Al Jazeera's open-source unit compared Sentinel-2 satellite passes from 7 and 12 July and found newly formed impact scars inside the boundary of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the first independent evidence that a strike reached the complex.1
Bushehr's deputy governor Ehsan Jahanian had told Iranian state media on 9 July that a US projectile hit the plant's perimeter; CENTCOM stayed silent, and the IAEA's Rafael Grossi declined in Kaliningrad to confirm it. Sentinel-2 is the European Space Agency's Earth-observation constellation, and its imagery settles that fortnight-old dispute.
Tehran has since retreated from its own claim. Jahanian now says the reactor is unaffected and operating normally, and CENTCOM's roughly 90-target list from 7-8 July never named Bushehr.2 Neither belligerent wants to own a strike beside a live reactor.
Sentinel-2's roughly 10-metre resolution can show cratering and impact scars but not sub-building damage, which is why the imagery proves a strike reached the perimeter without proving the reactor was the target. That ambiguity is what lets both sides decline ownership: for Washington, striking a nuclear plant invites the charge it crossed a red line; for Tehran, admitting a hit near the core would expose a vulnerability. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), locked out of Iran's sites since April, cannot arbitrate.
