Paris, France:

From coups to sabotage to cyberattacks, Israel has either been held responsible for or claimed responsibility for various attacks on Iran.

In Israel’s sights are Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Tehran’s nuclear program.

As Israel launched a series of airstrikes on Saturday that it said targeted Iran’s military infrastructure, AFP looks at other initiatives over the years.

Revolutionary Guards

Israel has been accused of targeting senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, mostly in initiatives outside its own country’s borders.

The latest victims include a general killed alongside Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli attack in the suburbs of Beirut on September 27.

According to Tehran, on April 1, 2024, an airstrike on Iran’s annex consulate in Damascus, for which Israel was responsible, killed seven members of the Revolutionary Guard, including two high-ranking members.

The latest murders are just the latest in a long list.

In December 2023, a year after a colonel was killed in Syria, a commander was killed in an attack for which Israel was blamed.

In May 2022, Sayyad Khodaei, a member of the Quds Force, the unit responsible for the Guard’s foreign operations, was shot and killed by two motorcyclists on his way to his home in Tehran. According to the New York Times, Israel said that it was responsible for the attack on the USA.

General Hasan Moghadam, who was in charge of armaments programs, was killed in an explosion at an ammunition depot near Tehran in November 2011, in an operation blamed on the United States and Israel.

Iran’s nuclear program

Israel is also accused of carrying out targeted assassinations of several senior Iranian physicists, often with ties to Tehran’s nuclear program.

Among them is nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was killed in November 2020 and posthumously presented as deputy defense minister.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a scientist who worked at the Natanz nuclear site, and Majid Shahriari, the founder of Iran’s nuclear community, as well as particle physics professor Massoud Ali Mohammadi, were among others killed over the years.

Israel is also accused of sabotaging Iran’s nuclear facilities, especially the Natanz complex south of Tehran.

According to Iran’s atomic energy agency, there was a small explosion at the facility on April 11, 2021.

The New York Times reported that Israel played a role in the “powerful explosion” that disabled the internal electrical system feeding the uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Another “accident” also hit Natanz in July 2020; The incident, which Iran’s atomic agency said was “sabotage”.

In September 2010, a cyberattack using the Stuxnet virus disabled the enrichment centrifuges at Natanz.

While Iran blamed Israel and the USA, information security experts also pointed the finger at Washington.

Iran’s allies

Iran’s allies also realized that Tehran was not always a safe haven.

Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in the Iranian capital on July 31, in an attack blamed on Israel. He was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president Massoud Pezeshkian.

Iranian oil

In March 2021, the Wall Street Journal, citing US and Middle Eastern officials, reported that Israel targeted at least a dozen ships bound for Syria in 2019, in most cases carrying Iranian oil.

The report stated that Israel deployed underwater mines in the attack.

Until 2021, Israel and Iran accused each other of naval sabotage.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is syndicated.)