A senior Iranian military commander linked to Hezbollah’s tunnel infrastructure was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Iran, the Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday.
The strike that killed Mahdi Vafaei, head of the Engineering Branch of the Quds Force’s Lebanon Corps, was in the Mahallat area in Iran, about 200 miles south of Tehran, according to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. It was one of more than 800 strike sorties, involving 16,000 munitions, that the IDF has conducted against Iran since the launch on Feb. 28 of the joint operation against the Islamic Republic by Israel and the United States, the statement continued.
Vafaei “led the Iranian terror regime’s efforts to establish underground terrorist infrastructure sites for Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, and managed dozens of underground projects in Lebanon utilized for the storage of advanced weapons,” according to the statement. His elimination “degrades the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s capacity to develop underground infrastructure sites and undermines the Iranian terrorist regime’s efforts to advance and carry out terror attacks across the Middle East,” it added.
The IDF has identified more than 5,000 targets in Iran, including thousands of “terror components that were subsequently struck,” according to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon and beyond brought the total targets hit since Feb. 28 to 7,000, it said.
One target hit Tuesday in Iran was a factory that “systematically transferred chemical substances to the Iranian terror regime designated for the development of chemical weapons,” the Spokesperson’s Unit said in a separate statement. The factory, owned by the Tofiq Daru Company, “served as a principal supplier of fentanyl to the SPND organization,” which is “responsible for the development of chemical weapons for the Iranian terror regime,” the statement continued.
The factory was disguised as a civilian company but in practice it transferred to the Iranian regime substances ”that were used for research and development of chemical weapons,” according to the Spokesperson’s Unit.
The strike on the Tofiq Daru Company “impaired the Iranian terror regime’s chemical weapons production capabilities,” the statement continued, adding that “precautionary measures were taken” ahead of the strike “in order to minimize possible harm to civilians.”
Tuesday saw several major strikes in Iran, including in a wave targeting “20 weapon manufacturing sites,” the IDF said.
In a wave of strikes on “Iranian regime infrastructure” across Tehran, the IDF added, over 80 munitions were used. Also hit were a site used for manufacturing “critical components for missile engines,” a site used for testing missile engines, and an air defense systems manufacturing site, the IDF said.
The IDF on Tuesday also struck “infrastructure in the IRGC’s main naval headquarters” and missile launch and storage sites and defense system sites, according to the Israeli military.
