A mysterious explosion at a Tehran high-rise that houses elite members of the Iranian regime is raising questions about whether Israel is renewing targeted hits against Islamic Republic officials even after President Trump announced a cease-fire following last month’s war between Iran and Israel, and whether such targeting is justified. 

The Tehran fire department said the explosion, which occurred at 4:30 in the afternoon, local time, was caused by a gas leak. The 14th-floor apartment’s residents were evacuated and several injured persons were taken to a hospital, the fire department added. There were no official reports of deaths related to the event. 

According to unconfirmed Iranian press reports, the Islamic Republic’s army chief of staff, General Abdulrahim Mousavi, has been assassinated. No party took responsibility for the reported killing. As of now what happened is “still a mystery,” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun  

Was it an Israeli assassination attempt, as many Iranians are speculating on social media? Israel is not taking credit, but the defense minister, Israel Katz, says it will continue to hit Iranian targets despite the cease-fire. “There is no place where you can hide,” he said Thursday, referring to top regime officials. 

The 14th-floor apartment was reportedly situated in a tower known to house personnel from the judicial organization of the Islamic Republic’s armed forces. The Chitgar area in western Tehran, where the explosion occurred, is favored by regime officials.

During the 12-day war, as Mr. Trump dubbed it, one of Israel’s most effective strategies was targeting military higher-ups, as well as, crucially, nuclear scientists. The hits, including by drones that were hidden at Tehran before the war, aimed at specific apartment units, killing the targets and members of their family. 

That strategy is often criticized as a violation of the laws of war. Despite involvement in a secret nuclear program, for one, the targeted scientists are civilians. Yet, is it effective? Can it be justified? 

“Killing the scientists and their family members was a brutal, brutal thing, you can’t characterize it any other way,” the founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, said Thursday in an X briefing on the 12-day war’s aftermath. The Israelis “knew they were going to be killing family members and potentially children.”

The session of the “Good ISIS,” as the institute is known, was unrelated to Thursday’s mysterious explosion at Tehran. 

Mr. Albright, who is a physicist, says targeting scientists and their families was part of Israel’s strategy. “In addition to killing these family members, they were using social media to terrify many other scientists, in the sense of ‘you’re next.’ They issued a threat during the war that if you work on nuclear weapons, we will seek you out and kill you.”

The Israelis, he adds, also had “this very visible, secure email line that informants could call and reveal secret information, and essentially get a reward and safety.”

Critics often argue that military strikes on nuclear facilities, like the ones that Israel and America conducted last month, are futile. The knowledge of how to enrich and create bombs can’t be erased, these critics contend. “Well, what Israel has been doing, and again, as a scientist I’m horrified by this, but basically what they’re doing is they are trying to destroy knowledge,” Mr. Albright says. 

In one little-noticed strike last month, Israeli jets destroyed an archive containing nuclear information, where copies of documents from the archive that Mossad agents stole were kept. After that 2018 theft, the Israelis allowed Mr. Albright access to the archive’s documents. 

“Some of the calculations that I looked at are very complicated, and a lot of drawings of parts and a lot of knowledge about production,” he says. “And that’s not in people’s heads, so if the documentation gets lost, it can be much harder to put these things back together again.”

Despite all the criticism, Israel “has been enforcing the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty,” Mr. Albright says. “It didn’t set out to do that, it was just defending its own interests. But this is not necessarily a weakening of the Non Proliferation regime. It could actually be a strengthening of it at a time when the Non Proliferation regime is incredibly weak.” 

The Thursday Tehran explosion might remain a mystery for a while, and it could well be the result of an accident. Yet, if it was a targeted hit, as many Iranians believe, it is part of a strategy that, in addition to the destruction of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities, seems to have significantly set back the regime’s atomic weapons project.