In the early morning hours of June 13, 2025, the Israeli Air Force launched the first wave of what it called preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and military targets. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the goal of the operation, called Rising Lion, was “to damage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, its ballistic missile factories and military capabilities.”The first sorties of Rising Lion involved more than 200 aircraft including F-16s, F-15s, and F-35s (notably launching without radar reflectors, which means they did the mission in stealth mode) loaded with GBU-24 and GBU-31 bunker busting precision guided bombs that hit over 100 targets across Iran.Among the targets the Israelis hit were the nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz and ballistic missile site at Isfahan. They also struck locations around the Iranian capital of Tehran and elsewhere that killed Mohammad Mehdi Theranchi and Fereydoon Abbasi, who were prominent nuclear scientists, and high-ranking military officials including Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces. Iran’s immediate response was to launch over 100 Shahed UAVs toward Israel. The IDF claimed to have intercepted all of them.