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Middle East crisis live: Israel launches ‘wave of strikes’ on Tehran; nearly 150 reported missing after Iranian warship sunk

Here is the Turkish defence ministry statement in full following reports that an Iranian missile was downed as it hurtled toward Turkey’s airspace. The ministry said: A ballistic missile, launched from Iran and detected heading towards Turkish airspace after crossing Iraqi and Syrian airspace, was timely engaged and neutralised by Nato air and missile defence elements deployed in the eastern Mediterranean. It has been determined that the ordnance that fell in Dörtyol district of Hatay province belonged to an air defence munition that intercepted the threat in the air. There were no casualties or injuries in the incident. Our resolve and capacity to ensure the security of our country and citizens are at the highest level. While Turkey supports regional stability and peace, it is capable of ensuring the security of its territory and citizens, regardless of who or where the threat comes from. Every step taken to defend our territory and airspace will be taken resolutely and without hesitation. We remind you that we reserve the right to respond to any hostile attitude towards our country. We urge all parties to refrain from actions that would further spread the conflict in the region. In this context, we will continue to consult with Nato and our other allies.

Spain tells of ‘surprise’ at Merz’s White House comments over Trump’s trade threats – Europe live

in Madrid French president Emmanuel Macron contacted Spain’s Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday to express France’s “European solidarity” in the face of recent threats from US President Donald Trump, according to a report from the Spanish Efe news agency. “The president just spoke with prime minister Sánchez to express France’s European solidarity in response to the recent threats of economic coercion launched yesterday against Spain,” sources at the Élysée Palace told Efe. Macron’s contact was also reported by the French media.

Mojtaba Khamenei, son of former supreme leader, tipped to become Iran’s next head of state

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course. No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed. His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated. Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader. Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Donald Trump would have wanted. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion. The choice of supreme leader is made by the 88-strong Assembly of Experts, who in this case are picking from a field of six possible candidates. His election would be a powerful if unsurprising symbol that the government is not looking to find an accommodation with America. Trump has said the worst-case scenario would be if Khamenei’s successor was “as bad as the previous person”. There has been speculation for more than a decade that he would be his father’s successor, which grew when Ebrahim Raisi, the elected president and favourite of Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash. Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 and studied theology after graduating from high school. At the age of 17, he went to serve in the Iran-Iraq war, but it was not until the late 1990s that he came to be recognised as a public figure in his own right. After the landslide defeat of Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh Nuri, in the 1997 presidential election, where he won only 25% of the final vote, various conservative Iranian groups realised the need to make changes to their structures and Mojtaba Khamenei was central to that project. He was also seen as instrumental by reformists in suppressing the protests in 2009 that came after allegations the presidential election had been rigged, with his name chanted in the streets as one of those responsible. Mostafa Tajzadeh, a senior member of Iran’s reformist parties who was imprisoned after the vote, alleged that his and his wife, Fakhr al-Sadat Mohtashamipour’s, legal case was under the direct supervision of Mojtaba Khamenei. In 2022 he was given the title of ayatollah – essential to his promotion. By then he was a regular figure by his father’s side at political meetings, as well as playing an influential role in the Islamic Republic’s Broadcasting Corporation, the government’s official media outlet often criticised for churning out dull political propaganda that many Iranians reject in favour of overseas satellite channels. He has also played a central role in the administration of his father’s substantial financial empire. His closest political allies are Ahmad Vahidi, the newly appointed IRGC commander; Hossein Taeb, a former head of the IRGC’s intelligence organisation; and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker of the parliament. His rumoured appointment and its hereditary nature has long been resisted by reformists. The former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, referring to the long history of rumours about Mojtaba Khamenei succeeding his father as leader, wrote in 2022: “News of this conspiracy have been heard for 13 years. If they are not truly pursuing it, why don’t they deny such an intention once and for all?” The Assembly of Experts, in response, denounced “meaninglessness of doubts” and said the assembly would select only “the most qualified and the most suitable”. Israel on Tuesday struck the building in the Iranian city of Qom, one of Shia Islam’s main seats of power, where the assembly was scheduled, but the building was empty, according to IRGC-affiliated media.

Israel carries out fresh strikes on Tehran and Beirut as Iran targets US bases in Gulf

Israel has carried out another wave of strikes on Tehran and Beirut while Iranian missiles continued to fly toward Israel and the Gulf as the war with Iran entered its fifth day. Explosions were heard across Tehran in the early hours of Wednesday morning as the Israeli military announced “broad-scale strikes” on Iranian regime targets. Police stations and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) headquarters in the Kurdish regions of north-western Iran were also razed by strikes, Kurdish media reported. Iran’s death toll soared, as estimates of those killed by strikes rose to 800 to 1,500 people in five days of war. US and Israeli officials said the war was so far going better than they expected, but it was unclear what the end goal of their campaign was as they had offered contradictory aims. The Trump administration has said at various times that its goal was regime change, destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capacity and its navy, preventing it from getting a nuclear weapon, and putting a stop to its support for proxies across the region. The US president, Donald Trump, said that some of the individuals he was considering as possible post-war leaders of Iran were killed in the opening days of the war. On Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah of Iran, Trump said he preferred “someone from within” Iran. In Iran, funeral proceedings for the late head of state, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, started in Tehran on Wednesday morning. The body of Khamenei, killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on Sunday, is due to be on display for three days in a large compound in central Tehran for the public to view. The funeral came as Iran’s senior clerics met to appoint a new supreme leader, a position that functions as both head of state and commander in chief of its vast military apparatus. The reported favoured candidate of clerics was Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of Ali Khamenei and preferred choice of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Analysts have said that Mojtaba Khamenei is a hardliner and his choice as successor would signal an increasing role for the IRGC in Iran. His appointment would signify a doubling down on the Iranian regime’s authoritarian response to domestic calls for reform. Frustration with the government had exploded into weeks-long protests earlier in the year, put down by a brutal government crackdown that left at least 7,000 dead. Iran continued to strike US bases and installations across the Gulf, targeting the US embassy in Saudi Arabia and consulate in the United Arab Emirates. Iranian drones and missiles also struck US military radars and early warning systems in Bahrain and Qatar, unprecedented strikes for US bases in the region, which have enjoyed almost unchallenged primacy since the first Gulf war. Israeli authorities said Iran launched missile barrages overnight and into the early morning at Israel, though most missiles were intercepted and no casualties were recorded. Hezbollah also continued targeting Israel, shooting salvos of rockets and suicide drones at military bases and gatherings of troops in northern Israel. Hezbollah media also said it had struck three Israeli Merkava tanks that entered southern Lebanon, and downed an Israeli drone in Lebanese airspace. In response, Israel carried out wide-ranging airstrikes across Lebanon, particularly in the southern suburbs of Beirut, with explosions rattling the capital into Wednesday morning. Israel also struck a hotel without warning in Hazmieh, south-east of Beirut, about 700 metres from the presidential palace. Lebanon’s health ministry announced that six people were killed in the strikes, bringing the total death toll since Monday to 46. At least 58,000 people were displaced around the country by the strikes, and a state of panic descended on the country, where rumours of evacuation orders resulted in people fleeing from certain areas and buildings en masse, sometimes erroneously. The US and Israel provided an optimistic assessment of their war so far, with Adm Brad Cooper, the head of US central command, saying the US has struck about 2,000 targets in the last few days. Cooper said the US has “severely degraded Iran’s air defences” and destroyed large weapons caches and ballistic missile launchers. The Israeli military spokesperson Brig Gen Effie Defrin said it had struck a building in the Iranian city of Qom, where religious authorities had been meeting to elect a new supreme leader. Iranian media claimed the building was empty when it was struck and Defrin said Israel was checking for casualties. The Israeli military also said it struck sites in Iran that were being used to store ballistic missiles and that it had destroyed a secret underground facility used to develop “key components” for nuclear weapons. Iran has long maintained that it does not want a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear programme is for civilian use.

Attacking Iran’s nuclear programme could drive it towards a bomb, experts warn

The US-Israeli onslaught against Iran is intended to resolve a 24-year standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme, but it runs the risk of backfiring and driving the regime towards making a secret bomb, proliferation experts have warned. The regime in Tehran has long insisted that the programme is for civilian purposes and it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon. However, since two undeclared sites, for uranium enrichment and heavy water plutonium production, were discovered in 2002, the programme has been treated with intense suspicion. A nuclear deal in 2015 imposed severe limits and thorough inspections on Iran but when Donald Trump walked out of the agreement in 2018, triggering its collapse, Iran ramped up its work on enrichment and other aspects of the programme. Most worryingly for the international community, Iran had by last summer produced a stockpile of just over 440kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU), of 60% purity. In terms of technical difficulty, once at 60%, it is a relatively easy step to reach 90% – weapons-grade uranium that can be used to make a compact warhead. With further enrichment and conversion of the uranium from gas to metal form, Iran’s 440kg stockpile would be enough to make more than 10 warheads. The anxiety over this stockpile, accumulated since the torpedoing of the 2015 nuclear deal, was the motive for last June’s US-Israeli strikes on Iran. The US role, Operation Midnight Hammer, was focused on dropping bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s nuclear sites. Trump claimed the bombardment had “obliterated” the nuclear programme, but it soon became apparent this was not true. The bombs had wreaked extensive damage, but deep underground sites, burrowed beneath mountains in two sites in particular, Isfahan and Natanz, could not be destroyed. In response to the attacks, Iran excluded UN inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from those and other sensitive sites, with the result that the watchdog lost track of what became of the 440kg HEU stockpile, and of what was being done in the deep tunnels in Isfahan and Natanz. In its latest report, the IAEA conceded it could not verify whether Iran had suspended all enrichment-related activities, or the size of its uranium stockpile at the affected nuclear facilities. Despite that uncertainty, the IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said on Monday that “we don’t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons”. However, nuclear proliferation experts worry that might change in the aftermath of an attack aimed at destroying the regime that has ruled Iran for 47 years, and the killing of its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who had issued a religious edict, a fatwa, against the building of a bomb. “That is what makes this such a tremendous roll of the dice,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished scholar of global security at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “Because if the strike does not succeed in removing a regime, there remain thousands of people in Iran who are capable of reconstituting a programme like this.” Lewis added: “The technology itself is decades old, and a vengeful Iran that survives this strike is likely to reach the same conclusion that North Korea reached, that it’s a dangerous world out there with the United States, and it’s better to go nuclear.” Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, agreed that in the aftermath of the attack there would be greater motivation within the remnants of the regime “pushing Iran towards weaponisation no matter how this conflict ends, because of the nature in which it started”. Davenport pointed out that if the regime collapsed or if a civil war broke out, the fate of Iran’s HEU stockpile would become a major global problem. “If we end up in a scenario where we have regime implosion, where Iran becomes so internally destabilised that there is a real risk that material is diverted, that it is stolen … there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the United States to put boots on the ground,” Davenport said. “There’s a real nuclear terrorism risk to Trump’s regime change objective that I have not heard the administration acknowledging.”

‘We never imagined this’: the Cypriot village on edge after RAF Akrotiri drone strike

All his life, like his parents before him, Giorgos Konstantinos has learned to live next to RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus. He has dealt with the roar of planes, the comings and going of military vehicles and the war games. But never has Konstantinos, the village’s vice-mayor, witnessed anything quite like the events of the past two days. “We live here, we’ve got used to all the exercises, we’ve got used to all the planes, but what we never imagined is this,” the retired lawyer said on Tuesday, standing in front of the main gate to the facility. “Who would have thought of a drone flying through our skies, exploding on the other side of that fence and forcing all of us to leave?” In a moment, he said, the dangers of living next to a British base, when conflict was raging not so very far away, had suddenly become very real. In the early hours of Monday, sirens had begun to sound after the unmanned one-way attack drone crashed into RAF Akrotiri’s runway. The next day, the village of low-level villas and houses was all but deserted; police cars parked in front of its church, its streets eerily empty, its school under lock and key – testament to a government-ordered evacuation overseen by civil defence forces. “There are over 1,000 of us in our community, but today not more than 30 have remained,” said Konstantinos. “They’ve all gone, either to hotels, the nearby monastery or relatives in Limassol. People don’t feel safe when there’s so much uncertainty. Even the British can’t answer the question everyone here is asking: why, when there are so many air defence systems on that base, was the drone not detected earlier?” It is a question more and more Cypriots are asking. The EU’s easternmost member state is barely a 20-minute flight from Lebanon, from where the Shia militia group Hezbollah is believed by Cypriot officials to have launched the Shahed-type drone and two others intercepted later on Monday morning. “I have a job on the bases, like many of us in Akrotiri,” said Michalis Georgiou, one of the few local people who, by Tuesday, had returned to the village. “What happened on Sunday was terrifying. I was asleep, then I heard the sirens, then suddenly my parents and I were packing and fleeing. I’m not at all sure I am going to stay. The same thing could happen again, right?” The RAF base is all that Georgiou, 25, has ever known. He is the first to say that its presence on soil retained by Britain after the island nation became independent in 1960 is “very strange”. Part of an expanse in the south of the eastern Mediterranean island, the British-controlled territory sprawls across 99 sq miles. A landscape dotted by rugged fields and antennas – the most visible sign of the facility’s use as a listening post and spy station – surrounds the base’s barbed-wire perimeter. In the distance, across a bay, lies Limassol, the coastal town known as “Moscow on the Med” because of its popularity among Russians. Late on Tuesday, as the sun set, hundreds amassed on Limassol’s seafront to protest against the US-Israeli offensive against Iran and demand the withdrawal of military fixtures seen increasingly as a danger for Cyprus. “Ours is a small country that must remain neutral,” said Tasos Kosteas, who heads the Pancyprian Peace Council, which organised the demonstration. “The bases are clearly a danger to Cyprus, because it is the bases that Iran is targeting. Our basic message tonight is that the interests of the US and Israel are not the same as ours. The big powers only care about Cyprus because of its geostrategic importance, they don’t care about its people.” This week’s strike is the first against a British military installation on the island since 1986 and, in the minds of some Cypriot officials, is linked to the decision of the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, to allow the facilities to be used in a defensive capacity by the US – even if the UK maintains the attack happened before that policy was announced. On Monday, Nicosia took the rare step of openly chastising London for its perceived failure to clarify the base’s role. In an address, Nikos Christodoulides, the president of Cyprus, said the country had no intention of participating in any military operation. Concerns the island could be dragged into a widening regional war – at a time when it is also heading the EU presidency – are evident in the military hardware also heading to its shores. This week, France followed Greece in deploying military support to the country in the form of state-of-the-art frigates, F-16 fighter jets and anti-missile and anti-drone systems. The move came as it was announced that Akrotiri, and several other areas, would remain under evacuation for several more days. “We think there should be a permanent shelter here,” said Konstantinos. “A refuge point where we would feel safe. It’s not a demand that we’ve had before, but now I think everyone would agree it’s become a priority.”

Israel launches fresh wave of strikes on Iran: what we know on day five of the war

Israel said it had launched a “broad wave of strikes” against government targets in Tehran, including the presidential office. A loud blast was reported in the north-east of Tehran on Wednesday morning, as explosions rocked Iranian cities for a fourth night. Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon continues, with strikes reported in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, seen as a support base for the militant group Hezbollah. Iran continues to launch retaliatory strikes, with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) saying it fired about 40 missiles at US and Israeli targets. A funeral ceremony is to be held in Tehran for the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to state media. Supporters of the late Khamenei, who was killed in the US-Israeli strikes on Saturday, will gather at the prayer hall of the Grand Mosalla of Tehran on Wednesday at 10pm (6.30pm GMT) to begin a three-day commemoration ceremony. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, has emerged as the frontrunner to replace his father as Iran’s supreme leader, the New York Times has reported, citing Iranian officials. The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said his military would attempt to kill any Iranian leader appointed to succeed Khamenei. Global oil and gas prices have spiked as the war halted energy exports from the Middle East. Iran has attacked ships and energy facilities, closing navigation in the Gulf and forcing production stoppages from Qatar to Iraq. The conflict has caused turbulence on global markets. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 continued to fall on Wednesday, and was down about 3.9% during early trading. In Seoul, the Kospi – which dropped 7.2% on Tuesday – fell by a further 8.1% before trading was suspended on Wednesday. But Wall Street looks set to open only marginally lower in New York, according to pre-market trading data. The US navy could begin escorting oil tankers through the strait of Hormuz if necessary, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, in one of the administration’s most aggressive steps yet to attempt to contain soaring energy prices sparked by the war. The US military has claimed that the number of strikes carried out on Saturday in the first 24 hours of its war on Iran was nearly double that of the “shock-and-awe” strikes on Iraq in 2003, and that nearly 2,000 targets had been hit so far in Iran. Cooper also said the US was also sinking “all of the Iranian navy” and had already destroyed 17 Iranian ships.