(Zero Hedge)—A primary nuclear facility in Iran’s Isfahan province was targeted by an Israeli airstrike, though local authorities have reported no radiation leaks.
Smoke was visible early Saturday morning near a mountainous area in Isfahan city following overnight Israeli strikes on the site, which activated the country’s air defense systems, amid continued tit-for-tat strikes between the Islamic Republic and Israel.
This is the second Israeli aerial attack on Isfahan, and as the Trump White House has vowed to not let Iran get a nuclear weapon.
“Within the compound, a centrifuge production facility was also targeted, along with additional military targets of the Iranian regime in the Isfahan area,” the IDF said Saturday morning.
“This is what the nuclear facility in Isfahan looks like, which is used to convert uranium, which is the stage that follows the enrichment stage on the way to producing nuclear weapons,” said Israeli Army spokesman Avichay Adraee in an online post.
“The air force struck the central facility along with buildings used to produce centrifuges. We continue to strike the Iranian nuclear project,” the statement said.
According to more:
Iran’s Fars news agency reported that there was no leakage of hazardous materials from the Isfahan site following the latest strikes.
Meanwhile, four primed ballistic missile launchers were “neutralized” in strikes before a salvo was launched at Israel, the military said.
One UN-affiliated war monitor has alleged the following:
Israel illegally, criminally, and deliberately attacked a nuclear facility in Isfahan, Iran, creating this way the risk of a nuclear catastrophe with mass civilian casualties.
This is not just a violation of international law, it is terrorism. pic.twitter.com/SzKnAUciq8
— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) June 21, 2025
Below is The Wall Street Journal on the significance of the Isfahan site:
The Israeli military has now hit several of Iran’s centrifuge production sites, including at Isfahan, Tehran and Karaj. While this represents a blow to Iran’s centrifuge production, questions remain over its uranium stockpile.
Iran’s large stockpile of enriched uranium was held in or around Isfahan. Safeguarding that stockpile, which has enough highly enriched uranium for around 10 nuclear weapons, would be crucial for any Iranian attempt to rush toward building a bomb. Tehran hinted last month it might disperse that material, which is held in barrels sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and regularly inspected. It isn’t known if Iran did so.
And here is Financial Times on Saturday after the Isfahan strike:
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had launched an overnight assault involving 50 warplanes, with some targeting two centrifuge production facilities at Isfahan.
However, the crown jewel of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, a sprawling uranium enrichment facility built deep under a mountain in Fordow, remains out of reach of Israel’s conventional weapons.
Q: Your intelligence community says they have no evidence that Iran is building a nuke
TRUMP: Then my intelligence community is wrong. Who said that?
Q: You director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard
TRUMP: She’s wrong pic.twitter.com/RI9Jzouagh
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 20, 2025
There are also emerging Saturday reports that Iran has killed another Iranian nuclear scientist:
As Israeli jets struck military targets, high-ranking officers and nuclear-related facilities in Iran during the opening salvo of Operation Rising Lion, there was another extremely high-stakes clandestine mission taking place. Code-named Operation Narnia, Israeli operatives reportedly used a “secret weapon” to simultaneously kill nine of Iran’s top nuclear scientists as they slept in their beds, according to Israel’s N12 news outlet. It was the latest move in Israel’s long-time effort to blunt Iranian nuclear ambitions by killing off the people capable of advancing the program.
Officials declined to say what this special weapon, “which remains under censorship and has not been disclosed publicly,” was, the Times of Israel explained. The War Zone cannot verify these claims. However, as we have previously reported, Israel hit residences of high-value individuals with smaller munitions and Mossad used drones and anti-tank guided missiles inside Iran (more on those later) on the first night of its attack. These targeted assassinations continue today, although not in the same volume seen during the opening acts of the war. It remains possible that some of these systems were used in the assassination of the scientists.
After testifying before the Senate weeks ago that Iran is not actively pursuing a nuclear bomb, Gabbard has since said US intelligence showed Iran is “at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months.”
Meanwhile, the head of the leading intergovernmental watchdog for nuclear energy and atomic weapons, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, has said that it is possible that there are operations being kept secret from nuclear monitors.
The IDF releases footage showing the aftermath of its airstrikes on Iran’s Isfahan nuclear facility.
A first strike on Ishafan on June 13 destroyed several critical sections, including uranium conversion infrastructure and labs, according to the IDF.
Strikes overnight were… pic.twitter.com/pJ3J5H5FkP
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) June 21, 2025
But at the same time, the United States’ own intelligence community has indicated the Islamic Republic is not seeking a nuke. The BBC reports in response to some of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s latest comments:
Disagreement has been building within Trump’s “America First” movement over whether the US should enter the conflict.
On Saturday morning, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said his country was “absolutely ready for a negotiated solution” on their nuclear programme but that Iran “cannot go through negotiations with the US when our people are under bombardment.”
“President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree,” she added in a new public statement. Trump has said he will make a decision on striking Iran within ‘two weeks’ – but there remain many variables, no the least of which has been a perceived public rift between DNI Gabbard and the White House.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.