Iranian missile strikes Israel’s ‘crown jewel of science’
For years, Israel has targeted Iranian nuclear scientists, hoping to choke progress on Iran’s nuclear program by striking at the brains behind it.
Now, with Iran and Israel in an open-ended direct conflict, scientists in Israel have found themselves in the crosshairs after an Iranian missile struck a premier research institute known for its work in life sciences and physics, among other fields.
While no one was killed in the strike on the Weizmann Institute of Science early Sunday, it caused heavy damage to multiple labs on campus, snuffing out years of scientific research and sending a chilling message to Israeli scientists that they and their expertise are now targets in the escalating conflict with Iran.
“It’s a moral victory” for Iran, said Oren Schuldiner, a professor in the department of molecular cell biology and the department of molecular neuroscience whose lab was obliterated in the strike. “They managed to harm the crown jewel of science in Israel.”
Iranian scientists were a prime target in a long shadow war
During years of a shadow war between Israel and Iran that preceded the current conflict, Israel repeatedly targeted Iranian nuclear scientists with the aim of setting back Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel continued that tactic with its initial blow against Iran days ago, killing multiple nuclear scientists, along with top generals, as well as striking nuclear facilities and ballistic missile infrastructure.
For its part, Iran has been accused of targeting at least one Weizmann scientist before. Last year, Israeli authorities said they busted an Iranian spy ring that devised a plot to follow and assassinate an Israeli nuclear scientist who worked and lived at the institute.
Citing an indictment, Israeli media said the suspects, Palestinians from east Jerusalem, gathered information about the scientist and photographed the exterior of the Weizmann Institute but were arrested before they could proceed.
With Iran’s intelligence penetration into Israel far less successful than Israel’s, those plots have not been seen through, making this week’s strike on Weizmann that much more jarring.
“The Weizmann Institute has been in Iran’s sights,” said Yoel Guzansky, an Iran expert and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv think tank. He stressed that he did not know for certain whether Iran intended to strike the institute but believed it did.
While it is a multidisciplinary research institute, Weizmann, like other Israeli universities, has ties to Israel’s defense establishment, including collaborations with industry leaders like Elbit Systems, which is why it may have been targeted.
But Guzansky said the institute primarily symbolizes “Israeli scientific progress” and the strike against it shows Iran’s thinking: “You harm our scientists, so we are also harming (your) scientific cadre.”
Damage to the institute and labs ‘literally decimated’
Weizmann, founded in 1934 and later renamed after Israel’s first president, ranks among the world’s top research institutes. Its scientists and researchers publish hundreds of studies each year. One Nobel laureate in chemistry and three Turing Award laureates have been associated with the institute, which built the first computer in Israel in 1954.
Two buildings were hit in the strike, including one housing life sciences labs and a second that was empty and under construction but meant for chemistry study, according to the institute. Dozens of other buildings were damaged.
The campus has been closed since the strike, although media were allowed to visit Thursday. Large piles of rock, twisted metal and other debris were strewn on campus. There were shattered windows, collapsed ceiling panels and charred walls.
A photo shared on X by one professor showed flames rising near a heavily damaged structure with debris scattered on the ground nearby.
“Several buildings were hit quite hard, meaning that some labs were literally decimated, really leaving nothing,” said Sarel Fleishman, a professor of biochemics who said he has visited the site since the strike.
Life’s work of many researchers is gone
Many of those labs focus on the life sciences, whose projects are especially sensitive to physical damage, Fleishman said. The labs were studying areas like tissue generation, developmental biology or cancer, with much of their work now halted or severely set back by the damage.
“This was the life’s work of many people,” he said, noting that years’ or even decades’ worth of research was destroyed.
For Schuldiner, the damage means the lab he has worked at for 16 years “is entirely gone. No trace. There is nothing to save.”
In that once gleaming lab, he kept thousands of genetically modified flies used for research into the development of the human nervous system, which helped provide insights into autism and schizophrenia, he said.
The lab housed equipment like sophisticated microscopes. Researchers from Israel and abroad joined hands in the study effort.
“All of our studies have stopped,” he said, estimating it would take years to rebuild and get the science work back on track. “It’s very significant damage to the science that we can create and to the contribution we can make to the world.”
** Trump says he’ll decide whether US will directly attack Iran within 2 weeks
President Donald Trump said Thursday he will decide within two weeks whether the U.S. military will get directly involved in the conflict between Israel and Iran given the “substantial chance” for renewed negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program, as the two sides attacked one another for a seventh day.
Trump has been weighing whether to attack Iran by striking its well-defended Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried under a mountain and widely considered to be out of reach of all but America’s “bunker-buster” bombs. His statement was read out by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Earlier in the day, Israel’s defense minister threatened Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after Iranian missiles crashed into a major hospital in southern Israel and hit residential buildings near Tel Aviv, wounding at least 240 people. Israel’s military “has been instructed and knows that in order to achieve all of its goals, this man absolutely should not continue to exist,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said.
As rescuers wheeled patients out of the smoldering hospital, Israeli warplanes launched their latest attack on Iran’s nuclear program.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he trusted that Trump would “do what’s best for America.” Speaking from the rubble and shattered glass around the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, he added: “I can tell you that they’re already helping a lot.”
A new diplomatic initiative appeared to be underway as Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepared to travel Friday to Geneva for meetings with the European Union’s top diplomat and counterparts from the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Britain’s foreign secretary said he met at the White House with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff, to discuss the potential for a deal that could cool the conflict.
“A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution,” Britain’s David Lammy said in a social media post after Thursday’s meeting.
The open conflict between Israel and Iran erupted last Friday with a surprise wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generalsand nuclear scientists. At least 657 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 2,000 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group.
Iran has retaliated by firing 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli army estimates. Most have been shot down by Israel’s multitiered air defenses, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded.
Many hospitals have transferred patients underground
Israel’s Home Front Command asserted that one of the Iranian ballistic missiles fired Thursday morning had been rigged with fragmenting cluster munitions. Rather than a conventional warhead, a cluster munition warhead carries dozens of submunitions that can explode on impact, showering small bomblets around a large area and posing major safety risks on the ground. The Israeli military did not say where that missile had been fired.
At least 80 patients and medical workers were wounded in the strike on Soroka Medical Center. The vast majority were lightly wounded, as much of the hospital building had been evacuated in recent days.
Iranian officials insisted they had not sought to strike the hospital and claimed the attack hit a facility belonging to the Israeli military’s elite technological unit, called C4i. The website for the Gav-Yam Negev advanced technologies park, some 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the hospital, said C4i had a branch campus in the area.
The Israeli army did not respond to a request for comment. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence that Iran had planned to target the hospital.
Many hospitals in Israel, including Soroka, had activated emergency plans in the past week. They converted parking garages to wards and transferred vulnerable patients underground. Israel also has a fortified, subterranean blood bank that kicked into action after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Doctors at Soroka said the Iranian missile struck almost immediately after air raid sirens went off, causing an explosion that could be heard from a safe room. The strike inflicted the greatest damage on an old surgery building and affected key infrastructure, including gas, water and air-conditioning systems, the medical center said.
The hospital, which provides services to around 1 million residents, had been caring for 700 patients at the time. After the strike, the hospital closed to all patients except for life-threatening cases.
Iran rejects calls to surrender or end its nuclear program
Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But it is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.
Israel is widely believed to be the only country with a nuclear weapons program in the Middle East but has never acknowledged the existence of its arsenal.
The Israeli air campaign has targeted Iran’s enrichment site at Natanz, centrifuge workshops around Tehran, a nuclear site in Isfahan and what the army assesses to be most of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. The destruction of those launchers has contributed to the steady decline in Iranian attacks since the start of the conflict.
Israeli airstrikes reached into the city of Rasht on the Caspian Sea early Friday, Iranian media reported. The Israeli military had warned the public to flee the area around Rasht’s Industrial City, southwest of the city’s downtown. But with Iran’s internet shut off to the outside world, it’s unclear just how many people could see the message.
On Thursday, anti-aircraft artillery was audible across Tehran, and witnesses in the central city of Isfahan reported seeing anti-aircraft fire after nightfall.
Trump’s announcement of a decision in the next two weeks opened up diplomatic options, with the apparent hope Iran would make concessions after suffering major military losses.
But at least publicly, Iran has struck a hard line.
Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender and warned that any U.S. military involvement would cause “irreparable damage to them.”
Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on Thursday criticized Trump for using military pressure to gain an advantage in nuclear negotiations. The latest indirect talks between Iran and the U.S., set for last Sunday, were cancelled.
“The delusional American president knows that he cannot impose peace on us by imposing war and threatening us,” he said.
Iran agreed to redesign Arak to address nuclear concerns
Israel’s military said its fighter jets targeted the Arak heavy water reactor, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Tehran, to prevent it from being used to produce plutonium.
Iranian state TV said there was “no radiation danger whatsoever” around the Arak site, which it said had been evacuated ahead of the strike.
Heavy water helps cool nuclear reactors, but it produces plutonium as a byproduct that potentially can be used in nuclear weapons. That would provide Iran another path to the bomb beyond enriched uranium, should it choose to pursue the weapon.
Iran had agreed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to redesign the facility to alleviate proliferation concerns. That work was never completed.
The reactor became a point of contention after Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Ali Akbar Salehi, a high-ranking nuclear official in Iran, said in 2019 that Tehran bought extra parts to replace a portion of the reactor that it had poured concrete into under the deal.
Israel said strikes were carried out “in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that due to restrictions imposed by Iran on inspectors, the U.N. nuclear watchdog has lost “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s heavy water production — meaning it could not absolutely verify Tehran’s production and stockpile.
AP
