ANKARA: Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Saturday accused Israel of leading the Middle East towards “total disaster” by attacking Iran on June 13.
“Israel is now leading the region to the brink of total disaster by attacking Iran, our neighbour,” he told a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul. “There is no Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni or Iranian problem but there is clearly an Israeli problem,” Fidan said.
He called for an end to the “unlimited aggression” against Iran, adding: “We must prevent the situation from deteriorating into a spiral of violence that would further jeopardise regional and global security.”
Israel targeted “two centrifuge production sites” at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear facility overnight in a second wave of strikes on the location since the start of the war, a military official said on Saturday.
“Isfahan we targeted in the first 24 hours of our operation, but we carried out a second wave of strikes there overnight, deepening our achievements and advancing the damage to the facility,” the military official told reporters during a briefing on condition of anonymity.
He added that the targeting of two centrifuge production sites in Isfahan was “in addition to a couple more centrifuge production sites that we have been able to strike successfully in recent days”.
The repeated raids by the Israeli air force have “dealt a severe blow to Iran’s centrifuge production capabilities,” the official added.
Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium, both for civilian and military use, with the radioactive metal needing to be enriched to high levels for use in atomic weapons.
Isfahan, in central Iran, is known to have a uranium conversion facility which processes raw, mined uranium. It also holds a nuclear fuel fabrication facility, which was inaugurated in 2009 and produces low-enriched fuel for use in power plants.
In July 2022, Iran announced plans to construct a new research reactor there.
On the first day of Israel’s strikes on June 13, the Israeli military said it had struck “a facility for producing metallic uranium, infrastructure for reconverting enriched uranium, laboratories, and additional infrastructure” in Isfahan.
Iran’s atomic energy agency said afterwards that the damage was “not extensive” and there was no cause for concern about radiation.
Israel has also targeted Iran’s two main underground nuclear sites, Natanz and Fordo.
Israel said Saturday it had killed three Iranian commanders in its unprecedented bombing campaign across the Islamic republic.
Israel’s military said its fighter jets successfully targeted top Iranian official Saeed Izadi, in charge of coordination with Palestinian militant group Hamas, in Qom south of Tehran and announced the deaths of two other commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
As Israel continued to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and military targets, in an interview published Saturday, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar said by the country’s own assessment it had “already delayed for at least two or three years the possibility for them to have a nuclear bomb”.
“We will do everything that we can do there in order to remove this threat,” Saar told German newspaper Bild, asserting Israel’s onslaught would continue.
