Iran’s president says country is in ‘full-scale war’ after expansion of US attacks
Iran’s president has said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing. Iranian media reported strikes around Tabriz, believed to hold underground missile bases, as well as Bushehr, home to the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant. The US military said it had struck “military command centers, air defence and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites and communications networks”. Iran launched attacks against Bahrain, which hosts the US navy’s fifth fleet, and Kuwait, in addition to striking tankers in the strait of Hormuz, which carried a fifth of global oil and gas supplies before the war. Bahrain said its air traffic systems were damaged by the strikes, but that traffic was not affected. The Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen also announced a blockade of Saudi ports. “The reality is that today the Islamic Republic of Iran is engaged in a full-scale war,” the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said in a statement on Monday, warning it might have to endure more strikes.
The tit-for-tat attacks came as the region lurched back towards a total war despite an interim peace deal agreed last month. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) to halt attacks and open the strait is more than halfway through a 60-day implementation period that was intended to provide breathing room for diplomacy. Shipping in the strait has slowed to a trickle as a result of the fighting and the price of oil reached its highest in a month, passing $90 (£67) a barrel, exacerbating the global energy crisis.
A Houthi blockade of Saudi ports announced on Monday could further strain global energy markets as Saudi Arabia was using the Red Sea route to export millions of barrels of oil and circumvent Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. The group said it was responding to what it called Riyadh’s targeting of Sana’a airport last week after it was bombed by the Saudi-backed Yemen government, and that it would answer a “blockade with a blockade”. But in a sign that talks could still stop the escalating round of conflict, an Iranian official told Reuters that mediators gave Iran a proposal for a 10-day-ceasefire to find ways to revive the MoU. The proposal follows a statement by Iran that diplomacy with the US was continuing despite the fighting, without giving details on the content of the discussions. Iran’s interior minister was expected to travel to Islamabad on Monday, Agence France-Presse reported. The Iranian foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said at a press conference in Tehran: “We have been informed by mediators, we have received messages – without going into details – but the main point is that the diplomatic apparatus has been active in recent days and ideas have been conveyed to us by certain mediators.” Hours earlier, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was still open to negotiations with Iran, but that “it has to be real”. “We’re going to continue to respond. If the door opens to diplomacy – if the guys that want to do something productive for Iran win and take control of that system, or take control of the negotiations – that’ll be a very positive development,” Rubio said.
Mediators including Qatar and Pakistan have continued to speak to both sides during the current round of escalation in an attempt to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. The US military said a service member was killed on Saturday in northern Iraq, where the US has military bases, during a controlled detonation of what was called unexploded ordnance on a downed Iranian attack drone. It was the third US death in recent days, after two military service personnel were killed in an Iranian attack on a Jordanian airbase on Friday, with a third missing in action. “We hit them very hard again tonight,” Donald Trump said as he returned to Washington after the World Cup final, adding: “We did that in honour of the, probably three, it’s probably three great patriots.”
Since the war began, 17 US service members have been killed. Iran’s health ministry said on Friday that 50 people had been killed and more than 500 injured in the current round of fighting. As the strikes began early on Monday, a ship caught fire in the strait of Hormuz near the coastline of Oman in the southern corridor the US military has encouraged ships to use to avoid Iran’s control. The crew safely abandoned the vessel, while the ship was recovered by a tug boat, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed two oil tankers were blown up after attempting to transit through the southern route, but there was no independent confirmation.
The IRGC also claimed to have launched a “surprise attack” on an enemy command centre in the al-Tanf region of Syria, in a statement reported by the state news agency IRNA. After Iran targeted sites in Jordan on Sunday, Israel warned of the danger of the strikes spilling across its borders, reigniting a direct regional conflict that had been restrained even as tensions between the Trump administration and Iran have soared again. “If Iran fires missiles at Israel, we will attack them with full force,” said the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, on Sunday. The US is expected to send dozens of additional refuelling planes to Israel as part of a reinforcement of its force posture in the region, a US official told Reuters. Trump has threatened to target Iran’s power stations and bridges to try to compel Tehran to loosen its hold on the strait of Hormuz. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, defended the Trump administration’s strategy for the war, but argued that the mission had since shifted toward ensuring oil shipments could move through the strait. “We did a pause to try to get an agreement with the Iranian people to allow oil to flow without them attacking it,” Wright said on Sunday. “They’ve proven unwilling to do that, and we’ve pivoted. Now what we’re doing is assuring that that oil and gas and other products can flow through the strait of Hormuz with or without Iranian cooperation.” The US also announced that the “pilot zone” scheme in Lebanon had begun in three villages in the south, after peace talks in Rome between the governments of Lebanon and Israel. Under the programme, Israel will withdraw soldiers from areas it occupies in south Lebanon, to be replaced by the Lebanese army, which will be tasked with dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure in the areas. The US state department spokesperson Thomas Pigott said on Monday that the scheme started in the villages of Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya.