Ce n'est pas une pipe

We can come up with reason after reason, that gets more and more unlikely about why Israeli aircraft weren't actually over Iran

At no point did I assert that no Israeli planes were ever over Iran, in fact the bulk of my post was arguing that there definitely could have been, just via a different route. It was specifically about the June 16th attack that I questioned the planes. We don't know if the attacks portrayed on that video are the same attacks that the Fars report is about.

And ballistic missiles being used doesn't imply that literally every strike was ballistic missiles. It could have been a combination of missiles and bombs - it's the proportion which matters. Again, I'm not denying that there were bombs dropped, but every strike being an F-35 flying directly overhead is a very different thing from, say, 60% being that and the rest being missiles, or some other ratio.

We have video evidence, although not the highest quality, is conclusive enough to state that a JDAM or SPICE 2000 was dropped on Tehran on June 15th, a day before

See, this is my problem, which I brought up in my original comment - "trying to guess vague bomb or missile shapes based on grainy footage doesn't exactly seem like sound analysis to me"! The evidence in question?

The conclusion of this being a JDAM or SPICE is by the OSINTer in question (and I feel like the whole past several years should have really taught us to take these guys with a grain of salt). But I'm not really seeing the frontal fins or little rear wings of a SPICE (but depending on the angle, we wouldn't see the wings anyway, and the fins might well be not visible at this resolution...):

A GBU-31 seems more likely, there seemingly is the wider central portion, but again, at this video resolution, actually determining the exact shape of the projectile is iffy - compression can throw of shapes depending on what the algorithm decided to color in a pixel as (and there could also just not be enough detail in the original video either, where again a pixel being chosen as one color over another could throw things off)

Telling the size is also pretty difficult, we don't have any sort of distance estimation from the video to the projectile with which to figure that out.

So, why couldn't this be some kind of missile? Here's a LORA for example, this is during its ascent so we can see the exhaust, but on its descent there wouldn't necessarily be anything visible:

Modern cruise missiles generally have less bomb-like, more rectangular shapes, and more uniquely-shaped noses, but again, at this video quality, telling the precise shape is difficult. Here's an Icebreaker for example - as with the SPICE, we wouldn't necessarily be able to see the wings depending on the angle, and the nose is the the most smudged-up part of the Iran image, so we can't tell the precise shape of it either.

The other bit of evidence seemingly doesn't feature any strikes, but their aftermath. The higher-detail video (with the guy cheering the strikes for whatever reason) has several explosions going off, but I wasn't able to see any actual projectile in the footage, so I assume it was just traveling too fast to be picked up? So again, what are we basing our conclusion on what munitions were used there, that these were bunker busters specifically? The amount of debris kicked up can help us estimate the power of the explosion, but that's hardly a foolproof method - an explosion could kick up a lot of dust without necessarily doing that much damage. Additionally, strikes going off in the mountain doesn't have to mean they were using bunker busters specifically, couldn't they have used more conventional munitions to strike just entrances?

I've seen you post these two several times, and I assumed that you had many more images and these were just the ones you picked for illustrative purposes, but you keep coming up with just these two. I tried looking up what else you had posted, but I can't navigate Hexbear search results very well, so I may have missed stuff, but I didn't find that much more footage of strikes over Tehran, and especially not much from which we could accurately judge what munitions were used.

and I don't think Israel has enough stock of air launched ballistic missiles with 1000lb unitary warheads to do the kind of bombardment that took place. Even Russia who produce hundreds of Iskander ballistic missiles a month (and get plenty of KN-23s from North Korea) don't perform such attacks.

What about the past few years has given any indication that Western countries actually make rational decisions, weighing the long-term impacts of their ammunition expenditure? There's European countries with barely any artillery left at this point. The Israelis may well have used a dangerously large amount of their stockpile, confident that the US will make up for their losses with later military aid.

The Russians also do use ballistics pretty extensively, including to target Ukrainian vehicles like missile launchers. They're not doing daily attacks because they're engaged in a years-long attritional conflict - the Israel-Iran war was barely two weeks. It could well be that the Israelis were just about to finish their stockpiles as the ceasefire was signed. It's speculation, sure, but that's a lot about this war.

I just think that the most likely explanation is the true one.

Why is "Israeli planes managed to fly over a large swath of territory and completely avoid Iranian air defense" a more likely explanation than "Azerbaijan, a comprador state with open military ties to Turkey and Israel, and essentially the only Muslim country to support Israel during the Gaza genocide, aided Israel"?

You've also repeatedly downplayed the damage Israel itself has sustained (which we cannot accurately judge on account of censorship, and yet you confidently assert that they must not have lost anything important), and have also uncritically reported literal IDF propaganda (https://hexbear.net/comment/6271486 - not sure how many people actually opened up the link instead of assuming that the "Over 50 aircraft" was your own analysis, but it's a direct citation of a statement by the IDF). I guess we can trust their propaganda, even though we confidently dismiss Iranian/Resistance propaganda about the damage inflicted on Israel?

Your estimation on Iranian equipment losses is based on an Oryx-style list by a pro-Ukrainian propagandist - have you audited that list to make sure there's no duplicate footage being passed off as different strikes, as Oryx did? This user has admitted to blocking those who question his numbers - now, he's of course framing it as if they must have all been trolling assholes, but this is a classic online tactic: use the trolls as justification to silence people who might actually damage your narrative.

When it comes to damage assessments for Iran, you confidently assert that the real numbers are likely higher than what's on the list, but when it comes to damage assessments for Israel, you confidently state that the limited footage we have available is painting a complete picture and nothing else was blown up.

I've asked this question in another thread already, but I'll ask it again - if Israel was ostensibly performing so well, easily bombing targets all over Iran while sustaining minimal damage themselves, why did they accept a ceasefire?