Tehran, June 21 (IANS) Israeli attacks on Iran over the past nine days have killed over 400 Iranians and left 3,056 others wounded, Hossein Kermanpour, head of the Iranian Health Ministry’s public relations, said on Saturday.
“Among the injured, 2,220 have been treated and discharged from Ministry of Health hospitals, while 232 received outpatient care at the scene of the attacks,” Kermanpour said in a post on social media platform X.
According to the health official, the majority of the casualties have been civilians, with 54 women and children among those killed in the Israeli strikes.
As the conflict continues, the Iranian Red Crescent Society said earlier in the day that one of its rescue helicopters was damaged as a result of a “treacherous Israeli attack.”
Israel launched a series of large-scale airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear and military sites on June 13, killing several top commanders and nuclear scientists. In response, Iran retaliated overnight with missile and drone strikes on Israeli territory, Xinhua news agency reported.
Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in statements that it had killed three senior commanders in Iran overnight.
One of them was Saeed Izadi, the commander of the Palestine Corps in the Quds Force, a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to the IDF.
Izadi, a key coordinator between the Iran and Hamas, was killed in an air strike in Iran’s Qom province, the IDF said.
“Izadi was responsible for increasing the financial funding from Iran to Hamas for activities against Israel,” the statement read. “He was also a main orchestrator of the October 7th massacre and one of the few people who knew about it in advance.”
The IDF said in a separate statement that its air force also killed Behnam Shahriyari, commander of the Quds Force’s weapons transfer unit in the IRGC, in western Iran.
The statement said that Shahriyari was responsible for “weapons transfers from Iran to its proxies” across the Middle East.
“Shahriyari commanded the transfer of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars annually to various terrorist organizations, utilizing a network of shell companies, money changers, and couriers,” the statement read.
Earlier on Saturday, the IDF said that its air force had struck and killed Aminpour Joudaki in southwestern Iran. Joudaki was the commander of the second unmanned aerial vehicle brigade of the IRGC Air Force.
–IANS
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