Iran responded to Israel’s airstrike on its country by launching over 100 drones toward Israel on Friday morning.
The drone deployment came as retaliation for Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, which targeted Iran’s nuclear program in a military airstrike on Thursday. The preemptive attack centered on “dozens of military targets, including nuclear targets in different areas of Iran.”
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The airstrike was devastating for Iran, which suffered significant casualties among its country’s leadership. Several prominent military heads were killed in the strike, including Gen. Hossein Salami, the chief commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Gholamali Rashid, a senior IRGC commander, the Washington Examiner previously reported. Iranian nuclear scientists Fereydoun Abbasi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Mohammad-Mehdi Tehranchi, a theoretical physicist, were also killed in the attack.
Iranian state media also reportedly claimed that children were killed in “at least one of the airstrikes.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, confirmed the deaths and then warned that Israel would endure “severe punishment” as a result of the attack in a series of social media posts on X.
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“Zionist regime has committed a crime in our dear country today at dawn with its satanic, bloodstained hands,” Khamenei said. “It has revealed its malicious nature even more than before by targeting residential areas.”
“That [Zionist] regime should anticipate a severe punishment. By God’s grace, the powerful arm of the Islamic Republic’s Armed Forces won’t let them go unpunished,” he added. “With this crime, the Zionist regime has prepared for itself a bitter, painful fate, which it will definitely see.”