The Israeli military on Saturday named nine senior Iranian nuclear scientists it says were assassinated during the opening wave of strikes targeting Tehran, marking the start of what it called a broad operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

According to the Israeli army, the targeted individuals were all instrumental in advancing Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb and were eliminated in precision strikes carried out early Friday.

“All the scientists and experts who were eliminated were significant sources of knowledge in the Iranian nuclear project, and had decades of cumulative experience in the development of nuclear weapons,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

The nine scientists were identified as:

• Fereydoon Abbasi, expert in nuclear engineering

• Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, expert in physics

• Akbar Motalebi Zadeh, expert in chemical engineering

• Saeed Barji, expert in materials engineering

• Amir Hassan Fakhahi, expert in physics

• Abd al-Hamid Minoushehr, expert in reactor physics

• Mansour Asgari, expert in physics

• Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari Daryani, expert in nuclear engineering

• Ali Bakhouei Katirimi, expert in mechanics

Several of the scientists, the military noted, were considered successors to Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a senior Iranian nuclear figure described as the “father of the Iranian nuclear project,” who was reportedly killed in an Israeli operation in 2020.

The military said the strikes were part of a wider offensive that also killed dozens of Iranian military commanders, including six high-ranking officials.

“The elimination of the scientists was made possible following in-depth intelligence research that intensified over the past year, as part of a classified and compartmentalized IDF plan,” the military said.

The plan, according to the Israeli army, involved a dedicated team of intelligence specialists who worked for years on a covert initiative to track and monitor key figures within Iran’s nuclear program.

“Dozens of intelligence researchers worked on a secret project aimed at tracking key nuclear scientists in Iran over the course of several years,” the statement said.