TEL AVIV — Iranian forces launched a fresh round of missile and drone strikes toward several Persian Gulf states and Israel on Tuesday, according to national authorities, as Israel said its forces were striking Iran and Lebanon, including targets in Beirut. The exchanges came after President Donald Trump said the United States was postponing strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure for five days while negotiating with Iran to end the war.
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, denied such talks are taking place, as strikes in Israel and across the region continued. Israel said it detected a volley of missiles from Iran on Tuesday morning, with damage reported throughout the country, including in central Tel Aviv. Dean Elsdunne, international spokesman for Israeli police, said at the scene of a strike there that a heavy warhead with “a high amount of explosives” landed there.
Four Gulf states also reported fresh missile and drone threats. Saudi officials said Riyadh’s air defenses had intercepted more than 20 drones in the east over a few hours early Tuesday, while the United Arab Emirates said it defended itself from five ballistic missiles and 17 drones. Bahrain reported a fire ignited at a commercial facility as a result of “Iranian aggression,” and Kuwait’s army also reported drones and missiles.
Current and former Israeli security officials received Trump’s announcement of talks to end hostilities with skepticism, expressing doubt that Iran was prepared to relinquish its stores of enriched uranium, end ballistic missile production or agree to other conditions seen as prerequisites for any lasting agreement.
Trump “gave them five days now to come to their senses,” said Tzachi Hanegbi, who served as national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before stepping down last year. A breakthrough agreement “is unlikely to happen,” Hanegbi said, adding that he expects the period to end without adequate concessions from Tehran and that Trump “will just go back to the difficult way, the hard way,” of further strikes.
Netanyahu said in a statement Monday that he had spoken to Trump earlier in the day and that Trump “believes there is an opportunity to leverage the tremendous achievements we have reached alongside the U.S. military to realize the goals of the war through an agreement.” He didn’t say that he shared Trump’s belief, and he pledged to continue striking Iran and Lebanon.
On Tuesday morning, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the IDF will continue to strike Iran “with full force.”
The IDF said its air force struck more than 50 targets in Iran overnight, a day after it completed a “a wide-scale wave of strikes” in Tehran targeting military command centers. The Iranian Red Crescent Society said Tuesday its emergency rescuers were at the scene of multiple impact sites throughout the capital with significant damage to residential buildings.
Fighting also continues to engulf Lebanon, where the government is trying to prove it is serious about halting Hezbollah’s military activity. The Lebanese Foreign Ministry issued orders Tuesday for the Iranian ambassador in Beirut to be expelled from the country. Israel says Lebanese state infrastructure will be increasingly targeted if Beirut cannot rein in the militant group — which it says it cannot do while under fire.
Israeli fighter jets boomed low across the capital overnight, with at least seven explosions heard. In one strike without warning on the town of Bchamoun, around six miles southeast of the capital, a 3-year-old girl was among the dead.
Lebanon has borne the brunt of the spillover from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. In less than a month of a conflict that is expected to outlast the war in Iran, Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,000 people, displaced over 1 million and wreaked widespread destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, as Hezbollah continues to fire into Israel.
The Israeli military has over the past week been slowly severing the area of southern Lebanon beneath the Litani River — which Israel occupied for 18 years before it withdrew in 2000 — from the rest of the country, blowing up bridges that it says Hezbollah uses to transfer weapons, but which are primarily vital arteries for civilians.
Katz appeared to say Tuesday that Israel would leave some of the bridges in place but that they would fall under Israeli military control as part of what he called a “security area,” bolstering fears in Lebanon that the entire area south of the river — some 8 percent of the country’s territory — could soon fall back under Israeli control.
Sands reported from London. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo and Mohamad El Chamaa and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.
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