United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on Israel and the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah to “stop the war” at the start of his visit to Beirut yesterday, as Israel expanded its strikes across the country.
Lebanon was drawn into the Middle East war last week when Hezbollah attacked Israel in response to the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes.
“My strong appeal to those parties, to Hezbollah and to Israel, is for a ceasefire to stop the war,” Guterres said.
“This is no longer the time of armed groups. This is the time of strong states.”
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Later in the day, the UN chief launched a humanitarian appeal to help the more than 800,000 people registered as displaced in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said the US was going to be hitting Iran “very hard over the next week”, shortly after issuing a partial 30-day waiver for purchases of sanctioned Russian oil, hoping to ease prices fuelled by the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Prices have been whipsawing on Trump’s changing comments on the likely duration of the war, which has prompted Iran to attack vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil.
Benchmark Brent crude (LCOc1) eased about 0.6% to around $99.80, still up almost 40% since the start of the conflict.
After nearly two weeks of war, 2,000 people have been killed, most of them in Iran, but many also in Lebanon and a growing number in the Gulf, which has, for the first time in decades of Middle East conflicts, found itself on the front line. Several million people have been displaced from their homes.
As Israeli warplanes pounded Beirut’s suburbs with air strikes, Lebanon’s interior minister said authorities were unable to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who have sought refuge in the capital.
Israel also dropped leaflets threatening Gaza-scale devastation as it deployed more troops to fight Hezbollah and warned of more attacks on Lebanon’s infrastructure.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced yesterday that they had launched missiles and drones at Israel in coordination with Hezbollah.
Several homes in a Bedouin Arab town near an air base in northern Israel were heavily damaged overnight.
Later in the day, smoke could be seen rising from two locations around Tel Aviv, AFP journalists said, after blasts were heard following a warning that missiles were fired from Iran.
US forces have also suffered casualties. The US military confirmed that all six crew members aboard a refuelling aircraft that crashed in western Iraq were dead.
Iranian drones were reported flying into Kuwait, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman.
The Israeli military launched strikes across Tehran. It said its air force had struck more than 200 targets in western and central Iran over the past day.
Iranian Press TV said a woman had been killed by an airstrike close to a rally in Tehran for Quds (Jerusalem) Day, one of many across Iran in support of Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territory.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and security chief Ali Larijani all appeared in videos verified by Reuters openly attending the rally in a gesture of defiance, despite an assertion by US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth that the leadership were “cowering” underground.
The war has sparked a critical shortage of cooking gas in India, a country with longstanding ties to Iran. Iran has allowed two Indian-flagged liquefied petroleum gas carriers to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, four sources told Reuters.
The US waiver on Russian oil was welcomed in Moscow but left Kyiv and its allies angry.
Trump said he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin may be helping Iran a “little bit” in the interview with Fox News Radio that aired on Friday.
“I think he might be helping him (Iran) a little bit, yeah, I guess. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right?” Trump told “The Brian Kilmeade Show”, without specifying the nature of that help.
The Washington Post reported last week that Russia was providing Iran with targeting information that included locations of U.S. warships and aircraft in the Middle East. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff later said Russia had denied doing so, and “we can take them at their word.”
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, in his first public comments on Thursday, vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut and urged neighbouring countries to close US bases on their territory or risk being attacked themselves.
Khamenei’s comments were read out by a television presenter, and it was not clear why he had not appeared in person or recorded his comments.
Hegseth told a news briefing that the U.S. knew he was “wounded and likely disfigured”. An Iranian official told Reuters on Wednesday that Khamenei was lightly injured but continuing to work.
President Emmanuel Macron said one French soldier had been killed and several wounded during an attack in northern Iraq, hours after an Italian base in the same area was attacked. The French soldiers were providing training as part of an international coalition fighting Islamic State militants.
