal of ballistic missiles, said Decker Eveleth of the CNA think tank in Virginia.

In a statement released immediately after the attack on Saturday, the Israeli military said that the target was "missile production facilities used to produce missiles that Iran has fired at the State of Israel over the past year.

The destruction of such facilities could significantly undermine Iran's ability to produce new ballistic missiles to replenish its arsenal after two attacks on Israel, the newspaper notes. 

It also said that one plant appeared to have been hit in the industrial city of Shamsabad, south of Tehran, near Imam Khomeini International Airport, the country's main gateway to the outside world. Online videos of the damaged building matched the address of a firm known as TIECO, which advertises itself as producing advanced equipment used in Iran's oil and gas industry, the newspaper writes.

Israel hits key missile production components in Iran - AxiosOctober 27 2024, 07:14 AM • 14914 views