Israel Has Dropped 4k Bombs on Iran — Surpassing 12-Day War in Just 4 Days

The Israeli military announced that it dropped as many bombs on Iran as Israel used during the entirety of the 12-day war last year over just a third of the time this week, signalling the severity of the Israeli military’s bombardment without even counting the bombardments carried out by U.S. forces.

Israeli military spokesperson Effie Defrin said in a press conference on Tuesday that the military crossed the amount of munitions that it dropped during the “entire” 12-day war last June.

The Israeli military says that it dropped roughly 4,000 bombs during its illegal war then, and had already surpassed that by Tuesday, the fourth day of the new U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The U.S. has not provided figures for the number of bombs dropped thus far by U.S. forces. However, Israel’s figures are a show that the bombardments on Iran are more intense this time around — and may go on for weeks, if not months.

The death toll has already surpassed that of last year’s war. The Iranian government reported on Thursday that at least 1,230 people have been killed thus far, and the toll is expected to rise rapidly as the bombardments continue to unfold. Iranian human rights group HRANA counted 1,114 civilians killed as of Wednesday, including 183 children, most of them under 10 years old, and 926 more reported deaths that are still under review.

The Iranian Red Crescent Society said on Thursday that 4,000 civilian buildings in Iran have been damaged by U.S. and Israeli bombardments so far. This includes at least 105 strikes on civilian sites, including 14 medical facilities.

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the agency has identified 13 attacks on health infrastructure in Iran thus far, killing four health care workers and injuring 25. WHO reported that nearby Israeli strikes forced a hospital in Tehran to evacuate earlier this week. WHO also said that 100,000 people have fled Iran since the U.S. and Israel first launched unprovoked strikes on February 28.

Among civilian casualties are the 160 children killed in a strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, on Saturday. Middle East Eye reports that that was an apparent “double-tap” strike, in which the second strike was carried out to kill those trying to rescue survivors. NBC reported that the school was struck three times, according to Minab’s mayor.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said in a post on X that the U.S. and Israel are targeting civilian sites. “[O]ur people are being brutally slaughtered as the aggressors deliberately target civilian areas and any location they believe will inflict the maximum possible suffering and loss of life,” he wrote.

AI targeting is reportedly central to the U.S.’s carpet bombing campaign in Tehran. Military officials are using Palantir’s Maven Smart System, powered by Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, to help generate targets at a faster pace and aid with targeting.

The military is using Maven and Claude to generate hundreds of targets and coordinates, and then to prioritize them based on importance. “The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of the people,” The Washington Post reports.

AI targeting was a tactic used by Israel in its genocide in Gaza, with Israel’s “Lavender” system generating tens of thousands of targets with the goal of maximizing the pace of killing, Israeli military sources said. The system considers children to be legitimate targets, reports say, and there is little to no oversight by humans to vet the targeting.