Two Iranian scientists fell ill in late May, and they grew sicker and ended up in the intensive care units of hospitals in two different cities nearly 400 miles apart. Then, they both died within days of each other.
They both graduated from Iran’s top universities — young, healthy and athletic. One of them, Ayoub Entezari, was an aeronautical engineer who worked for a military research center, and the other, Kamran Aghamolaei, was a geologist.
Iran believes Israel killed them by poisoning their food, the New York Times quoted Iranian official and two other people with ties to the government who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Compounding the mystery behind their deaths, Israeli media and Persian news channels abroad reported that Aghamolaei worked at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. But friends denied that and said he worked for a private geological research company.
Entezari had a doctorate in aeronautics and worked on projects related to missiles and airplane turbines for a government aerospace center in the city of Yazd, about 390 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran, the newspaper reported.
He developed symptoms of food poisoning after attending a dinner he was invited to in Yazd, according to a staff member of a senior Iranian official.
The host of the dinner party had disappeared and authorities were searching for him, according to the staff member, who could not be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
While Aghamolaei had just returned to Tehran from a business trip to the northwestern city of Tabriz when he developed intense nausea and diarrhea that worsened day by day until his organs failed and he died, according to a friend.
If, as Iran suspects, these mysteriously similar deaths were targeted killings, it would fit the pattern of a shadow war with Israel that has seen both sides strike each other with just enough secrecy to avoid a full blown war.
Now that shadow war appears to be intensifying.
In the past two weeks alone, a series of deaths linked to Israel have rattled Iran. Israel appears to have broadened its targets from senior figures connected to the nuclear program to military personnel and lower level scientists.
The newspaper said that a spokeswoman for the Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment on the two recent deaths inside Iran.
But Israel has worked clandestinely for years to undermine Iran’s nuclear and weapons programs, including by targeted killings of experts involved in those endeavors. It has also attacked Iranian military sites developing advanced drones and missiles, the report showed.
Iran, in turn, has tried to target Israeli citizens around the world and armed and funded regional militias hostile to Israel, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But much of the conflict has centered around the nuclear program.
Israel staunchly opposes the efforts, albeit faltering, to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers — which then US President Donald Trump pulled out of in 2018.
The agreement eased punishing economic sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limiting Iran’s nuclear activity.
Israel feels the deal does not limit Iran’s nuclear activities enough at a time when it is deeply concerned that the country is within close reach of producing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.
The quickening pace of attacks in Iran, taken together with recent comments by Israeli leaders, suggest a shift in Israel’s strategy.
“The past year has been a year of changing course in Israel’s strategy vis-à-vis Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Tuesday at a meeting of the parliamentary foreign affairs and defense and foreign affairs committee.
“We have shifted into a higher gear. We are acting at all times and places, and we will continue to do so.”
Over the past two weeks in Iran, a senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Sayad Khodayee, was targeted and killed in a drive-by shooting in Tehran.
A young Defense Ministry engineer was killed in a drone attack, and another IRGC senior member fell suspiciously to his death from a balcony.
