The Israeli airstrike on Iran this week damaged a critical part of an air defense system at a military base that the Iranians use to protect the country’s key nuclear facilities, according to satellite imagery.
Images analyzed by experts found that the attack on the Eighth Shekari Air Base destroyed the “flap-lid” radar that the Russian-made S-300 air defense system uses to locate and track incoming enemy targets, The New York Times reported.
Iranian officials confirmed to the Times that the missiles struck the air defense system that is used to defend the area around Natanz, where Iran has its primary nuclear enrichment facility, and Isfahan, which is home to the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center (INTC), the country’s largest nuclear research complex that employs 3,000 scientists, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Western intelligence officials said that the Israelis fired one missile from a warplane “far from Israeli or Iranian airspace” that “included technology that enabled it to evade Iran’s radar defenses.”
The Iranians told the Times that the country’s air defense system, which they admitted was hit, was never activated because it did not detect any incoming projectiles.
Former U.S. government imagery analyst Chris Biggers posted a photo of the satellite imagery that showed evidence that the S-300 system had been damaged.
Umbra synthetic aperture radar imagery acquired 0648Z 19APR2024 showed evidence of damage to the Iranian S-300PMU2 strategic surface-to-air missile battery in Isfahan since 15APR2024. A probable damaged 30N6E target engagement radar was visible in imagery still on the radar… pic.twitter.com/eqMFTanPOH
— Chris Biggers (@CSBiggers) April 19, 2024
It also appears as though Israel deployed aerial drones that were launched from inside Iran, according to five intelligence officials from the West and Iran. It is not clear what damage the drones caused or what their target was.
Analysts say that the message that Israel sent to Iran was decisive: that it could strike whenever and wherever it wanted inside the country and the Iranians would not see it coming.
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The strike came in response to Iran launching an unprecedented attack on Israel last week that included more than 300 missiles and drones. Despite the scale of the attack, 99% of the projectiles were successfully intercepted and the several that did land inside Israel effectively created little more than some giant potholes at a runway in an Israeli air base.
