# Iran Says 35 Special Forces Killed in First U.S.–Israeli Strike Wave, Exposing Depth of 40‑Day War

*Tuesday, June 23, 2026 at 6:09 PM UTC — Hamer Intelligence Services Desk*

**Published**: 2026-06-23T18:09:37.924Z (4h ago)
**Category**: conflict | **Region**: Middle East
**Importance**: 8/10
**Sources**: OSINT
**Permalink**: https://hamerintel.com/data/articles/8523.md
**Source**: https://hamerintel.com/summaries

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**Deck**: Iranian accounts report 35 members of an elite special forces battalion killed and more than 70 wounded in Baneh during the first wave of joint U.S. and Israeli strikes in the 40-day war. The losses, if confirmed, suggest the campaign is hammering core units, not just infrastructure, with direct consequences for Iran’s ground posture and the civilians living around its bases.

The picture out of Baneh is stark: dozens of elite Iranian soldiers from a single battalion reportedly killed or wounded in one strike wave, an early sign that the 40‑day war is hitting deep into Iran’s professional ranks rather than just skimming its periphery. For commanders in Tehran, that means damage that cannot be fixed simply by pouring more money into missiles and drones.

Iranian‑linked reporting on 23 June circulated an image said to show 35 members of the 107th Special Forces Battalion of the Army Ground Forces who were "eliminated" in Baneh, in Iran’s Kurdish northeast, during the first day of joint U.S. and Israeli attacks. The same accounts claim more than 70 additional soldiers from the battalion were injured in those strikes. The figures have not been independently verified, and neither Washington nor Jerusalem has publicly confirmed the specific target set, but the reported scale of casualties in a single elite unit is unusually high.

Baneh, in Iran’s Kurdistan region near the Iraqi border, sits in a zone where Tehran has long deployed special forces and intelligence units to deter cross‑border militancy and manage internal dissent. Hitting a battalion stationed there would signal a deliberate choice to pressure Iran’s capacity to police its own frontier and suppress Kurdish activism, not only its external power projection. The characterization of the attack as part of a "joint" U.S.–Israeli operation, again coming from Iranian‑side channels, also points to the perception in Tehran that it faces a coordinated military front rather than isolated strikes.

For the soldiers and families linked to the 107th Battalion, the impact is immediate: a unit that once deployed as a cohesive formation may now be fragmented by deaths, injuries, and redeployments. For residents of Baneh and surrounding towns, the strike confirms that their communities are now within the blast radius of a regional confrontation that stretches from Gaza and Lebanon to Iraq and Iran itself. Military sites stitched into the urban fabric turn routine life into a calculation about which buildings might suddenly become targets.

At an operational level, such losses erode Iran’s ground‑based deterrent in sensitive regions. Special forces battalions like the 107th are trained for rapid reaction, internal security missions, and asymmetric warfare. Weakening them could complicate Tehran’s ability to respond to unrest or insurgent activity in border areas, potentially forcing it to lean even more heavily on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and allied militias. That, in turn, risks blurring the line between domestic security and the external campaigns Iran wages through proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond.

Strategically, the reported strike feeds into a broader pressure campaign in which Iran’s leadership insists its missile arsenal is non‑negotiable and purely defensive, while enemies seek to degrade not only those missiles but the human infrastructure that would use them. President Masoud Pezeshkian has argued publicly that without Iran’s missile forces, the country would be "plowed through" in the way Gaza has been, framing the arsenal as an existential shield against U.S. and Israeli power. Heavy casualties among elite ground troops complicate that narrative by showing that even well‑trained conventional units are vulnerable inside Iranian territory.

The reported losses in Baneh are a reminder that in a high‑tech war of missiles, drones and airstrikes, manpower remains the most fragile asset: battalions can be rebuilt on paper faster than experience and cohesion can be replaced in the field. When dozens of special forces from one unit disappear in a single day, the damage reverberates across training pipelines, deployment schedules and deterrence calculations.

Key signals to watch next include whether Iran publicly acknowledges the hit or stages high‑profile funerals, how it reallocates forces in Kurdistan and along the Iraqi border, and whether U.S. or Israeli officials indirectly reference ground‑force attrition in their own assessments. Any visible thinning of Iranian deployments around Baneh or compensatory moves by allied militias would offer a concrete measure of how much strain this phase of the war is imposing on Iran’s internal security architecture.