As Israel’s air campaign against Iran entered its fifth day Monday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told residents of Tehran to evacuate, an announcement echoed by the Israel Defense Forces’s evacuation orders for the Iranian capital’s District 3, which contains a number of important government buildings.
Israel has focused many of its airstrikes on taking out important government leaders in a bid to debilitate the Iranian government and decapitate its military, rendering it incapable of the command-and-control capacity necessary to offer effective resistance. To its list of dead Iranian leadership it added Sunday Mohammed Kazemi, Chief of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence, as well as his deputy Hassan Mohaqiq and other senior Iranian intelligence officials. They were killed in an airstrike on an Iranian intelligence facility.
The attacks have made it difficult for Iran to respond effectively, but the Islamic Republic continued to launch ballistic missiles against Israeli targets throughout the weekend. Iranian missile strikes Sunday killed eight civilians, wounded hundreds more, and forced a partial shutdown of an oil refinery in Haifa.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that Iranian intermediaries have been quietly pushing for a reopening of President Donald Trump’s nuclear talks if the U.S. does not join Israel in the war, while other sources told Reuters that Iran had informed Oman and Qatar that it would not be willing to engage in any negotiations while “while under attack.”
Trump has declined Israeli invitations to join the bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Israel does not possess the bunker-busting munitions necessary to destroy some of Iran’s deeply-buried nuclear centrifuges.
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