Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities, military officials, and nuclear scientists in a surprise preemptive strike early Friday morning.
In the days since, Israel and Iran have continued to trade blows, with Israeli officials saying they expect at least a few days or even a few weeks of fighting with Iran.
Iranian missile barrages have killed 27 Israelis and wounded hundreds of others, since the fighting began.
Why did Israel strike Iran now, and what happens next?
What happened?
Shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday, June 13, the IDF launched strikes on nuclear facilities, senior military officials, nuclear scientists, and missile sites across Iran.
A special emergency was declared across the country, with most events canceled and many businesses closed. Thousands of reserve soldiers were called up for the war effort.
Footage from Iran showed several apartment buildings hit by airstrikes, as well as military and nuclear sites across the country.
Dozens of senior Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists have been eliminated in the strikes. This included:
- The chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri
- The commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami
- The commander of Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters (a body that coordinates between the IRGC and Iran’s standard military), Gholam Ali Rashid
- The Commander of the IRGC’s Air Force, Amir Ali Hajizadeh
- Nuclear scientist Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi
- Nuclear scientist Fereydoon Abbasi
The strikes on Iran didn’t just come from the air, though. Israel also succeeded in hitting Iran from within.
The Mossad established explosive drone launchpads near weapons arrays in Iran. The explosive drones targeted missile sites near Tehran and senior officials.
Israeli commando forces also deployed weapons systems in the heart of Iran near missile systems, which were activated in conjunction with airstrikes to launch precision strikes. Weapons systems were also placed on vehicles in Iran to target Iranian air defenses.
A few hours after the strikes began, a wave of explosive drones was launched from Iran toward Israel, although they were all intercepted before they could reach Israel.
On Friday night, Iran launched several waves of missile barrages toward Israel. Three people were killed and several others were lightly to moderately injured. Heavy damage was caused in several locations directly hit by Iranian missiles in central Israel.
On Saturday, Israeli strikes continued in Iran, expanding to oil infrastructure in the country in response to the missile attacks on civilians in Israel.
Iran has launched several further missile barrages since, destroying and heavily damaging many homes throughout the country. Hundreds of Israelis were displaced and housed in hotels as their homes were too damaged to be safe.
Iran’s attempts to build a nuclear bomb
For years, Iran has conducted covert and overt operations to develop a nuclear weapon, although it has continuously denied that its nuclear program isn’t peaceful.
In 2015, Iran signed a deal with the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
That deal was meant to roll back Iran’s nuclear program to ensure it would take at least a year for Iran to develop a bomb, giving world powers enough time to respond before the weapon was developed.
Israel argued the deal wasn’t strong enough and that Iran would continue pursuing a weapon even under the agreement, while simultaneously benefiting from the lifting of sanctions. Israel also argued that Iran hadn’t been honest about the extent of its nuclear activity and couldn’t be trusted.
In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, insisting that a better deal could be reached. Trump argued that the JCPOA enriched Iran, which gave it the money to fund terrorism around the world.
Since then, Iran has significantly advanced its nuclear program, enriching large amounts of uranium to high levels of about 60%. In modern nuclear weapons, uranium is usually enriched to 90% (Check out the bottom of this article for an explanation of what all this means and why it’s important for nuclear weapons development).
As of last month, Iran was estimated to have enough highly enriched uranium that it could prepare 11 weapons within just one month. There are other steps Iran would still need to complete to develop a nuclear missile, but it’s estimated that this process would take at most six months to a year.
In recent months, Iran and the Trump administration have been conducting negotiations aimed at reaching a deal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
The talks had hit a dead end in recent weeks, as Iran insisted on continuing to enrich uranium domestically, while the U.S. rejected such an option.
Alongside their nuclear ambitions, the Khamenei regime, which runs Iran, has set the destruction of Israel as a central goal over the years.
To that end, they’ve organized, armed, and funded a massive network of proxy terrorist groups across the Middle East and around the world for over 40 years, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
This network was used to attack Israel, the U.S., and other countries, including Saudi Arabia, while keeping the conflict away from Iran itself. The network also served as a deterrent to allow Iran to continue working on its nuclear program, threatening to respond to anyone who could attack the country.
During the war sparked by the October 7 attacks, Israel heavily damaged many of Iran’s proxies, especially Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran’s proxy network suffered another heavy blow when the Syrian government, which was a central base for the network, was overthrown by rebels heavily opposed to the Khamenei regime late last year.
Iran and Israel also traded blows directly twice throughout the war, with Israel taking out several Iranian commanders and much of their advanced air defense system and Iran launching barrages of hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel.
For years, Israelis debated whether fighting Iran’s proxy network was enough or if it was necessary to take out the “head of the octopus” which was funding and arming the network (AKA Iran). Part of the problem was the threat posed by the network to Israel, preventing such a strike.
In the days leading up to the strikes, Trump said that he had become a lot more pessimistic about the chances of reaching a deal. Additionally, the U.S. began pulling nonessential personnel out of embassies in the Middle East, and security alerts were issued for the region.
Why did Israel strike now?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel decided to strike now because “Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before” to weaponize enriched uranium.
“If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year, it could be within a few months, less than a year, this is a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister added that Iran was trying to produce 10,000 advanced ballistic missiles that could threaten Israel.
IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir stressed that “We began this operation because the time has come, we are at the point of no return.”
“We cannot afford to wait for another time to operate; we have no other choice,” Zamir said. “Recent and past events of history have taught us that when the enemy is attempting to destroy us, we must not turn a blind eye. As such, we need to fight for our existence; the freedom is given to those willing to fight for it.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit added that intelligence information showed that “in recent years, and more so since the beginning of the war, concrete progress has been identified in the Iranian regime’s efforts to produce weapons components adapted for a nuclear bomb.”
U.S. officials called on Iran to agree to a deal on America’s terms, warning that a refusal to do so would lead to further and more intensive strikes. They also told CNN that some American officials believe Israel is trying to push Iran into regime change.
How has the world responded to the strikes?
The first statement on the strikes out of the U.S. came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who stressed that the country. was not involved in any way in the strikes. “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense,” Rubio said, calling on Iran not to harm U.S. interests or soldiers.
However, later in the day, Trump issued a statement that was more directly supportive of Israel and attacked Iran for not agreeing to a deal.
“I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.”
“I told them it would be much worse than anything they know, anticipated, or were told, that the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it. Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” Trump warned. “There has already been great death and destruction, but there is still time to make this slaughter, with the next already planned attacks being even more brutal, come to an end. Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
The United Arab Emirates, an Israeli ally in the region, condemned the Israeli strikes “in the strongest terms,” and expressed its “deep concern over the continued escalation and its repercussions on security and stability in the region.”
The UAE “stressed the importance of exercising maximum restraint and prudence to avoid risks and the expansion of the conflict, and called on countries to use diplomatic means to avoid conflict.
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al-Saud condemned what he called a “blatant Israeli aggression,” telling Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi that his country rejects the use of force.
“The Israeli attack hinders efforts aimed at de-escalation and reaching diplomatic solutions,” said Al-Saud.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stressed that Israel has a right to defend itself and that Iran should not develop nuclear weapons, but also called on both sides to refrain from escalation.
What’s uranium enrichment, and why does it have everyone on edge?
To build a nuclear bomb, you need uranium, but you can’t just rip uranium ore out of the ground and stuff it in a missile.
First, you have to enrich it. There are two types of uranium in mined ore: Uranium-235 and Uranium-238. Uranium-235 is what you need for a bomb, but it only makes up about 1% of the mass of mined ore. So to get enough Uranium-235, you’ve got to essentially sift it out. To do that, today we use centrifuges, which essentially spin out the U-238, which is heavier, leaving behind mostly just U-235, although some U-238 is still mixed in. The more times you repeat this process, the more U-238 you remove and the purer the U-235 becomes.
For most civilian purposes, such as nuclear electricity reactors, the uranium only needs to be enriched up to about 3 to 5%, AKA less spinning time. However, to make a bomb, the uranium has to be a lot purer, at least 20% enriched. Even then, the process isn’t over.
To make a bomb, you need the uranium to be able to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, where atoms are split apart, hitting other atoms and forcing them to split apart, hitting other atoms and forcing them to split apart…you get the idea. When this is done super quickly, you get a lot of atoms splitting all at once, AKA a nuclear explosion.
To do any of this, though, you need uranium-235: the only part of the uranium ore that can sustain that reaction because of how light and unstable it is.
Not any amount will do, though. If you only have a little bit or a lot but not pressed together tightly, the uranium atoms may split apart without hitting other atoms, AKA no chain reaction. To make matters worse, if you have too much uranium-238, it’ll get in the way like a buffer, also stopping the reaction.
So let’s say you have uranium that’s only 5% enriched, that means there’s a lot of uranium-238 that can get in the way. That means you need a lot of material (3,600 kg or about the mass of an elephant) tightly packed together (in a sphere about the size of an exercise ball), if you want a uranium-235 particle to have a chance of hitting other uranium-235 particles when it splits. Needless to say, a missile that weighs as much as an elephant isn’t so practical if you want to hit anything at all far from you.
But as the uranium becomes more enriched, it’s easier to get that desired chain reaction. At 45% enrichment, you only need 36kg in a volleyball-sized sphere. And at 93% enrichment, you only need 12 kg in an apple-sized sphere, which is great for when you want to lob it at your far-away enemies.
Most nuclear weapons today use 90% enriched uranium, so Iran is 30% away. That’s far right?
Not really.
The more uranium is enriched, the less time it takes to enrich it even further. While it takes a lot of work to enrich uranium to 3-5%, it takes a lot less to get it from 60% to 90%. It’s not clear exactly how long it would take, but it’s estimated that if Iran were to use its more advanced centrifuges, it could enrich enough uranium for a bomb within a matter of days or weeks.
Enriched uranium on its own isn’t enough for a bomb, though.
Nuclear weapons aren’t like regular missiles. They need a lot of special technical requirements, requirements that Iran still doesn’t seem to have ready.
Developing those capabilities and fashioning them all into a working weapon is going to take some time, likely at least a few months, although some argue it could be less. Not a lot of time, but more than enrichment.
That means that possibly even more concerning than enrichment would be signs that Iran was conducting testing to develop the technical developments needed for a nuclear missile. There have been signs that Iran has already conducted at least some of these tests.
Originally Published Jun 16, 2025 08:37AM EDT
