Israel has just carried out a series of devastating airstrikes on Iran, eliminating leaders, attacking nuclear sites and military installations inside Iran.
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00:00Israel has just carried out a series of devastating airstrikes on Iran, eliminating leaders, attacking nuclear sites and military installations inside Iran.
00:10What's Operation Rising Lion all about? I'll tell you.
00:15This is one of the most audacious Israeli operations and this one targets Iran.
00:25Now, you have to understand how strange this geography is.
00:31Israel is a country that is nearly a thousand kilometers away from Iran.
00:49That's right, both countries don't share a border.
00:55Israel, of course, is a country the size of the Indian state of Manipur, it's over 20,000 kilometers and Iran is a country that's half the size of India, it's almost 1.3 million square kilometers.
01:18So, that's a David and Goliath fight for you right here.
01:20Now, Israel claims to have used something like 200 fighter aircraft, which struck something like 200 targets inside Iran.
01:33Now, what are the aircraft that are used?
01:35We know this from the videos that we have seen so far of aircraft flying around Iranian airspace.
01:40The three aircraft appear to be the F-15, which is a very capable US-built bomber.
01:55The F-35, it's a very modern 5th generation stealth strike aircraft and, of course, the iconic F-16.
02:19F-16, all three aircraft make up a bulk of the Israeli Air Force's strike fleet and the IAF, the Israeli Air Force claims to have launched something like 200 of these aircraft, 200 aircraft.
02:37That's possibly the size of the entire Iranian Air Force, 200 of these aircraft struck something like 100 targets inside Iran.
02:47What are the targets that they struck?
02:49Well, there were essentially three types of targets.
02:52One is leadership targets.
02:54You had the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council, a very, very important man, something like the Chairman Joint Chief of Staff in the United States.
03:06General Salami was assassinated in his house.
03:11You had nuclear installations taken out.
03:14Now, Iran has a number of nuclear enrichment facilities around the country.
03:24They have facilities at Natanz, Bushair.
03:31All of these were struck by Israeli jets.
03:35Now, some of these facilities, mind you, are deep underground.
03:39They're buried deep underground, 50 to 60 meters under the ground.
03:42The Israeli Air Force claims to have destroyed all of them.
03:47What they possibly used was a weapon called the GBU-109.
03:55Now, that is a very powerful American-developed weapon that is carried by all of these aircraft.
04:02It's a one-ton weapon.
04:03And that, when it's launched by the fighter jets, can strike at deeply buried targets underground.
04:13So, this is possibly one of the bombs that was used in these attacks.
04:17And, of course, the third type of targets that Israel took out inside Iran during Operation Rising Line are the AD networks.
04:27That is the Iranian ground-based air defense networks here.
04:32And this is a developing story.
04:35How were these air defense sites taken out?
04:38There's one version that suggests that Israel launched hundreds of drones, which had already been smuggled inside Iran,
04:47and which lay in wait exactly like the Ukrainians had done it a few days back inside Russia.
04:52These drones were then activated, and they flew in to destroy all of these Iranian ground-based air defense networks,
05:02their radars, their missiles.
05:04All of these were struck in what is called the Suppression of Air Defense Operation, SEAD, as it's called.
05:12Once all of these radars and missile sites were knocked out, it became easier for the, what is called the strike packages of all of these fighter jets to literally come in.
05:24But it is an astounding operation, which targeted, as the Israelis say, a hundred locations all across Iran,
05:34striking literally within hours of each other.
05:36leadership targets, nuclear sites, buried nuclear sites, and, of course, military installations like AD networks and the like.
05:47So this is the biggest attack by Israel on Iran so far.
05:51And this is an operation of the kind that Israel is known to be carrying out in the past.
05:58It's, of course, carried out some spectacular operations like Operation Jonathan,
06:02that rescue of the hijacked passengers in Africa, almost 50 years back.
06:10So Israel is known to carry out operations of this kind.
06:12And this Operation Rising Line, using such a large number of fighter jets,
06:17almost simultaneously striking across a country the size of Iran, is going to be studied for several years from now.