Israel hits nuclear sites, Iran strikes hospital as war escalates

TEL AVIV/DUBAI - Israel bombed nuclear targets in Iran on June 19 and Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital overnight, as the week-old air war escalated with no sign yet of an off-ramp.

Following the strike that damaged the Soroka Medical Centre in Israel’s southern city of Beersheba, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tehran’s “tyrants” would pay the “full price”.

Defence Minister Israel Katz said the military had been instructed to intensify strikes on strategic-related targets in Tehran in order to eliminate the threat to Israel and destabilise the “Ayatollah regime”.

Israel’s sweeping campaign of air strikes aims to do more than destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and missile capabilities. It seeks to shatter the foundations of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s government and leave it near collapse, said Israeli, Western and regional officials.

Mr Netanyahu wants Iran weakened enough to be forced into fundamental concessions on permanently abandoning its nuclear enrichment, its ballistic missile programme and its support for militant groups across the region, the sources said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, speaking to reporters outside the damaged hospital, said “regime change” in Tehran was not a goal the Security Cabinet had set “for the time being”.

US President Donald Trump, meanwhile,

has kept the world guessing about whether Israel’s superpower ally would join it in air strikes

.

Israel said it had struck Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites. It initially said it had also hit Bushehr, site of Iran’s only functioning nuclear power plant, but a spokesperson later said it was a mistake to have said this.

An Iranian diplomat told Reuters that Bushehr was not hit and Israel was engaged in “psychological warfare” by discussing it. Any attack on the plant, near Arab neighbours and housing Russian technicians, is viewed as risking nuclear disaster.

Mr Trump has veered from proposing a swift diplomatic end to the war to suggesting the US might join it. On June 18, he said nobody knew what he would do. A day earlier he mused on social media about killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei, then demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender.

A

week of Israeli air and missile strikes against its major rival

has wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military command, damaged its nuclear capabilities and killed hundreds of people, while Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed at least two dozen civilians in Israel.

Iran has been weighing its options in responding to its biggest security challenge since the 1979 revolution.

A member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee Presidium, Mr Behnam Saeedi, told the semi-official Mehr news agency that Iran could consider closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of daily global oil consumption passes.

Tehran has in the past threatened to close the strait. Shipping sources said on June 18 that commercial ships were avoiding Iran’s waters nearby.

Oil prices rose after Israel and Iran continued to exchange missile attacks overnight and Mr Trump’s stance on the conflict kept investors on edge.

Countries around the world are taking measures to evacuate their citizens from Israel and Iran, and airspace in the region remains closed.

Earlier, the Israeli military said it targeted the Khondab nuclear site near Iran’s central city Arak overnight, including a partially built heavy-water research reactor. Heavy-water reactors produce plutonium which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb. Iran’s atomic energy agency said the attack caused no casualties.

The Israeli military also said it attacked launch sites in western Iran after attempts to restore them were detected.

Israel, which has the most advanced military in the Middle East, has been fighting on several fronts since the Oct 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas triggered the Gaza war.

It has severely weakened Iran’s regional allies, Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and bombed Yemen’s Houthis.

The extent of the damage inside Iran from the week-old bombing campaign has become more difficult to assess in recent days, with the authorities apparently seeking to prevent panic by limiting information.

Iran has stopped giving updates on the death toll, and state media have ceased showing widespread images of destruction. The internet has been almost completely shut down, and the public has been banned from filming.

Arash, 33, a government employee in Tehran, said a building next to his home in Tehran’s Shahrak-e Gharb neighbourhood had been destroyed in the strikes.

“I saw at least three dead children and two women in that building. Is this how Netanyahu plans to ‘liberate’ Iranians? Stay away from our country,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Israel has issued evacuation orders for whole sections of Tehran, a city of 10 million. Thousands of residents have fled, jamming the highways.

Samira, 11, moved in with her grandparents in the north-western city of Urmia after her family fled Tehran when a shopping centre near their house was struck. She said she has not been able to sleep at night.

“I’m afraid Israel will hit our home and my mom will die. I’m too scared. I just want to go home,” she said by phone.

Inside Israel, the missile strikes over the past week are the first time a significant number of projectiles from Iran have pierced defences and killed Israelis in their homes.

The director-general of the Israeli hospital that was damaged in Beersheba, Professor Shlomi Kodesh, told reporters at the site that a missile strike had destroyed several wards and wounded 40 people, mostly staff and patients.

Mr Netanyahu, visiting the site, said he had issued instructions that “no one is immune” from Israeli attacks.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted Israeli military and intelligence headquarters near the hospital. An Israeli military official denied there were military targets nearby.

Missiles also hit a residential building in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv. “It’s very scary,” said Yaniv, 34, who lives nearby. He said he heard a deafening explosion when the missile hit, shaking his apartment tower. REUTERS