Iran Fires Back after Israel Launched “Preemptive” Strikes: What to Know

TIME

Explosions were reported over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Friday evening as Iran launched a broad retaliatory strike against Israel, marking a significant escalation in an already volatile regional conflict.  Iran warned Israel that it would pay a “heavy price” for a series of strikes targeting military leaders, civilian officials, and nuclear sites across the country. Iran's state-run news agency IRNA claimed that the country's air defense systems had shot down at least two Israeli fighter jets, though the report could not be independently verified. The fate of the pilots remains unknown.

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00:00Israel has launched a massive attack on Iran, hitting sites across the country,

00:14including its Natanz nuclear enrichment site. This assault is the most serious

00:19that Iran has faced since its 1980s war with Iraq, and it just shows how

00:25dangerous the situation has become in the wider Middle East over a year after the Israel-Hamas

00:32war in the Gaza Strip began. Now, as of right now, the Iranians are still trying to dig through the

00:39rubble of these attacks, and they're trying to reconstitute their military command. The chief

00:45of army staff, as well as the head of Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and the general

00:51who oversaw the guard's ballistic missile arsenal, all have been killed by the Israelis. The Israelis

00:57say that the Mossad Intelligence Agency, as well as the Israeli Air Force, were involved in these

01:02attacks that are still going on, even now, targeting sites in Iran. And the Israelis are signaling they

01:09could go on for some time to come. Now, the Iranians already have launched several hundred drones at

01:15Israel, and the Israelis engage in dogfights with those drones, likely over Jordan. The whole region

01:22is really tense right now, and there's some concern that the Iranians could expand their target list

01:27already. Some are trying to link this attack back to America. The U.S. has a broad military footprint

01:33in the region. That includes the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, as well as other assets in the region,

01:39like the aircraft carrier Charles Vincennes, which has been in the area earlier fighting Yemen's Iranian-backed

01:46Houthi rebels.

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