Satellite photos taken on July 7 and July 12, 2026, show fresh damage inside Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant complex and at a nearby support building, according to a report published July 17 by Al Jazeera's investigative team Al Jazeera. The images came from Sentinel-2, a European satellite that photographs the Earth's surface. Reporters cross-checked the satellite photos with video footage from the ground and data from US Central Command (CENTCOM), the branch of the US military that oversees operations in the Middle East. Together, these sources form part of a larger effort to map American strike locations across Iran from July 7 to July 15.

The Bushehr complex is located about 17 kilometers south of the city of Bushehr and covers an area of about 2.5 square kilometers. It contains two reactor buildings. Bushehr-1 is up and running and is Iran's only operating nuclear power plant. A second reactor has never been finished. The satellite images show clear marks left by impacts within the complex's fence line and at a support facility next door. However, no one has publicly identified exactly which buildings were hit.

CENTCOM said it struck about 90 military targets in Iran on July 7 and 8, 2026, including air defense systems, missile and drone storage sites, naval assets, and military infrastructure along Iran's southern coast Al Jazeera. CENTCOM did not include Bushehr or any nuclear facility on its list of targets. This mismatch between what the US says it struck and what the satellite images show inside the Bushehr complex is the main unanswered question raised by the Al Jazeera report.

Ehsan Jahanian, the deputy governor of Bushehr province, said on July 9, 2026, that several locations across the province had been struck, including areas around the nuclear plant, a military site in Choghadak, and a fishing port in the south of the province Al Jazeera. He later denied reports that the Bushehr nuclear power plant itself had been hit, saying the reactor was unaffected and operating normally.

The difference between damage inside the complex and damage to the reactor itself is important. Nuclear power plants sit on large fenced properties that hold reactors, cooling systems, office buildings, power transmission equipment, and security posts. Think of it like a hospital campus: damage to a parking lot or a supply shed does not mean the operating rooms were harmed. Impact marks within the fence line do not necessarily mean the reactor, its protective shell, or safety systems were damaged. Jahanian's denial seems to refer specifically to the reactor, while the satellite evidence points to the broader site. Both statements could be true at the same time: strikes may have hit support buildings or open ground without harming the reactor.

This is not the first time Bushehr has come up in strike reporting. Iran reported at least four attacks against the Bushehr plant to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — the UN body that monitors nuclear facilities — as of June 2026, according to an analysis published by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) on June 9, 2026 ISIS. ISIS had earlier published a report titled "Impact Site Identified Near the Iranian Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant" on March 28, 2026, written by David Albright, Sarah Burkhard, Spencer Faragasso, and the Good ISIS Team. The ISIS website also featured an entry titled "Iranian Nuclear Weapons R&D Facility" dated July 10, 2026, showing that researchers were paying close attention to Iran's nuclear sites in the weeks around the US strikes.

GlobalSecurity.org, a defense information website, published an "Iran War 2026 — Overhead Imagery Digest" on July 8, 2026, covering satellite imagery of Iranian military and nuclear sites including Bushehr GlobalSecurity.org. That digest noted that open-source accounts on X/Twitter had not turned up new satellite imagery at that time. This suggests the Sentinel-2 images used in the Al Jazeera report became available for public analysis in the days after the strikes, not right away.

The broader context here is one of rising military activity around Iran's nuclear sites during the summer of 2026. The IAEA had already been tracking multiple reported attacks on Bushehr before the July 7–8 US strikes. CENTCOM's campaign, targeting about 90 sites along Iran's southern coast, put heavy military infrastructure in Bushehr province within the area of operations. Whether the impact scars inside the Bushehr complex came from deliberate targeting, fallout from strikes on nearby military sites, or a separate actor entirely remains unconfirmed by any available source.

For experts who track the spread of nuclear weapons and monitor safety at nuclear facilities, the key question is whether any strike affected systems that the IAEA monitors. The reactor itself, according to Iranian provincial officials, kept running. But the IAEA's record of four prior attacks on the facility, combined with the latest satellite evidence, points to a steady pattern of physical threat to a monitored civilian nuclear installation. That situation creates obligations for both the attacker and the country where the facility is located under international nuclear security rules, no matter what the intent was. The gap between CENTCOM's published target list and the physical evidence of damage inside the Bushehr perimeter will likely shape the IAEA's next round of reporting and any formal complaints Iran may file in response.