The Iranian military's reports claiming that it had downed two Israeli F-35s during Operation Rising Lion were false and “damaged [IRIB’s] credibility,” Peyman Jabali, head of the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation (IRIB), admitted during a session with students at Shahid Beheshti University on Tuesday, according to Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency.
Explain his agency's false reporting on the Israeli Jets, Jabali said IRIB was not directly observing the crash or monitoring defense systems and relied on false information provided by Iranian military officials.
“Were we in the sky to witness the fighter jet crash? Were we behind the defense system? Someone from the military officials informed us, and then they eventually realized…that the information was not credible and gave us another piece of news,” he said.
“Media officials should not make their credibility dependent on the credibility of other institutions and organizations,” he added.
Jabali claimed Netanyahu expected Iran to fall after IRIB strike
Jabali went on to claim that Netanyahu had expected Iran to be defeated after Israel attacked his corporation's building. “He thought that, in his opinion, the end of the Islamic Republic would be on June 16 with the bombing of the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation,” he said.
“We were proud in the war, we were proud, we resisted, we stunned the world, we pushed the regime back for years. They may not say it, but the losses that the Zionist regime suffered were not just these buildings, and the Weizmann Institute and the missile bases, but its entire computing system collapsed.”
He claimed that internal signals of weakness within Iran contributed to miscalculations by Israel.
“Those who made the narrative of weakness prevail over the narrative of strength; those who did not see the capabilities, highlighted the weaknesses; those who did not see the reality…transmitted the signal of this narrative of weakness to the enemy,” Jabali said.
Jabali added that Israel’s misjudgment was not solely the result of its own or Western think tanks.
“That calculation and false image were not created only by the Zionist regime's think tanks and Western think tanks; we created it internally,” he said, referring to internal signals that he said contributed to Israel’s errors in judgment.