Paris, France:

From successful jobs to sabotage and cyber attacks, Israel has either been blamed for or claimed responsibility for a variety of attacks against 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 attempts over the years.

Revolutionary Guard

Israel has been accused of targeting top members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, mostly in attempts outside their country’s borders.

The latest casualties include a general killed on September 27 by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli strike in the suburbs of Beirut.

An airstrike blamed on Israel on Iran’s consular annex building in Damascus on April 1, 2024, killed seven members of the Revolutionary Guards, including two high-ranking ones, according to Tehran.

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

In December 2023, a commander died in Syria in an attack blamed on Israel, a year after a colonel was killed, also in Syria.

In May 2022, Sayyad Khodaei, a member of the Quds Force, the unit responsible for the Guards’ external operations, was shot by two motorcyclists on his way home in Tehran. According to the New York Times, Israel told the United States it was responsible for the hitjob.

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

Iran’s nuclear program

Israel has also been accused of carrying out targeted assassinations of several high-ranking Iranian physicists, often linked to Tehran’s nuclear program.

Among them is nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in November 2020 and posthumously named deputy defense minister.

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

Israel has also been accused of sabotaging Iran’s nuclear facilities, mainly the Natanz complex in southern Tehran.

On April 11, 2021, the site saw a small explosion, according to Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency.

The New York Times reported that Israel played a role in the “powerful explosion” that apparently destroyed the domestic electrical system powering the uranium enrichment centrifuges.

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

In September 2010, a cyber attack with the Stuxnet virus took out the enrichment centrifuges at Natanz.

Iran blamed Israel and the United States, while intelligence security experts also pointed the finger at Washington.

Iran’s allies

And Iran’s allies have discovered that Tehran is not always a safe haven.

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

Iranian gasoline

In March 2021, the Wall Street Journal, citing US and Middle East officials, reported that Israel had targeted at least a dozen ships traveling to Syria in 2019, most of them carrying Iranian gasoline.

The report said Israel had deployed underwater mines in the assault.

By 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 published from a syndicated feed.)