The US state department has urged Americans to immediately depart more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries amid US-Israeli strikes against Iran.
US citizens were urged to depart using commercial means from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the [occupied] West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, according to Mora Namdar, the department’s assistant secretary for consular affairs.
Hundreds of thousands of travellers are currently stranded in the Gulf states, as the airspace over some of the world’s busiest international airports, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, closed over the weekend.
The Israeli military has said it has detected incoming missiles launched from Iran and its defensive systems are working to intercept the threat.
The US Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said a briefing from Trump administration officials about the US war with Iran “raised many more questions than it answered”.
“Look, a whole lot of questions were asked. I found their answers completely and totally insufficient,” Schumer told reporters as he exited the meeting. He departed without taking questions.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio as well as CIA director John Ratcliffe are among those briefing Congress leaders in a classified facility in the Capitol.
A reminder that you can follow our US politics live blog for more US-focused reaction and developments:
in Larnaka
Over in Cyprus local officials are confirming that nearly all residents have been evacuated tonight from the village of Akrotiri surrounding the British RAF facility that has been targeted by combat drones.
“Everyone has left with the exception of about 20 people who refused to leave” the area’s deputy mayor Giorgos Konstantinos told the Guardian. “It’s been a mass evacuation given the circumstances and fear.”
Police forces had been bolstered tonight around the RAF base from where non-essential personnel have also been removed to other parts of the sovereign base areas – a legacy of colonial rule – for safety following the midnight drone attack on Sunday.
It is still unclear if the unmanned vehicles, another two of which were intercepted earlier on Monday, were deployed against the base from Iran, or fired by Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon.
Donald Trump has claimed, without evidence, that had he not ripped up the Iran nuclear deal signed by former US president Barack Obama in 2015, Tehran would have had a nuclear bomb by now.
He wrote on his Truth Social platform:
If I didn’t terminate Obama’s horrendous Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA), Iran would have had a Nuclear Weapon three years ago. That was the most dangerous transaction we have ever entered into, and had it been allowed to stand, the World would be an entirely different place right now. You can blame Barack Hussein Obama, and Sleepy Joe Biden. THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!
The IAEA verified that Iran was complying with the JCPOA, which limited its uranium enrichment, at the time. It only breached those limits after Trump pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018.
Further to our earlier post, the Israeli military said it has targeted the complex of Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB in Tehran, following an evacuation warning for the area.
The US state department has urged Americans to immediately depart more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries amid US-Israeli strikes against Iran.
US citizens were urged to depart using commercial means from Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the [occupied] West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, according to Mora Namdar, the department’s assistant secretary for consular affairs.
Hundreds of thousands of travellers are currently stranded in the Gulf states, as the airspace over some of the world’s busiest international airports, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, closed over the weekend.
The US embassy in Kuwait was struck by drones, three diplomatic sources have told AFP after smoke was seen rising from the diplomatic mission earlier.
One Kuwait-based diplomat and a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the embassy had been damaged by a number of drones while a second Kuwait-based diplomat said the embassy building had been struck directly in the attack.
As an AFP correspondent saw smoke rising from the diplomatic mission on Iran’s third day of retaliatory Gulf attacks, the US embassy said that people should not come to the facility, warning of “a continuing threat of missile and UAV [drone] attacks over Kuwait”.
Israel’s military has issued a new evacuation warning for residents of the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon.
We will bring you the latest updates as we get them.
The Israeli military says it has begun a new wave of strikes on Tehran. This came shortly after the military issued an evacuation warning for Tehran residents, especially those located near the headquarters of Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB.
Israel’s Channel 12 reports Iranian television is one of the targets of the latest strikes, citing an Israeli source.
The US will take action to mitigate a spike in energy prices after the Iran conflict has sent oil prices rising, Marco Rubio said on Monday.
The US secretary of state said more detail on the plans would come on Tuesday. He spoke shortly after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps announced it had closed the Strait of Hormuz – critical to the global flow of oil shipments – and would fire on any ships trying to pass.
Rubio told reporters: “Starting tomorrow, you will see us rolling out those phases to try to mitigate against that … We anticipated this could be an issue.”
US secretary of state Marco Rubio insisted the US would not “deliberately” target a school, after Iran said 168 people died in an alleged US-Israeli strike.
“The United States would not deliberately target a school. Our objectives are missiles, both the ability to manufacture them and the ability to launch them,” Rubio told reporters, while adding that the Pentagon was investigating the alleged incident.
The strike on school appears to be the worst mass casualty event of the US-Israeli-led bombing campaign on Iran so far.
Marco Rubio reiterated what Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth said earlier on Monday that regime change in Iran was not the objective of the US-Israeli combat operation.
But Rubio added that the US hoped Iranians would topple the regime.
“We hope that the Iranian people can overthrow this government and establish a new future for that country. We would love for that to be possible,” Rubio told reporters.
“But the objective of this mission is the destruction of their ballistic missile capabilities and of their naval capabilities,” he added.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
