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After the series of explosions: Iran prepares to respond Israel today

2020-08-15T06:22:52.948Z


The mysterious vulnerabilities in sensitive facilities have embarrassed Tehran, which continues to go between concealment and admission of nuclear development | Israel this week - a political supplement


The mysterious damage to sensitive facilities in Iran embarrassed the regime in Tehran, which continues to walk the fine line between concealment and admission of nuclear development • Yossi Manshroff, senior researcher: "Iranians live in a constant sense of persecution and are convinced that the nuclear is an insurance certificate for them"

  • The Iranians are not ready to face further humiliation. Documentation of the explosion earlier this month

    Photo: 

    From Twitter

The blast that illuminated the skies of Iran on Friday night, June 26, hit the skies of the capital Tehran and social networks almost as fast. Whoever dictated the hectic end of the news were the surfers, who reported, photographed and located the incident at one of the country’s secret military bases, the Perchin facility, which is also used by the Islamic Republic’s nuclear project and missile industry. 

The regime's media were quick to deny the reports, but satellite images indicated that the source of the explosion was indeed at the Hujira base, a branch for the production of Perchin missiles, and that much damage appeared to have been done to one of the buildings. 

The mysterious explosion was the opening shot of a chain of incidents in which various sensitive and important installations in Iran exploded or caught fire one after another. Power plants, petrochemical plants and a car manufacturing plant owned by the Revolutionary Guards went up in smoke, causing real hysteria among the administration.

Will respond, even without a smoking gun

The highlight of the latest wave of incidents was in the dead of night on July 2, near a small town in the deserts of southern Iran. Shortly after two in the morning, a huge explosion tore to pieces a building that was allegedly used for the development and experimentation of pine enrichment centers at the Natanz plant. 

An unidentified organization called the "Cheetah of the Nation" claimed responsibility for the operation, in a series of emails sent to various media outlets hours before the explosion became known. In contrast to previous incidents, the Iranian regime and its media have hinted that it is quite possible that this is a planned sabotage. After it was revealed in the New York Times that the damage could delay the Iranian nuclear program for two years, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Masawi explicitly threatened that Iran would come to terms with whoever was found responsible for the attack. 

Despite the overt threats, Iran has been careful to blame Israel directly, and has allowed the media and research institutes affiliated with the regime to implicitly raise this possibility. 

Yossi Kuperwasser // Photo: Yehoshua Yosef

Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of the research division at the Israel Defense Forces and currently a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public and State Affairs, is convinced that Tehran is still on absorption alert. 

"Although Iran apparently does not have incriminating information about the person responsible for the bombing of Natanz and what appears to be a series of explosions at military weapons production facilities, it is clear that it assumes the responsibility falls on the known suspects: Israel and the United States," said Cooperwasser. opposition. These are interested in undermining the nuclear program and embarrassing the regime, and there is no doubt that this goal has been achieved. Moreover, Iran does not seem to know whether it is likely to experience further spot blows.

"Even in the absence of a 'smoking gun,' and despite economic hardship, pressure on their allies in the region, continued damage to their people and bases in Syria and the spread of the corona, the Iranians will consider response options to deter further damage and honor, damaged again after Qassem Suleimani's assassination. 

"A possible response channel is an action in cyberspace, but it should not be ruled out that they will also consider the kinetic action options, especially from Syria. In the meantime, China is taking advantage of Iran's weakness to promote a multi-year cooperation agreement with Tehran on very favorable terms. "Challenging US policy toward Iran."

Virus, elimination and the price of infidelity

Iran's nuclear program has become one of the flagship projects of the ayatollahs' regime. Although Tehran insists it has no intention of producing nuclear weapons, many in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular see the possibility of a nuclear Iran as a nightmare, and will do anything to torpedo it. 

A series of creative, daring and sometimes ruthless operations have managed over the years to delay the project for many years. 

In 2010, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad admitted that the nuclear program had suffered significant damage from "Network Worm," a sophisticated malware that made a name for itself in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, the same facility that went up in flames earlier this month. 

The sophisticated damage, which according to foreign experts was developed and implanted in the facility's computers in American-Israeli cooperation, operated for years on the facility's computers and due to its ability to digitally sign other software, was not discovered by Iranian defense systems. Slowly, the "worm" has done enormous damage to Iranian centers, while Iranian engineers and scientists are failing to understand what is wrong. 

But the war on Iran's nuclear program has sometimes taken on a much less cruel and sophisticated face. In 2010, when the Texent virus was discovered, three of the program's top scientists were killed by a charge attached to their vehicle by a motorcyclist. In 2011, another senior Iranian physicist, Dr. Darius Razai, was assassinated in front of his house. The assassinations lasted until 2013 and also included the head of Iran's cyber network and another senior member of the Revolutionary Guards. 

Western newspapers claimed that those who carried out the assassinations were members of the Mujahideen Khalq, a left-wing organization that took part in the revolution that brought Khomeini to power in 1979, only to be outlawed and brutally persecuted like other non-aligned political organizations. . It is alleged that the Mossad trained opponents of the regime to tail the scientific and military elite. Three decades late, the ayatollahs' regime discovered the price of betrayal by its partners.

In 2018, Mossad officials managed to get their hands on a treasure trove of documents, which were stolen from safes in a warehouse in southern Tehran and smuggled out in an operation that could be the basis for a series of tensions. The operation revealed to the world what Israel had been saying for more than a decade - that Iran, despite its statements, had never abandoned the idea of ​​developing nuclear weapons. 

Why is Iran actually willing to hide, lie and act against its declared ideology, in the face of international losses and boycotts, in order to obtain nuclear weapons? Dr. Yossi Manshroff, an Iranian researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), explains: "There are three reasons behind the Iranian regime's consistent desire to achieve nuclear capability: First, its self-esteem as one subject to siege and constant persecution. Tehran believes that nuclear weapons will be an insurance certificate against an external threat. 

"Second, Tehran is determined to achieve what it considers the ultimate deterrent weapon, as a result of the trauma of the Iran-Iraq war, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and the Iraqi Scud missiles that hit the Iranian home front. Third, nuclear weapons will bounce Iran to world power." 

Tehran's vigorous denials about its attempts to achieve nuclear capability stem in part from the fraud scheme and in part from the nature of the regime. Nuclear capability will allow the regime, in its view, to ensure its survival, and is therefore allowed to lie - in accordance with the Shiite "taqiya" principle, which allows the believer to distort the truth in order to survive.

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2020-08-15

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