Israel’s ambulance service said it was treating 40 people following the strike in Dimona, including 37 with mild injuries and a 10-year-old boy in serious condition. <\/p>\n
It said 68 others were being treated following a separate strike in the nearby town of Arad, including 47 with mild injuries and 10 in serious condition. <\/p>\n
“This is a very severe scene,” emergency medical technician Yakir Talkar said in a statement describing Arad, adding there were “many wounded with varying degrees of injury”.<\/p>\n
Israeli authorities are now investigating how missiles made it through air defence systems. <\/p>\n
“In both Dimona and Arad, interceptors were launched that failed to hit the threats, resulting in two direct hits by ballistic missiles with warheads weighing hundreds of kilograms,” Israeli firefighters said.<\/p>\n
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center – located in the Negev desert – is often referred to colloquially as the “Dimona reactor”. It is long accepted as holding Israel’s undeclared arsenal of nuclear weapons. <\/p>\n
Officially, the site is said to focus solely on research. But for around six decades, it has been an open secret that Israel developed a nuclear bomb there, even if each succeeding government has maintained a position of ambiguity over this. <\/p>\n
It has meant that Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. So, any indication that it is being targeted is taken with the utmost seriousness by Israel.<\/p>\n
Both Israel and the US have set the elimination of any possible Iranian capacity to develop a nuclear bomb as the key aim of the war.<\/p>\n
Iran’s own Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI) described the attack on Natanz as a violation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, though it said “no leakage of radioactive materials” was reported and there was “no danger to residents of the surrounding areas”. <\/p>\n
Natanz was also targeted in the first days of the war, which started on 28 February, by US-Israeli strikes, as well as during the 12-day war in June. <\/p>\n
Asked about Natanz on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces told Israeli and international media that it was not aware of a strike in the area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israel’s ambulance service said it was treating 40 people following the strike in Dimona, including 37 with mild…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-488704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}