Some of the laboratories at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have been completely destroyed by Iranian missiles. There were no casualties.
A facility for chemistry and materials labs as well as a building for life and computer sciences at Israel’s renowned Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot were destroyed by an Iranian retaliatory missile attack on Sunday. This was reported by the specialist magazine science.org and by Science|Business, among others. The conflict escalated on 13 June when Israeli drone and missile attacks destroyed nuclear facilities and killed senior officials and military science researchers in Iran.
According to The Jerusalem Post, the attack on the Weizmann Institute targeted a laboratory headed by Professor Eldad Tzahor – a world-leading scientist in the field of heart regeneration and director of the Laboratory of Cell and Molecular Biology in Regenerative Medicine. In addition, the laboratory of a cancer researcher suffered considerable damage. According to the institute, several buildings on the campus were damaged, but no one was injured.
According to Science|Business, it is estimated that the damage could disrupt around 15 projects funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Among the research material lost, according to science.org, were countless bacterial and DNA samples that could take up to four years to recover. Ninety percent of the institute’s buildings had been damaged in some way. According to Science|Business and science.org, some Weizmann research deals with military projects such as protecting drones from eavesdropping. But much of the focus is on basic research in health, medicine and biology.
The attack on the Weizmann Institute comes at a time when the EU is considering suspending its broader association agreement with Israel due to human rights violations. For Germany, the institute has a special scientific-historical significance: the co-operative connection between German and Israeli science goes back to a visit by a delegation from the Max Planck Society to the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1959.
Source: Forschung und Lehre (in German)
Apart from the Weizmann Instititute, some bulidings at Ben Gurion University were also hit and damaged.
Source: The Times of Israel