Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on Thursday, 13 March 2026, that Israeli strikes have killed a top Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded several others, as the 14th day of the US-Israeli war on Iran brought fresh devastation across the region. Speaking at a news conference, Netanyahu said the attacks inflicted severe damage on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij forces and claimed the strikes had prevented Iran from moving its nuclear and ballistic projects underground.
An earlier wire report erroneously stated that multiple scientists had been killed; the Associated Press later issued a correction clarifying that one top scientist was killed and several others were wounded. Meanwhile, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei absent from public view since the war began, vowed in a statement read on state television to avenge those killed, including the more than 165 people who died in a strike on an Iranian girls’ school. The conflict, which erupted on 28 February 2026, has displaced millions, sent oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel, and drawn urgent international calls for restraint.
‘Iran Is No Longer The Same Iran’: Netanyahu
Netanyahu said Israel had killed senior nuclear scientists involved in developing nuclear weapons and targeted additional scientists, adding that Israel was working to create the conditions for Iranians to remove the regime describing the strikes as an effort “to give them the space needed to go out to the streets.” Addressing Iranians who had taken to the streets in protest, he said, “We are standing by your side,” before adding, “But at the end of the day, this is up to you. It’s in your hands.” He also labelled Iran’s new Supreme Leader a “puppet of the Revolutionary Guards” who was unable to appear in public.
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, promised to “finish the job,” even as he claimed Iran was “virtually destroyed,” and said in a social media post that preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon was a higher priority than rising oil prices. The US military confirmed that American forces had struck more than 6,000 targets since operations began, including more than 30 minelaying vessels. Iran-backed Hezbollah launched around 200 rockets from Lebanon at northern Israel, while Israeli strikes hit central Beirut twice in a single day, with one strike killing the director of the faculty of sciences and a professor at Lebanon’s only public university.
The Mounting Cost Of 14 Days Of Conflict
The war’s most haunting chapter has been the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, which occurred on the very first day of the conflict. The school was on a US target list and may have been mistaken for a military site, killing at least 175 people, many of them children, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Preliminary findings from a US military investigation determined that officers used outdated intelligence data when placing the school on the target list.
Ten US Democratic senators called the killing of schoolchildren “appalling and unacceptable,” while UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the body had “significant concerns” about whether the strikes complied with international humanitarian law, with a UN spokeswoman warning that the incident must not simply fade from public attention without accountability. UNESCO condemned the attack as “a grave violation of humanitarian law,” and a UN panel of child rights experts said it was “alarmed” and called for children to be protected.
On the economic front, Iran’s relentless attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf have effectively choked oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, pushing crude prices above $100 a barrel. The UN refugee agency reports up to 3.2 million people displaced inside Iran and 800,000 more from Lebanon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking in Turkey, called for de-escalation and dialogue, warning that “the most vulnerable are being hurt first and worst.” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in a joint statement with the leaders of France and Germany, condemned Iranian counter-strikes and called for a resumption of diplomacy, while stating he did “not believe in regime change from the skies.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Fourteen days into a war that was never put to a popular vote, the human cost has become impossible to look away from. The confirmation that a nuclear scientist was targeted and killed is being framed as a strategic success, yet it raises a deeply unsettling. More damning still is the emerging evidence around the Minab school strike, that outdated intelligence may have sent a Tomahawk missile into a classroom full of girls on the very first morning of the war.
Over 165 children and teachers were killed not on a battlefield, but at their desks. That is not collateral damage; that is a catastrophe of accountability. Millions of ordinary Iranians, Lebanese and people across the Gulf are now paying with their lives, livelihoods and homes for decisions made in offices far removed from the rubble. The world’s institutions the UN, international courts, civil society must not allow the urgency of geopolitics to bury the demand for justice. Wars are far easier to start than to stop and history is littered with conflicts that began with declarations of decisive victory and ended in generational trauma.
Also Read: Chennai: Mob Kills Van Driver After He Allegedly Urinates On Woman; Family Refuses To Claim Body
