Israel and Iran launched fresh attacks yesterday, killing and wounding civilians and raising concerns of a broader regional conflict, with both militaries urging civilians on the opposing side to take precautions against further strikes.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he hoped a meeting of the Group of Seven leaders in Canada would reach an agreement to help resolve the conflict and keep it from escalating.
Iran has told mediators Qatar and Oman that it is not open to negotiating a ceasefire with the US while it is under Israeli attack, an official briefed on the communications told Reuters.
The Israeli military, which launched the attacks on Friday with the stated aim of wiping out Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, warned Iranians living near weapons facilities to evacuate.
“Iran will pay a heavy price for the murder of civilians, women and children,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said from a balcony overlooking blown-out apartments where six people were killed in Bat Yam, a town south of Tel Aviv.
Iran’s armed forces told residents of Israel to leave the vicinity of “vital areas” for their safety.
Explosions rattled Tel Aviv in the afternoon as Iran launched its first daylight missile raid since Israel attacked on Friday. At least 10 people, including children, have been killed so far, according to Israeli authorities.
Hours later, shortly after nightfall, Iran launched a second wave of missiles, which struck a residential street in Haifa, a mixed Jewish-Arab city in northern Israel.
The national emergency service reported nine people were injured in the strike, along with two others following a missile impact in the south.
In Bat Yam yesterday evening, shocked residents surveyed the damage of an overnight strike, while many across Israel braced for another sleepless night, unsure of what may come next.
Images from Tehran showed the night sky lit up by a huge blaze at a fuel depot after Israel began strikes against Iran’s oil and gas sector – raising the stakes for the global economy and the functioning of the Iranian state.
An Iranian health ministry spokesperson, Hossein Kermanpour, said the toll since the start of Israeli strikes had risen to 224 dead and more than 1,200 injured, 90 per cent of whom he said were civilians. Those killed included 60 on Saturday, half of them children, in a 14-storey apartment block flattened in the Iranian capital.
In Washington, two US officials told Reuters that US President Donald Trump had vetoed an Israeli plan in recent days to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Have the Iranians killed an American yet? No. Until they do we’re not even talking about going after the political leadership,” said one of the sources, a senior US administration official.
When asked about the Reuters report, Netanyahu told Fox News yesterday: “There’re so many false reports of conversations that never happened, and I’m not going to get into that.”
Iran said it had arrested two individuals it accused of being members of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad in Alborz province while they were preparing explosives and electronic devices, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported yesterday.
The intelligence chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Kazemi, and his deputy were killed in Israeli attacks on Tehran yesterday, Tasnim said.
Iran has vowed to “open the gates of hell” in retaliation in what has emerged as the biggest-ever confrontation between old enemies.
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