A tornado is striking Tehran, Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday, referring to the ongoing airstrikes and Mossad operations throughout Iran since last Friday.
“Symbols of the regime are being blown up and collapsing, [including] the official state broadcaster and soon other such targets,” he said.
Iranians fleeing Tehran
Many residents of Tehran were fleeing the city, he said.
Hundreds of them had left by midday Tuesday, the IDF said, while foreign media reports said thousands had left.
Israel’s largest evacuation order was for a specific area of Tehran that has about 300,000 residents, foreign media reports said.
Nearly 10 million people live in the metropolitan Tehran area.
It was unclear whether the number of residents leaving Tehran had hit a tipping point, but Katz said events were moving in the direction of looking like “a collapsing dictatorship.”
Later Wednesday, Katz noted that the IDF had bombed Iran's Interior Ministry, a symbol of its ruthless and theocratic control over its population, in continuing to bring down symbols of the regime.
Katz has taken the hardest public line on attacks on Iran, sometimes getting ahead of IDF statements and in at least one instance backtracking from a statement that was construed by some as a willingness to target civilians.