'A Barbaric Assault': Iran Condemns US-Israeli Bombing of Century-Old Medical Research Center

The Iranian Ministry of Health said Thursday that a US-Israeli airstrike hit and severely damaged the Pasteur Institute of Iran, a century-old medical research center that has played a key role in combating and preventing infectious diseases in the country.

Photos posted to social media by a spokesperson for Iran's Health Ministry, Hossein Kermanpour, showed flames and smoke amid the rubble of a devastated building. Kermanpour called the attack on the Pasteur Institute of Iran "a direct assault on international health security" and a violation of international law.

Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry, also condemned the attack on social media, blaming "the American-Israeli aggressors."

"Heartbreaking, cruel, despicable, and utterly outrageous," Baqaei wrote. "This is not merely another war crime committed as part of an illegal war; it is a barbaric assault on basic human core values."

News of the attack on the medical research center, which was founded in 1920, came hours after US President Donald Trump threatened in a primetime speech Wednesday night to bomb Iran "back to the Stone Ages."

Vali Nasr, an Iranian American academic and professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, wrote Thursday that the Pasteur Institute "has been an icon of Iran's healthcare system, a symbol of modern Iran, established a century ago along with foundational health and education institutions."

"Destroying it," Nasr wrote, "could have no other purpose than assaulting Iran’s history, erasing the history of its modernization and development—take Iranians back to the Stone Age."

The attack on the Pasteur Institute comes days after the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that airstrikes hit "near WHO's office in the Iranian capital, Tehran, shattering windows."

"Strikes impacting the operations and damaging the premises of WHO and other UN agencies, the locations of which have been clearly identified, cannot be tolerated and must be avoided at all costs," Tedros said in a statement.

Since the start of the deadly US-Israeli bombing onslaught on February 28, the WHO has documented more than two dozen attacks on healthcare infrastructure and personnel in Iran—part of a broader assault on healthcare that Trump's Iran War has unleashed throughout the Middle East.