The Israeli Air Force overnight on Saturday struck Tehran’s main oil depot. The reservoir was composed of at least 11 storage tanks, according to Israel’s Channel 12 News.
An Iranian oil ministry official confirmed the strike to The New York Times, and international media reports described significant fires and visible damage at the site.
“Tehran is burning,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz tweeted shortly after midnight.
Katz had issued a stark warning on Saturday, declaring that “Tehran will burn” if Iran continued to fire missiles at Israeli population centers. At least 10 people were killed overnight on Saturday in a wave of Iranian missile attacks on civilian areas across Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military confirmed that it had struck Iranian Defense Ministry headquarters in Tehran, the headquarters of Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), and other targets in the city. The SPND is responsible for the country’s nuclear project.
The targets hit were involved in advancing “the Iranian regime’s efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon and where the Iranian regime hid its nuclear archive,” according to the statement.
On Sunday morning, the IDF said that among the targets hit overnight Saturday were missile launchers, including those that were firing at Israel. In addition, the Iranian regime’s surface-to-air missile infrastructure and detection radars were attacked.
Furthermore, on Sunday morning, the Israeli Air Force completed a series of strikes on storage sites and missile launch infrastructure sites in western Iran.
As many as 50 fighter jets took part in the overnight strikes in Tehran, the IDF said on Sunday.
More than 80 targets were attacked overnight, and over 170 targets have been struck in total across Iran since Israel launched its preemptive operation early Friday, according to the IDF. Additionally, more than 720 military infrastructure locations have been hit.
For the first time since the start of the operation, the IDF on Sunday morning warned Iranian civilians to immediately distance themselves from weapons production facilities.
“Immediate notice to the entire Iranian population: All individuals who are in or near the country’s weapons production facilities should immediately leave these areas and report to the relevant authorities,” IDF Arab media spokesperson Col. Avichay Adraee wrote in Farsi on X, adding in a follow-up post that the warning included “supporting facilities.”
The message was also relayed by the IDF Farsi spokesperson in a video message posted to X.
Katz commented following the evacuation warning, saying that the military “will strike the sites and continue to peel the skin off the Iranian snake in Tehran and everywhere, stripping it of nuclear capabilities and weapons systems.”
He added, “The Iranian dictator is turning Tehran into Beirut and its residents into hostages for the sake of his regime’s survival.”
The IDF announced on Saturday that it had “established aerial superiority from western Iran to Tehran,” allowing Israeli aircraft to operate freely across a wide swath of territory.
Early on Friday, more than 200 Israeli jets attacked dozens of targets, including military and nuclear sites, in a “preemptive, precise, combined offensive” against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
The IDF said the attack was based on “high-quality intelligence” and was “in response to the Iranian regime’s ongoing aggression against Israel.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the operation, dubbed “Rising Lion,” would “continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat,” vowing to stop “the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”