Israeli jets strike ‘heart of Tehran’; IDF official says air superiority achieved

The Israeli Air Force on Sunday launched a wave of strikes “in the heart of Tehran,” as a military official told local media that the Jewish state had achieved aerial superiority over the Islamic Republic’s capital.

“The Israeli Air Force, guided by IDF intelligence, has begun a wave of strikes against targets belonging to the Iranian terrorist regime in Tehran,” the military said in a statement.

“Over the past day, the Israeli Air Force conducted large-scale strikes in order to establish aerial superiority and to pave the path to Tehran,” it added.

In a separate statement, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that IAF jets “are ‘stand-in’ over the skies of Tehran in a powerful attack on regime and repression targets in the heart of Tehran, in accordance with IDF plan as approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and me.”

“From now on,” the minister said, “a non-stop air train will operate” for what he described as a “powerful attack on Tornado targets in Tehran.”

The announcement came as an IDF official told Channel 12 News that the IAF, together with the U.S. military, had achieved aerial superiority over the western part of Iran, including Tehran.

Achieving air superiority over Tehran allows IAF fighter jets to strike targets in the city with heavy, precision-guided munitions from inside Iran’s airspace.

In a subsequent statement, the IDF said the Israeli Air Force struck two Iranian F-5 and F-4 fighter jets at Tabriz airport in western Iran as they were preparing for takeoff, in a bid to degrade Iran’s air force activity and further weaken the regime’s aerial defenses.

The military also released footage of strikes on a truck carrying ballistic missiles, on an Iranian air-defense system, on a ballistic missile launcher and on an unmanned aerial vehicle, underscoring what it described as ongoing efforts to dismantle Iran’s missile and drone capabilities.

The official cited by Channel 12 said that while Tehran still has surface-to-air missile launchers, the regime was largely focused on concealing them from Israeli and U.S. forces.

The military official noted that Iran’s air defenses were knocked out in a shorter time than during Israel’s June 2025 “Operation Rising Lion,” when air superiority was declared about 48 hours into the fighting.

The Israeli military launched preemptive airstrikes against the Islamic regime on Saturday morning to neutralize the threat it posed to the Jewish state, according to an earlier statement issued by Katz.

Tehran subsequently fired many dozens of ballistic missiles into the Jewish state’s territory, killing one and wounding several, with sirens continuing to blare across the country on Sunday morning.

In a statement posted to Truth Social announcing the start of “major combat operations” against the Islamic regime, U.S. President Donald Trump said that his objective was “to defend the American people” by neutralizing the “imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.”

Iran’s “menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas and our allies throughout the world,” the president wrote on Truth Social.