BEERSHEBA, Israel — (AP) — Israel's defense minister threatened Iran's supreme leader on Thursday after Iranian missiles crashed into a major hospital in southern Israel and hit residential buildings near Tel Aviv, wounding at least 240 people. As rescuers wheeled patients out of the smoldering hospital, Israeli warplanes launched their latest attack on the country's nuclear program.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for Thursday's barrage and said the military "has been instructed and knows that in order to achieve all of its goals, this man absolutely should not continue to exist."
While it remained unclear whether U.S. President Donald Trump would task American forces to join Israel's sweeping campaign against Iran's military and nuclear program, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he trusted that Trump would “do what's best for America.”
“I can tell you that they’re already helping a lot,” Netanyahu said from the rubble and shattered glass around the Soroka Medical Center in Israel’s southern city of Beersheba.
U.S. officials said earlier this week that Trump had vetoed an Israeli plan to kill Khamenei. Trump later said there were no plans to kill him, "at least not for now."
The U.S. has been weighing whether to join Israel’s attack by striking Iran’s well-defended Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried under a mountain and widely considered to be out of reach of all but America’s “bunker-buster” bombs.
The conflict began last Friday with a surprise wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, senior officers and nuclear scientists. At least 639 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 1,300 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group.
Iran has retaliated by firing hundreds of missiles and drones, killing at least 24 people in Israel and wounding hundreds.
At least 240 people were wounded by the latest Iranian attack on Israel, among them 80 wounded in the strike on the Soroka Medical Center. The vast majority were lightly wounded, as much of the hospital building had been evacuated in recent days.
Israel's Home Front Command said that one of the Iranian ballistic missiles fired Thursday morning had been rigged with fragmenting cluster munitions. Rather than a conventional warhead, the missile carries dozens of submunitions that can explode on impact, showering small bomblets around a large geographic area and posing major safety risks on the ground.
The Israeli military did not say where the missile with the cluster munition warhead had been fired.
Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard insisted that it had not sought to strike the hospital and claimed the attack hit an Israeli military intelligence compound near the Gav-Yam Negev advanced technologies park, some three kilometers (2 miles) from the hospital. An elite technological unit of the Israeli military has a branch campus in the area, according to the tech park's website.
The Israeli army did not respond to a request for comment. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence that Iran had planned to target the hospital.
Many hospitals in Israel, including Soroka, had activated emergency plans in the past week. They converted underground parking garages to wards and moved patients to them, especially those on ventilators or are difficult to move quickly.
Israel also has a fortified, subterranean blood bank that kicked into action after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Doctors at Soroka Medical Center said that the Iranian missile struck almost immediately after air raid sirens went off, causing a loud explosion that could be heard from a safe room. The strike inflicted the greatest damage on an old surgery building and affected key infrastructure, including gas, water and air-conditioning systems, the medical center said.
The hospital, which provides services to around 1 million residents of Israel’s south, had been caring for 700 patients at the time of the attack. Of the 80 lightly wounded in the strike, half were hospital staff, it said. Afterward, the hospital closed to all patients except for life-threatening cases.
Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel, though most have been shot down by Israel's multitiered air defenses.
Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. However, in addition to having a nuclear power plant, it also enriches uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich at that level.
Israel is widely believed to have nuclear weapons — making it the only such state in the Middle East — but does not acknowledge having such arms.
Iran's supreme leader on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender and warned that any American military involvement by the Americans would cause "irreparable damage to them."
Already, Israel's campaign has targeted Iran's enrichment site at Natanz, centrifuge workshops around Tehran, and a nuclear site in Isfahan. Its strikes have also killed top generals and nuclear scientists.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he would travel to Geneva for meetings with his counterparts from the United Kingdom, France and Germany, as well as the European Union’s top diplomat, indicating a new diplomatic initiative might be underway.
Trump has said he wants something "much bigger" than a ceasefire and has not ruled out the U.S. joining in Israel's campaign.
Israel's military said Thursday its fighter jets targeted the Arak heavy water reactor, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Tehran, in order to prevent it from being used to produce plutonium.
Iranian state TV said there was “no radiation danger whatsoever” around the Arak site, which it said had been evacuated ahead of the strike.
Heavy water helps cool nuclear reactors, but it produces plutonium as a byproduct that can potentially be used in nuclear weapons. That would provide Iran another path to the bomb beyond enriched uranium, should it choose to pursue the weapon.
Iran had agreed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to redesign the facility to alleviate proliferation concerns. That work was never completed.
The reactor became a point of contention after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. Ali Akbar Salehi, a high-ranking nuclear official in Iran, said in 2019 that Tehran bought extra parts to replace a portion of the reactor that it had poured concrete into under the deal.
Israel said strikes were carried out "in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has been urging Israel not to strike Iranian nuclear sites. IAEA inspectors reportedly last visited Arak on May 14.
Due to restrictions Iran imposed on inspectors, the IAEA has said it lost “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s heavy water production — meaning it could not absolutely verify Tehran’s production and stockpile.
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Melzer reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv contributed.
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