First there was the assassination of Hassan Sayad Khodayari, a member of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in the center of Tehran on May 22.

Engineer Ehsan Ghadbeigi was then killed in a drone attack on a military base near the Iranian capital on May 26.

Iranian scientists Kamran Aghamolaei and ​Ayoub Entezari died within days of each other on May 31 and June 2. Aghamolaei was an aeronautical engineer and Entezari a geologist, according to Tehran but a nuclear scientist according to Israel.