IRIB Director Peyman Jebelli confirmed overnight that the state broadcaster's Tehran headquarters was struck — the same facility hit during the Twelve-Day War in June. Broadcasting has not been interrupted. Contingency transmission systems installed after that earlier attack kept IRIB on air, evidence that Iranian institutional planning assumed a second campaign.
The target fits a pattern. The campaign's opening hours destroyed the IRGC's Sarallah Headquarters in Tehran and struck the Assembly of Experts' compound in Tehran, where Iran's next Supreme Leader would be selected. Up to 40 senior officials have been killed. Adding the state broadcaster means the campaign has struck across four institutional categories: military command, political leadership, religious authority, and state communications. The sequence is consistent with a doctrine of institutional dismantlement rather than purely military degradation.
The closest precedent is NATO's April 1999 strike on Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade, which killed 16 staff members. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia examined the strike and concluded it was of "dubious legality" — the legal question turned on whether a state broadcaster is a civilian object or a facility contributing to the war effort. IRIB's role in broadcasting military communications and coordinating civil defence complicates direct comparison, but the core legal tension is identical: at what point does a government's communication apparatus become a military target?
IRIB's contingency systems — installed after the June strike — kept broadcasts running through the second attack. The state's information infrastructure has shown more resilience than its military command: up to 40 senior officials are dead, the foreign minister has acknowledged units operating outside central direction, and no successor to the Supreme Leader has been named. Iran prepared for this war. Its preparations were uneven.
