Commercial satellite imagery showed that Israeli air strikes during an attack on Saturday hit buildings that Iran used to mix solid fuel for ballistic missiles, according to separate assessments by two US researchers. .
David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who heads the Science and International Security Research Group, and Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at CNA, a Washington think tank, reached the decision.
He told Reuters separately that Israel attacked Parchin, a huge military complex near Tehran. Israel also attacked Khozir, a massive missile production site near Tehran, according to Avleth.
Reuters reported in July that Khojir was undergoing a massive expansion.
Eveleth said the Israeli attacks “would have significantly hampered Iran’s ability to mass-produce missiles.”
The Israeli military said three waves of Israeli jets struck missile factories and other sites near Tehran and in western Iran early Saturday, in retaliation for Tehran’s October 1 barrage of more than 200 missiles against Israel .
Iran’s military said Israeli warplanes used “very light weapons” to attack border radar systems in Ilam, Khuzestan and the provinces around Tehran.
Eveleth said an image from Planet Labs, a commercial satellite firm, shows that an Israeli strike destroyed two buildings in Khozir where solid fuel for ballistic missiles was mixed.
The buildings were surrounded by tall piles of dirt, according to images reviewed by Reuters. Such structures are associated with missile production and are designed to prevent an explosion in a building from detonating flammable materials into nearby structures.
Parchin’s Planet Labs imagery showed that Israel fired three ballistic missile solid fuel mixture buildings and destroyed a warehouse, he said.
Albright said he reviewed low-resolution commercial satellite imagery of Parchin, which showed that three buildings were damaged in the Israeli attack, two of which contained solid fuel mixed for ballistic missiles.
He did not identify the commercial firm from which he obtained the photos.
The buildings, he said, are located about 350 yards from a facility that was once involved in an extensive nuclear weapons development program that Iran shut down in 2003, according to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. intelligence. Had done. Iran has denied such thing. Program.
“Israel says they targeted buildings with solid fuel mixers,” Eveleth said. “These industrial mixers are hard to make and export-controlled. Iran has imported many at huge cost over the years, and will likely have difficulty replacing them.”
He said, with a limited operation, Israel would have struck a significant blow against Iran’s ability to mass-produce missiles and would have made it more difficult for any future Iranian missile attacks to penetrate Israel’s missile defenses .
“The attacks appear to be extremely precise,” he said.
According to US officials, Iran has the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East and supplies missiles to Russia for use against Ukraine and Yemen’s Houthi rebels and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Tehran and Moscow deny that Russia has received Iranian missiles.
Planet Labs imagery reviewed earlier this year by Eveleth and Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey showed large expanses of the Khozir and Modares military complexes near Tehran, where the missile was launched, Reuters reports. Were to boost production.
Three senior Iranian officials confirmed that conclusion.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
