Iranian outlet WANA reported on March 2, 2026, that parts of Golestan Palace in Tehran were damaged in a nighttime attack on Arg Square in central Tehran. The report said the attack was carried out by the United States and Israel, and that the blast wave from the strike damaged sections of the palace. It also identified the source of the report as Shiava Abshenas, a Sputnik correspondent in Tehran.

The key fact in the source is not just that a building was hit, but that the building was Golestan Palace. The palace is Tehran’s only UNESCO World Heritage site, which gives any claim of damage immediate cultural significance. Heritage buildings are fragile in ways that ordinary infrastructure is not. Even when they are not directly targeted, nearby explosions can break glass, stress wooden structures and damage decorative interiors. The source’s emphasis on the palace’s location in central Tehran and the nighttime timing points to that kind of blast-related impact.

Because the report comes through a single outlet and a single correspondent, it should be treated carefully. The excerpt does not give an independent damage assessment, an exact list of affected rooms or a full account of what happened in Arg Square. It does, however, clearly state that parts of the palace were damaged. In wartime reporting, that kind of claim often arrives before fuller documentation, and the first task for editors is to preserve the narrow claim rather than expand it into something stronger than the source supports.

Golestan Palace matters because it is one of the city’s best-known historic complexes, and because a UNESCO designation is supposed to place extra attention on its protection. When a report says that the site has been damaged, the story extends beyond architecture into identity and memory. That is true even if the reported damage is limited. A heritage site can lose value through small breaks, not just through collapse, and the public significance can be large long before the physical damage is fully mapped.

So the most responsible summary is straightforward. WANA said that an airstrike in central Tehran damaged parts of Golestan Palace, and the source identified the palace as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The broader conflict surrounding the strike may produce more evidence later, but the packet itself supports only the reported damage and the cultural importance of the site.

The report also sits inside a larger pattern of heritage damage claims that are especially hard to verify in wartime. A palace can be hurt by shock waves, by falling debris or by direct impact, and those distinctions matter when editors try to describe what happened. Here, the source says only that parts of the palace were damaged in the attack on Arg Square. That narrow wording is the safest one to preserve. It keeps the focus on the reported effect without pretending to know more than the report actually supplied. Until there is a fuller assessment, the safest description remains a report of damage, not a final survey of the site.