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← The June 2025 Twelve-Day War

The June 22 Strikes: Operation Midnight Hammer

Evidence rating: CONFIRMED. What was dropped, on which sites, and what officials said about it is on the record from the Pentagon briefing, the President's address, and his letter to Congress. How much damage it did is a separate question, covered in The "Obliterated" Claim and the Damage Assessments.

This is the night the United States went from helping Israel defend itself to bombing Iran directly. It is the moment most Americans heard about, and it is the act that made Iran shoot at an American base the next day.

Go deeper (Level 4): Fordow · The fifteen-year target · Natanz · Isfahan · The B-2 mission and the GBU-57 · The War Powers letter · How Israel brought America in

The plain facts​

On the night of June 21, 2025, Washington time (early June 22 in Iran), US forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites:

  • Fordow — an enrichment plant built inside a mountain near Qom, the hardest target, and the reason the mission existed.
  • Natanz — Iran's main enrichment complex, already hit by Israel on June 13.
  • Isfahan — a uranium conversion and storage complex with tunnels.

At the Pentagon briefing the next morning, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the numbers, per the Rev transcript and PBS video:

  • Seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, about 18 hours each way.
  • They dropped fourteen GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, 30,000-pound "bunker busters," the "first ever operational use" of the weapon.
  • A submarine launched "more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles" at Isfahan.
  • About 75 precision-guided weapons in all; "more than 125 aircraft" took part, including decoys, fighters, and tankers.

Breaking Defense has a clear walk-through of the deception plan: a decoy group of B-2s flew west over the Pacific while the strike group flew east.

The Associated Press account of the Pentagon briefing adds the details a reader needs to picture it (AP via PBS NewsHour):

  • "At 6:40 p.m. in Washington and 2:10 a.m. in Tehran, the first B-2 bomber dropped its pair of GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrators on the deeply buried Fordo uranium enrichment plant. It was the first time these so-called 'bunker busters' had ever been used in combat." The New York Times put the whole strike window at "less than a half-hour — 6:40 p.m. to 7:05 p.m." (NYT, June 22, 2025).
  • About an hour earlier, the submarine launched its Tomahawks at Isfahan; the cruise missiles were "the last American weapons to hit their targets."
  • In all, about "420,000 pounds of explosives." Caine: "This was the largest B-2 operational strike in U.S. history, and the second longest B-2 mission ever flown, exceeded only by those in the days following 9/11."
  • The flight route on the Pentagon's own graphic crossed Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq; AP said "it was unclear whether those countries were notified."
  • Hegseth: "Our B-2s went in and out and back without the world knowing at all."

The bomb count changed as the night went on, which is worth knowing before you trust any first-night number. Fox News first reported six bunker-busters on Fordow; CNN then reported "12 bunker-buster bombs were dropped on Fordow, not 6" (@Osint613 relaying CNN); the Pentagon's final count was 14 across Fordow and Natanz.

The weapon itself was the product of a 15-year effort aimed at one mountain. At a second briefing on June 26, Caine said a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer was first shown Fordow in 2009: "For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target," and when they realized "we did not have a weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target," they worked with industry "to develop the GBU57" (as quoted in a post quoting the Pentagon account; DoD news story).

How Congress and the public found out​

  • The public. Most Americans learned of it from one social-media post. Trump wrote on Truth Social: "We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!" (as relayed by @EricGrimberg1 and the Washington Examiner). One analyst account wrote within the hour that "every American is discovering that the United States has struck Iran from a single social media post" and "Congress has NOT declared war on Iran" (S2 Underground, June 22, 2025).
  • Congress. "Most U.S. lawmakers were also kept in the dark, with some Republicans saying they were provided a brief heads-up by the White House before the strike," the AP reported. Caine said only "an extremely small number of planners and key leaders" knew (AP via PBS).
  • The cover story. Two days earlier the White House had said the President would decide "within the next two weeks." The AP called that line "ostensibly to allow additional time for negotiations, but in actuality masking the impending attack" (same AP story).
  • Israel knew. "The White House alerted Israel ahead of those strikes, U.S. officials told CBS News at the time" (as relayed by @MarioNawfal).

Did Iran know it was coming?​

Satellite imagery suggests Iran expected a strike on Fordow. Maxar images showed "16 trucks gathered on 19- 20 June with heavy machinery near the entrance to the main facility" (John Pollock on X), and images taken June 21 showed the facility's "entrance tunnels were observed being filled with earth by trucks and diggers" (Open Source Centre on X). Whether the trucks carried uranium out, or cement in, is disputed; see The "Obliterated" Claim.

The regional outlet Amwaj, citing one unnamed "high-level Iranian political source," reported that Washington notified Tehran in advance that it would carry out a one-time attack only, and that the sites had been evacuated and most enriched uranium moved (as relayed in Arabic by Dr. Mehmet Canbekli). An adviser to Iran's parliament speaker, Mehdi Mohammadi, said Fordow had been evacuated in advance and "no serious damage was recorded" (as relayed by Sprinter Press).

Iran's Atomic Energy Organization called the strikes a "savage assault" that violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty, accused the IAEA of complicity, and said the program would continue (Fars, as relayed by @Osint613).

What the officials said that morning​

President Trump, address to the nation, June 21, 2025, as transcribed by the Times of Israel:

"Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated."

"Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace."

"I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before."

"There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Pentagon briefing, June 22 (Rev transcript): "Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated," and the operation "did not target Iranian troops and Iranian people."

General Caine, same briefing, was more careful. He said "final battle damage will take some time," while early indications were that "all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction."

Notice the difference. The general said severe damage, with the final assessment still to come. The President and the Secretary said "obliterated." That gap is the subject of the next page.

The letter to Congress​

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the President to report to Congress within 48 hours when he sends forces into hostilities. Trump's letter is dated June 23, 2025 (govinfo.gov, Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents; also at the American Presidency Project). In it:

  • "On the night of June 21, 2025, at my direction, United States forces conducted a precision strike against three nuclear facilities in Iran."
  • The strike, the letter says, served vital US national interests and the collective self-defense of Israel.
  • It was "limited in scope and purpose," and "Iranian troops and other military facilities were not targeted."
  • He acted under his "constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive."

The letter confirms two things a reader should hold on to. There was no vote in Congress before the strike. And the stated purpose included the defense of Israel. The votes that came after are on What the War Cost Americans, and Who Voted.

Israel's view of the American strike​

Israeli officials welcomed it as the step only America could take, because only the B-2 carries the GBU-57. Netanyahu, on June 22, said Israel had "interesting intel" on where Iran's 60 percent enriched uranium had gone, and that Israel "will not be dragged into a war of attrition" (Times of Israel liveblog, June 22, 2025). Two days later, after the ceasefire, he said "we sent Iran's nuclear program down the drain" (Times of Israel liveblog, June 24, 2025).

His remark about the uranium matters. If the enriched stockpile was moved before the bombs fell, the sites could be wrecked while the material that matters most survived. That is exactly what later reporting suggested.

On June 24, in a video statement summing up the war, Netanyahu told Israelis whose work the American strike was. As the Times of Israel's Lazar Berman reported it, he said Israel had removed "two existential threats — the threat of destruction via nuclear weapons and the threat of destruction via 20,000 ballistic missiles," and that the US strike was "the fruit of a diplomatic campaign I led with [Strategic Affairs] Minister Ron Dermer." He added: "If someone in Iran tries to restore that program, we will act with the same determination, the same power, to cut off any such attempt" (Times of Israel, as quoted by Hugh Hewitt on X, June 24, 2025).

That sentence is the plainest statement in this investigation, from the Israeli side, that bringing the United States into the war was a goal Israel worked toward. The investigation's section Who Pushed the Iran War follows that campaign.

Two other Israeli statements belong here. In August 2026, former Mossad director Yossi Cohen told a conference of Israeli local authorities, according to Israeli media: "We toured the Fordow nuclear site many times to understand the site," and described the American bombing of Fordow as everything he had hoped for (@MarioNawfal citing CBS, August 12, 2026). And in private, according to leaked minutes of Israel's security cabinet posted by the head of the National Iranian American Council, a senior Israeli military official said: "Fordo will be destroyed only if the US attacks it" (see The Leaked Israeli Deliberations). Israel's generals knew only America could reach Fordow.

This was not only one administration's idea​

Amos Hochstein, a senior Middle East adviser in the Biden administration, said in April 2026 on CBS's Face the Nation that he had been "supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term," and that the earlier administration had run war games and practice runs (as quoted by Caitlin Johnstone; we have not opened the CBS transcript). The option of bombing Fordow was prepared across administrations; the GBU-57 was built for it (see above).

What it cost​

A Pentagon budget reprogramming document dated August 1, 2025, asked Congress to shift about $123 million to replace the 14 bunker-busters, plus smaller sums for other munitions, and $498 million for THAAD missile-defense interceptors fired to protect Israel (The War Zone, updated September 16, 2025). The strike itself was the cheaper part. Defending Israel from Iran's missiles cost about four times as much.

Status: Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Dan Caine, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, Yossi Cohen, Amos Hochstein, and Mehdi Mohammadi are alive, as far as these sources show. Nothing on this page is a finding that any of them acted unlawfully.

Israel knew first​

Axios and Channel 12 reporter Barak Ravid posted on the night of the strike: "An Israeli official told me Israel was notified by the Trump administration in advance of the U.S. strike in Iran" (Barak Ravid on X, June 21, 2025). Most members of Congress, as noted above, were not told beforehand. Rating: STRONG (a named Israeli-press reporter citing an Israeli official).

What a citizen can check​

  • Watch the June 22 Pentagon briefing (PBS link above) and write down every time "obliterated" is used, and by whom.
  • Read the one-page War Powers letter. Find the passage on the collective self-defense of Israel. Ask your representative whether defending another country is a reason the President can go to war without a vote.

Sources on this page​

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

Research captures: twitter/t83__v988.md, t83__v989.md, t83__v990.md, t83__v991.md, t83__v992.md, t83__v993.md, t84__v1000.md, t86__v1029.md

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