Report: Israel behind explosions of gas pipelines in Iran

Israel carried out covert attacks on two major gas pipelines inside Iran this week, two Western officials and a military strategist affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps told The New York Times on Friday.

The attacks resulted in explosions that disrupted the flow of heat and cooking gas to provinces with millions of people, the report said.

“The enemy’s plan was to completely disrupt the flow of gas in winter to several main cities and provinces in our country,” Iran’s Oil Minister, Javad Owji, told Iranian media on Friday.

Owji, who had previously referred to the blasts as “sabotage and terrorist attacks,” stopped short of publicly blaming Israel or any other culprit, but said that the goal of the attack was to damage Iran’s energy infrastructure and stir domestic discontent.

The Western officials and the Iranian military strategist told The New York Times the gas pipeline attacks by Israel required deep knowledge of Iran’s infrastructure and careful coordination, especially since two pipelines were hit in multiple locations at the same time.

The Western officials said Israel also caused a separate blast on Thursday inside a chemical factory on the outskirts of Tehran that rattled a neighborhood and sent plumes of smoke and fire into the air. Local officials, however, claimed the factory explosion was a result of an accident in the factory’s fuel tank.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.

(Israel National News’ North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)