Israeli sources announced that the “rising Assad” operation carried out by Israel at dawn on Friday resulted in the death of 10 Iranian nuclear scientists, while Iranian media reported the killing of 6 prominent atom scientists in the raids that targeted Tehran and several Iranian cities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the attack targeted scientists working to develop an Iranian nuclear weapon. For its part, the Iranian Tasnim Agency reported the names of the scholars who were killed, including Faridoun Abbasi, the former president of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, and Muhammad Mahdi Tahranji, President of the Islamic University of Azad, along with others such as Abdul Hamid Minoshor and Ahmed Reda Zalqari.
This process comes in the context of a long history of Israel’s targeting of Iranian corn scientists, as the period between 2010 and 2012 witnessed the assassination of four nuclear scientists, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, Majeed Shahriari, Darius Redaei, and Mustafa Ahmed Roshan, using bombings or shooting.
The nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhry Zadeh was killed in 2020 near Tehran in an armed attack. Iran accuses Israel and the United States of being behind these assassinations targeting its nuclear program.
