“Some of our air defences were damaged, this is not something we can hide, but our colleagues have used domestic resources and replaced them with pre-arranged systems that were stored in suitable locations in order to keep the airspace secure,” Mousavi said.

Prior to the war, Iran had its own domestically-made long-range air defence system Bavar-373 in addition to the Russian-made S-300 system. The report by Defah Press did not mention any import of foreign-made air defence systems to Iran in past weeks.

Following limited Israeli strikes against Iranian missile factories last October, Iran later displayed Russian-made air defences in a military exercise to show it recovered from the attack.