If you’re just joining us, here’s some of what has happened in the last few hours:
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At least four people were confirmed to have been killed when an Israeli strike hit a hotel in central Beirut. Ten others were injured, the Lebanese health ministry said.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the country would face “disastrous repercussions” if its government failed to enforce the 2024 agreement to disarm Hezbollah. Israeli strikes have killed 300 people across Lebanon since Monday, the country’s health ministry said.
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An oil storage facility was targeted in latest round of strikes on the country’s capital, Tehran, Iran state media confirmed. Massive plumes of flames lit up the sky, with videos showing the horizon glowing, pillars of flame, and billowing smoke.
- US President Donald Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that an errant Iranian missile struck a girls school in Iran, killing 175 people. Human Rights Watch said the pattern of the strikes suggested they were carried out by “highly accurate, guided munitions, rather than errant weapons”, and the strikes should be investigated as a potential war crime.
- Earlier, Trump criticised Keir Starmer over reports the British prime minister is preparing to send military aircraft to the Middle East. Trump said the US did not need allies “that join wars after we’ve already won”.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi has declared that the US and Israel’s war in Iran “shouldn’t have happened”, adding that seeking regime change would be unpopular and destabilising.
But he signalled that the US’s decision to attack Iran, one of China’s closest partners in the Middle East, would not derail the upcoming meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in April.
Speaking on the sidelines of China’s top annual political meetings, Wang did not directly condemn the US by name, but positioned Beijing as the global champion of state sovereignty while seeking to draw a contrast with Washington’s military interventionism.
“The history of the Middle East tells the world time and again that force provides no solution, and armed conflict will only increase hatred,” Wang said on Sunday. “Middle Eastern Affairs should be determined by regional countries independently. Plotting colour revolution or seeking regime change will find no popular support”.
China is Iran’s biggest economic partner, purchasing 90 per cent of its oil exports. But many experts say China’s relationship with Iran is a transactional one, and Beijing is unlikely to offer Tehran much material support beyond rhetoric.
Asked about the direction of China-US relations, Wang said both countries had a responsibility to engage, saying “sliding into conflict or confrontation could drag the whole world down.”
Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan said the prediction market industry’s war-related contracts face growing risks and acknowledged that rising visibility brings “more money, more problems”.
“There’s still a lot of resistance to innovation that kind of also seems jarring to begin with,” Coplan said on Saturday. But “that’s what makes it innovative and disruptive.”
Bettors placed $425.4 million in wagers on geopolitical questions on Polymarket in the week ending March 1, up from $163.9 million the week before, according to user-compiled data on Dune Analytics.
Coplan acknowledged the controversy but argued prediction markets provide real-world utility in high-stakes situations.
“When I get hit up by people in the Middle East who are saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Polymarket to decide whether we sleep near the bomb shelter; we look at it every day’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s really that popular over there?’” he added. “That’s very powerful. That’s an undeniable value proposition that did not exist before.”
Bloomberg
Good afternoon. Patrick Begley here with you, taking over the live blog from Angus Thomson.
In the next 24 hours, Iran is poised to appoint a successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed among other senior leaders in an airstrike at the start of the war. Since then, the country has been ruled by an interim leadership council.
Khamenei’s son, the hardline Mojtaba Khamenei, is tipped to succeed him. But as our correspondent David Crowe reports, Israel has vowed to take out the new leader, whoever it is.
“Every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the plan to destroy Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region, and to suppress the Iranian people – will be a target for elimination,” Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz declared on social media.
If you’re just joining us, here’s some of what has happened in the last few hours:
-
At least four people were confirmed to have been killed when an Israeli strike hit a hotel in central Beirut. Ten others were injured, the Lebanese health ministry said.
-
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the country would face “disastrous repercussions” if its government failed to enforce the 2024 agreement to disarm Hezbollah. Israeli strikes have killed 300 people across Lebanon since Monday, the country’s health ministry said.
-
An oil storage facility was targeted in latest round of strikes on the country’s capital, Tehran, Iran state media confirmed. Massive plumes of flames lit up the sky, with videos showing the horizon glowing, pillars of flame, and billowing smoke.
- US President Donald Trump claimed, without providing evidence, that an errant Iranian missile struck a girls school in Iran, killing 175 people. Human Rights Watch said the pattern of the strikes suggested they were carried out by “highly accurate, guided munitions, rather than errant weapons”, and the strikes should be investigated as a potential war crime.
- Earlier, Trump criticised Keir Starmer over reports the British prime minister is preparing to send military aircraft to the Middle East. Trump said the US did not need allies “that join wars after we’ve already won”.
At least four people were confirmed to have been killed when an Israeli strike hit a hotel in central Beirut.
The attack marked the first Israeli strike to hit the heart of Beirut since Israel-Hezbollah hostilities resumed last week.
Ten people were also injured in the attack on Beirut’s Raouche area, the Lebanese health ministry said in a statement.
Israel said it targeted key commanders of Iran’s elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards but did not name them.
“The commanders of the Quds Force’s Lebanon Corps operated to advance terror attacks against the state of Israel and its civilians, while operating simultaneously for the IRGC in Iran,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
The hotel was housing displaced people fleeing the war in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, and some were seen leaving the building for fear of further airstrikes.
Last week, Israel said it had killed the commander of Iran’s Quds Force in Lebanon, Daoud Ali Zadeh, in a strike in Tehran.
Lebanon was pulled into the widening US-Israel war with Iran on Monday after the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into Israel. Israel responded with heavy strikes across southern and eastern Lebanon and near Beirut.
Reuters
Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Australia could help Middle Eastern nations defend themselves against attacks by Iran while declining to back US President Donald Trump’s insistence that he play a role deciding the next Iranian leader.
Wong declared it was up to the Iranian people to determine who leads their nation as she ruled out any role for Australian troops in an offensive action in the region.
But in a new development, she flagged Australia could play a defensive role in helping protect nations in the Gulf from Iranian missile and drone strikes.
“We’ve had many countries which are non-participants [that] have been attacked, by Iran. You would anticipate as a consequence that we have been asked for assistance and we will work through that,” Wong told the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday.
“We will work through that in accordance with the position I have outlined, which is we are not participating in offensive action against Iran. And we’ve made clear we would not participate in any ground troop deployment into Iran.”
Read more from foreign affairs and national security correspondent Matthew Knott.
A strike on a primary school in southern Iran that left dozens of students and civilians dead should be investigated as a war crime, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.
US President Donald Trump earlier today claimed, without evidence, that an errant Iranian missile struck a girls school in Iran, killing more than 165 people – most of them children.
But after analysing and verifying 14 videos and photographs posted after the strike, the human rights groups said the pattern of the strikes suggested they were carried out by “highly accurate, guided munitions, rather than errant weapons”.
“A prompt and thorough investigation is needed into this attack, including if those responsible should have known that a school was there and that it would be full of children and their teachers before midday,” said HRW researcher Sophia Jones.
Iran blamed the US-Israeli coalition for the attack but neither have claimed responsibility for the strikes. An Israeli military spokesperson told Human Rights Watch that it was “not aware of any [Israeli military] strikes in the area.”
As the local time reaches 4am in Tehran, here’s an update on some of the strikes that have occurred across the Middle East this morning:
- An Israeli drone strike hit a hotel in central Beirut, AP and local media reported. There has been no word so far on casualties, and Israel has not said who it targeted.
- Fragments from an Iranian missile fell onto a road in Manama, Bahrain, injuring one person and causing damage to several shops, the country’s interior ministry said. The ministry also said Iran targeted a facility near Mina Salman, a seaport in Manama, where civil defence is working to control a fire that broke out following the strike.
- Eight people were killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese health ministry said the toll was not final, and rescue teams were still conducting search operations.
- Several drones struck three different areas in Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, local media reported. One person was killed in one of the attacks.
- Earlier, Israel’s military confirmed it struck several fuel storage complexes in Tehran, sending pillars of flames and billowing smoke into the city’s skyline.
- One person was killed in Dubai after debris from a missile interception fell onto their vehicle. Earlier, officials reported falling shrapnel from the interception of projectiles from Iran caused minor damage to the facade of a tower in Dubai Marina, an area with many luxury high rises. There were no injuries reported.
- Kuwait’s Ministry of Defence said it responded early Sunday to a wave of drones entering its airspace, including a direct attack on fuel tanks at Kuwait International Airport.
Vision of the Iranian women’s team swapping jerseys with the Matildas was “really moving for Australians”, Penny Wong said, but the foreign minister would not comment on whether Australian officials had made contact with the athletes.
On the ABC’s Insiders program earlier this morning, host David Speers asked Wong if it was safe for them to return home, after Iranian state TV labelled them “wartime traitors” for not singing the national anthem before their opening Women’s Asian Cup game.
This was Wong’s full response:
I want to say about the Iranian women’s team that it has been really moving for Australians to see them in Australia and the Matildas swapping jerseys with them was, I think, a very evocative moment that says spoke to solidarity and the way in which sport can bring us together. We know this regime has brutally murdered many of its own people. We know this regime has brutally oppressed many Iranian women, and we stand in solidarity with the men and women of Iran and particularly Iranian women and girls. I don’t want to get into commentary about the Iranian women’s team. Obviously, this is a regime that we know has brutally cracked down on its people.
Asked if the government had made direct contact with the players, Wong said: “I can’t comment on that … these are ultimately matters that would not be decisions I’d be making.”
The price of oil surged higher and showed no signs of halting its rapid climb a week after the US and Israel launched major attacks on Iran that escalated into a war in the Middle East.
The conflict has left ships that carry roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to safely pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Gulf that is bordered on its north side by Iran.
Oil prices surpassed US$90 a barrel Friday, with American crude settling at $90.90, up 36 per cent.
Brent, the international standard, climbing 27 per cent over the course of the week to land at US$92.69.
Unleaded petrol is sitting at just under $2.20 at dozens of pumps across Sydney and Melbourne this morning, according to the NSW government’s FuelCheck app, and the Victorian government’s Servo Saver tracker.
In a further threat to global energy markets, Kuwait said it was reducing oil production as a “precautionary” measure due to the war in the Middle East.
The Kuwait Petroleum Cooperation blamed Iran’s attacks on the country as well as threats to the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil trade passes.
Kuwait is one of the world’s largest oil producers. The week-old war has disrupted the flow of oil out of the Gulf and sent oil prices surging.
With AP
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
