Israel and the United States have bombarded Iran and Lebanon with a new wave of airstrikes and threatened a significant escalation in their joint offensive, as Iran retaliated with further attacks across a broad swathe of the Middle East. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that US firepower was "about to surge dramatically" with the deployment of additional bombers, while Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir stated that Israel is moving to a new phase of its offensive that would "further dismantle the regime and its military capabilities". Zamir added, "We have additional surprises ahead which I do not intend to disclose," highlighting the unpredictable nature of the conflict.
On Friday, the seventh day of the spiraling conflict, Tehran launched missiles and drones at Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, apparently targeting US bases and civilian infrastructure including oil pipelines. Iran's Revolutionary Guards said they had fired missiles towards Tel Aviv after an earlier wave of explosions caused a blaze at a residential building in the city. Witnesses described the latest airstrikes in Iran as particularly intense, shaking homes in the capital, Tehran. Internet coverage in Iran is running at about 1%, according to the monitor group NetBlocks, severely limiting information about the war's impact on ordinary Iranians.
In Lebanon, where renewed fighting has erupted between Israel and the Iranian-backed Islamist militant movement Hezbollah, many hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing Israeli strikes in the south of the country, parts of Beirut, and the Bekaa Valley. The Israeli army issued a warning on Thursday evening, urging residents of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold home to over 600,000 people, to "save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately". Red Cross spokesperson for the Middle East Hashem Osseiran described scenes of panic and confusion, noting that many have fled, some on foot, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and no clear sense of destination.
The war has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran and about a dozen in Israel, according to officials in those countries. Six US troops have been killed. Oil supplies have been disrupted, tens of thousands of flights cancelled, and international stock markets rocked. Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Friday that "some countries" had begun mediation efforts, without elaborating. Turkey is thought to have made some attempts to bring about a swift end to the conflict, but there appears little chance of success, reflecting the deep-seated tensions.
Donald Trump signaled once more that regime change was the objective of the joint US-Israeli offensive, which began with a surprise attack on Saturday that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In brief remarks at the White House, Trump again urged the Iranian people to "help take back your country", promising the US would grant them "immunity", though he provided no details on what that entails. Analysts have suggested that defections of senior officers from the army or Revolutionary Guards could indicate the radical clerical government's grip on Iran is weakening, but there is no evidence of this so far.
Iranian state television reported on Friday that a leadership council had started discussing how to convene the country's assembly of experts, which will select the new supreme leader. In Tehran, worshippers gathered for the first Friday prayers since the war began. Online footage shared by Iranian media showed crowds of men and women dressed in black, some carrying Iranian flags, streaming to an open space outside the Imam Khomeini Mosalla grand mosque in the capital. In the background of one video, a man speaking through a loudspeaker mourned Khamenei, as some worshippers seated on prayer rugs wept.
Recent waves of Israeli strikes appear to have been focused on Iran's western border with Iraq, possibly preparing for an incursion by fighters from Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in northern Iraq. Qatar and Saudi Arabia both said they had intercepted Iranian attacks targeting US bases in their countries. In Bahrain, officials said Iranian strikes targeted two hotels and a residential building. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk stated that "the world urgently needs to see steps to contain and extinguish this blaze", but that "instead we are only seeing more inflammatory, bellicose rhetoric, more bombings, more destruction, killings and escalation, that fuels it further", underscoring the grim outlook for de-escalation.
Source: www.theguardian.com