BURSTIsraeli officials urged hundreds of thousands of people in Tehran, Iran, to immediately evacuate Monday ahead of new strikes in its escalating military campaign against Iran.
"In the coming hours, the IDF will operate in the area, as it has done in recent days around Tehran, to attack military structures belonging to the Iranian regime," Israeli military spokesperson for Arab media Avichay Adraee wrote in a post on the social platform X. "Citizens of Iran, for your safety and security, please evacuate the area."
The warning, written in Farsi, included a map of a targeted central area of Tehran deemed "District 3," where Iranian state media and law enforcement are headquartered.
Israel on Monday declared it had eliminated defensive threats to its strikes in the area, essentially seizing control of the airspace over Tehran.
"The IAF controls the skies of Tehran; that changes the entire campaign," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday referring to Israel's air force. "With God's help, we will succeed and continue until victory."
According to The Associated Press, the Monday warning affected about 330,000 people.
Netanyahu, speaking at an air force base near Tel Aviv, Israel, told soldiers that Iran doesn't warn Israeli civilians before it attacks, but Israel would continue to issue alerts to residents of Tehran.
"When we control the skies of Tehran, we hit these targets, the enemy's targets — in contrast to the criminal Iranian regime, which targets our civilians and comes to kill our children and women — we tell the civilians in Tehran: 'Evacuate' and we are taking action," he said.