London: US and Israeli forces have hammered Iran with new strikes against missile and drone launch sites, aiming to wipe out its capacity to hit regional military and civilian targets amid conflicting signals about the goals and duration of the war.
The Israel Defence Forces launched simultaneous attacks against Tehran and Beirut on the fourth day of the conflict, targeting services in the Iranian capital and intensifying the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The IDF announced the latest strikes on Tuesday morning in the Middle East (4.30pm AEDT) after earlier confirming it had targeted the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB in Tehran and told civilians to leave the surrounding area.
US President Donald Trump declared the war might go “far longer” than his previous estimate of “four to five weeks” and did not rule out sending ground forces into Iran.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told The New York Post.
But Trump has sent a range of messages about the reasons for the war since initially calling on Iranians to topple the Islamic Republic’s regime, emphasising instead the goal of removing Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons.
Amid growing fears of an extended conflict that would compound casualties and wreak economic damage, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that ending the Iranian regime would stop the source of “95 per cent” of the problems in the Middle East.
“This is not an endless war, this is a gateway to peace,” he said.
The Iranian Red Crescent reported 555 deaths nationally from attacks on 131 residential areas, but it was not possible to verify the casualties – including a strike on a girls’ school – given limited access to information.
The American death toll rose to six from the Iranian attacks on facilities in the region, while the US said it was planning bigger strikes.
“The big wave hasn’t even happened,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “The big one is coming soon.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, listed as a terrorist group by Australia and other nations, increased pressure on regional shipping by declaring it would fire on any vessel seeking to navigate the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway into the Indian Ocean.
Iran has lost many of its naval vessels, but apparently can still attack civilian shipping, bringing the oil trade to a halt in the Gulf and deepening fears of a supply shortage that will increase prices. Brent Crude, the international standard, rose 6.7 per cent to $US77.74 a barrel.
Australian forces have felt the impact of Iranian counter-attacks. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles confirmed a drone strike on Saturday on the Al Minhad air base near Dubai, but said there were no injuries among Australians using the base.
A fire broke out at the US embassy in the Saudi capital Riyadh after an explosion was heard, two sources told Reuters, and US authorities asked people to avoid the area.
In Abu Dhabi, authorities responded to a drone strike on the Musaffah fuel terminal and brought a fire under control with no injuries.
In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, however, the Iranian attacks damaged oil and gas facilities, causing QatarEnergy, among the world’s biggest producers of liquefied natural gas, to halt supplies. This compounded the concerns about rising energy costs and higher inflation.
In the Kurdish region of Iraq, forces loyal to the Iranian regime fired 70 ballistic missiles and drones into the city of Erbil, according to regional minister Faud Hussein. The attacks highlighted the risk of a wider regional conflict and the threat to the nearby Harir base used by the United States.
The US and Israel have claimed to have killed 48 leaders in the Iranian government, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, though the surviving officials were adamant they would not plead for peace.
The secretary of the country’s top security council, Ali Larijani, said Iran would not negotiate with the US and that Trump had “delusional ambitions”.
The decision to launch the war has fuelled tensions between Trump and top leaders among American allies, even though British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have strongly criticised Iran.
Trump has rebuked Starmer for initially refusing to make UK bases available for the attack on Iran, a decision the British leader overturned within 48 hours on the proviso that they were used for “defensive” operations to remove Iranian threats.
In practice, this means the US can use the Fairford base in England and the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean to launch strikes on Iranian targets, despite a rift over the need for the war.
Starmer told the UK parliament on Monday that he stood by the decision not to join the strikes even though Iran was a threat to the region.
“We all remember the mistakes of Iraq, and we have learned those lessons,” he said.
“Any UK actions must always have a lawful basis, and a viable, thought-through plan. This government does not believe in regime change from the skies.”
The remarks triggered headlines that Starmer believed Trump had no “thought-through plan” for the war despite the various arguments from the White House in recent days about bringing down the Islamic Republic or removing its capacity to develop nuclear weapons.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the US attacks an “unjustifiable” and “dangerous” military intervention, but NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, one of Trump’s closest friends in Europe, said the action was needed to remove the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
In a significant statement about the timing of the war, Rubio said the US had decided on the strikes on Saturday morning after weighing up an Israeli decision to attack.
“There absolutely was an imminent threat,” he told reporters. “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.”
Families gathered at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem on Monday night, local time (early on Tuesday, AEDT) to bury the victims of an Iranian missile strike in central Israel on the weekend. The Biton siblings – Yaakov, 16, Avigail, 15, and Sarah, 13 – were among the nine people killed on Sunday when the missile hit a shelter in a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, the Associated Press reported.
Israel’s rescue services said 65 people were hospitalised, including two seriously wounded, as a result of the attack. When Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited one of the injured, Penina Cohen, at Hadassah Hospital on Monday, she told him she lost her husband, Yosef, and her mother-in-law, Bruria, in the strike.
In Iran, one of the remaining members of the country’s leadership posted an aerial photo showing rows of freshly dug graves for more than 160 girls who he said were killed by an airstrike on an elementary school in the country’s south.
“Their bodies were torn to shreds,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a post on social media. “This is how ‘rescue’ promised by Mr Trump looks in reality.”
With wires
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
