US bombing hits Bushehr reactor perimeter
A firefighter died and Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant was hit as the US resumed bombing, tearing up a ceasefire signed three weeks ago.
US missiles killed a firefighter, hit a Bushehr fishing pier and struck the perimeter of Iran’s only working nuclear plant, shattering a three-week ceasefire.
Khaled Qaderi, a firefighter, was killed at his post when a strike hit Iranshahr airport in Iran’s southeast, one of at least 14 people the Iranian health ministry says have died in two days of American bombing that has left 78 more injured. Nine members of Iran’s armed forces were killed in strikes the day before. On the Bushehr coast, a fishing pier used by local boats was also hit.
The Bushehr nuclear plant strike and the “reddest line”
Iranian officials in Bushehr province said the US strike also hit the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, the country’s only working civilian reactor. Iran says the reactor building itself was not damaged. It is the second time in three months a strike has landed near the plant: a projectile killed one person close to Bushehr in April, prompting the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, to warn that a direct hit on the reactor would cross the “reddest line” in nuclear safety and could trigger a severe radiological accident.
Rosatom, the Russian state firm that runs Bushehr with Iran’s national nuclear power company, had been due to send back several hundred of the roughly 700 technicians it evacuated when the war began, with a phased return planned from this month. Rosatom’s chief, Alexei Likhachyov, has separately warned that a strike on the plant risks spreading radioactive contamination well beyond Iran’s borders.
A ceasefire Washington signed three weeks ago
The strikes came a day after President Trump declared the US-Iran ceasefire “over”, three weeks after Washington and Tehran signed the Pakistan-brokered Islamabad Memorandum on 17 June. The war itself began on 28 February, when a US-Israeli operation killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and, in the same wave of strikes, roughly 170 people when a missile hit a girls’ school beside a naval base in Minab.
US Central Command said Thursday’s strikes hit around 90 Iranian military targets, including air defences and coastal surveillance sites, and described the campaign as necessary to protect shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which had earlier fired on commercial shipping in the strait, responded by launching ballistic missiles at US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and at Jordan’s Azraq base, injuring one person in Kuwait. “If you strike, you will be struck,” said Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said Tehran was preparing a further “military operation” if the attacks continue.
Iran’s death toll since the war began in February has passed 3,600, according to the Iran Human Rights Activists News Agency. Washington tore up a ceasefire it signed three weeks ago, and sent missiles toward a live nuclear reactor rather than wait for the ink to dry.
