NATO summit<\/a>, made reference to individuals who had been on the ground to assess the damage, without providing details.<\/p>\n\u201cI can\u2019t say it\u2019s a final assessment, because we\u2019re less than a week after,\u201d the Israeli official said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we can send officers openly. But that\u2019s the indication we have now.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Iran\u2019s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said the bombing raid \u201cbadly damaged\u201d the nuclear sites, but the Iranian government has said it will continue its nuclear efforts, which it insists are for peaceful purposes.<\/p>\n
A full review of the mission could take weeks, and experts have expressed skepticism of declarations by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the U.S. operation was a success within mere days of the attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cBattlefield damage assessment is an imprecise art, with initial estimates frequently being way off,\u201d said Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. \u201cI would be very suspicious of any claims \u2014 by Iran, by Trump, by Israel \u2014 about what has happened to Iran\u2019s enriched uranium stocks or to its centrifuges.\u201d<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s preliminary findings come after an initial assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cast doubt on the effectiveness of the American strikes. The U.S. intelligence agency said that, based on what it knew at the time, it believed that Iran had retained the core elements of its nuclear program despite the attack. The agency\u2019s assessment was first reported by CNN.<\/p>\n
The U.S. strikes came after nine days of an Israeli military campaign that decimated Iran\u2019s air defenses, its military leadership and its ballistic missile stockpiles, while degrading its nuclear facilities.<\/p>\n
Israeli intelligence has also monitored the reaction to the campaign among Iranian leadership, which has struggled to comprehend the extent of the damage, the Israeli official said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t believe everyone in the leadership knows what really happened, because the whole program was compartmentalized \u2014 they weren\u2019t sharing a lot of information, and a lot of the officers who were highly involved on the ground level were eliminated,\u201d the official continued. \u201cSo a lot of the top leadership hasn\u2019t fully begun to understand what\u2019s happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
The developing intelligence picture comes as Trump defended the U.S. mission, called Operation Midnight Hammer, during multiple appearances at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in The Hague on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been obliterated, totally obliterated,\u201d he said of Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities. Addressing the U.S. intelligence report, he added: \u201cThey did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it\u2019s just a few days after.\u201d<\/p>\n
The U.S. deployment of massive \u201cbunker buster\u201d munitions targeting Iran\u2019s main nuclear sites \u2014 including six dropped on Fordo, a facility burrowed deep into the side of a mountain \u2014 was intended to bury its most advanced equipment and most highly enriched uranium, which can be used to build nuclear warheads.<\/p>\n
Initial assessments of the damage were unclear, but since then, Trump said, \u201cwe\u2019ve collected additional intelligence.\u2029We\u2019ve also spoken to people that have seen the site, and the site is obliterated.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE HAGUE\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Israel\u2019s preliminary analysis of the damage caused by U.S. strikes on Iran\u2019s main nuclear facilities \u2014 based…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8991,11366,4641,83,99,15612,7088,15614,50,5394,15616,1408,15615,1807,1439,15613,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-15567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-attack","9":"tag-damage","10":"tag-expert","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-israeli-analysis","14":"tag-lot","15":"tag-main-nuclear-facility","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-nuclear-program","18":"tag-nuclear-site","19":"tag-official","20":"tag-preliminary-finding","21":"tag-president-trump","22":"tag-u-s","23":"tag-wednesday","24":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114748218781569552","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}