Airstrikes batter a university, residential zones in Tehran

Airstrikes damaged residential areas and civilian facilities in Tehran, Iran, on Saturday, including a prestigious university, according to Iranian media and aid groups.

Residents of the capital described particularly intense waves of strikes Friday night into Saturday, with the sounds of explosions heard across the city.

Nassrin, 62, a resident of Tehran, said the ground had shaken overnight with the force of the blasts. “I can’t even put into words what it was like in Tehran last night,” Nassrin, who asked that her last name not be used out of fear of retribution, said in a text message. “We got no sleep, it was hours and hours of explosions.”

The Israeli military said Saturday evening in the Middle East that it had completed a “wide-scale wave of strikes” targeting naval and military infrastructure in Tehran. It said the strikes were part of a “broader phase aimed at deepening the damage to the core systems” of Iran’s government.

On Saturday, U.S. Central Command said it had struck more than 11,000 targets in Iran since the war began. The U.S. military has not been specific about the locations of its strikes, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not held a news conference since March 19 to answer questions from journalists.

Video footage shared by BBC Persian showed razed buildings and flames at the Iran University of Science and Industry on Saturday, a university in downtown Tehran. According to Iranian state media outlets, several research and educational buildings were damaged at the university, though no casualties were reported in that strike.

Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, claimed in a social media post Saturday that the strike on the university was “among many universities and research centers deliberately attacked” since the war began.

Videos posted by the Red Crescent Society of Iran showed emergency teams responding to damage in residential areas of Tehran after what it described as airstrikes Saturday. The exact locations of the affected neighborhoods were not immediately clear from the reports.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a Washington-based human rights group, has reported that more than 1,492 civilians have been killed in Iran, out of more than 3,300 total deaths since the start of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign.

Israeli and U.S. officials have said strikes in Iran are aimed at military targets, including sites and individuals linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. But both targeted killings, as well as strikes on police stations and other security or military institutions, are often happening in densely packed residential neighborhoods with high-rise apartment buildings.

The airstrikes do not just hit the targeted buildings, but can cause significant damage to residential units in the area. Across the country, tens of thousands of residential units have been destroyed since the start of the war, according to the Red Crescent.

Israel announced this past week that it would intensify attacks on Iran’s infrastructure. The Israeli military has said that the industries struck are often “dual use,” with both civilian and military applications, or have ties to the government and armed forces. In recent days, two major steel production complexes have been hit.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.