Three quadrocopters, drones with four rotors, were aimed at “a munitions factory” north of the city. Tehran denounced a “cowardly act”.
A drone strike on Saturday night targeted a military base in Iran, which condemned “a cowardly act” related to tensions surrounding the nuclear file and the war in Ukraine.
Authorities remained very discreet on Sunday after claiming overnight they had repelled the attack, which bears similarities to clandestine operations targeting nuclear facilities in recent years.
“A cowardly act was committed today to make Iran less secure,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian condemned. But “such actions cannot spoil the will of our experts in the development of peaceful nuclear energy,” he added to the press.
“Minor damage”
The attack was carried out around 23:30 (20:00 GMT) this Saturday without causing any casualties and causing “minor damage to the roof” of a building of a military complex in Isfahan, a major city in central Iran, it said the Department of Defense overnight.
A total of three quadrocopters, drones equipped with four rotors, were aimed at “an ammunition factory” in the north of the city, as the Irna agency noted.
One of those drones, less damaged than the others, “was turned over to security forces stationed at the complex,” according to the agency.
A video widely circulated on social media, the authenticity of which AFP has been unable to verify, shows a large explosion at the site and images of emergency vehicles then moving toward the area.
Tehran accuses Israel
The announcement of this attack comes in a tense context amid a protest movement in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in September, ongoing differences over the nuclear issue and allegations by some countries of using drones to supply Tehran to the Russian army following the war in Ukraine.
In a statement to the Mehr news agency, MP Mohammad-Hassan Assafari accused the Islamic Republic’s “enemies” of disrupting the country’s “defense capabilities”.
Iran has several well-known nuclear research sites in the Isfahan region, including a uranium conversion plant.
In recent years, the Iranian authorities have implicated Israel in several covert actions carried out on its soil in the form of cyber attack campaigns, sabotage or targeted assassinations of scientists. Israel has never recognized such acts.
Attacks specifically targeted the nuclear research sites of Natanz in 2020 and 2021 and Karaj in the same year. In 2020, a leading nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed in an attack that Tehran said was carried out with a satellite-guided machine gun.
Nuclear talks stalled
Negotiations to revive the international Iran nuclear deal, known by its English acronym JCPOA, signed in 2015 between Iran on the one hand, the European Union and six major powers on the other, have stalled following the unilateral withdrawal of the United States in 2018.
This deal was aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a goal Iran has always denied.
However, in April 2022, Tehran announced that it had started production of 60% enriched uranium at the Natanz site, approaching the 90% needed to make a nuclear bomb.
Without establishing a connection with the attack, a fire broke out in a motor oil production plant in the north-west of the country on Saturday evening, the agency Irna reported. This fire, spectacular according to the images circulated by the media, occurred in an important industrial center.