Drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh on Tuesday as Iran hit back at industrial and diplomatic targets across the Middle East and Washington warned its citizens to evacuate the entire region.
- US embassy in Riyadh attacked
- Fresh ‘large scale’ blasts in Tehran
- Israel urges countries to cut Iran ties
- Six US military personnel killed
- Iran Red Crescent says 787 killed
- China opposes any military strikes
- Iran nuclear site damaged
- Israel moves to create south Lebanon ‘buffer’
The conflict started with US and Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend that killed the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and showed no sign of abating as it entered its fourth day.
The US embassy in Riyadh warned of an imminent attack in the eastern Saudi city of Dhahran, home to much of the kingdom’s energy installations along the Gulf coast.
‘There is a threat of imminent missile and UAV attacks over Dhahran. Do not come to the US Consulate’ the embassy wrote on its official X account.
The warning came just hours after the US mission in Riyadh was attacked by two drones that sparked fire on the embassy grounds.
On Monday, the massive Ras Tanura refinery on Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast went into partial shutdown after a strike by drones.
The complex run by the Saudi state oil giant Aramco is home to one of the largest refineries in the entire Middle East and a cornerstone of the kingdom’s energy sector.
Throughout the region, the death toll has steadily increased, with six US military personnel killed so far in the war, according to US Central Command.
Iranian media have reported hundreds of Iranian casualties, including scores at a girl’s school, although AFP reporters have not been able to verify tolls independently.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said there were 101 casualties inside Iran on the third day of the war, including ‘85 civilian deaths and 11 military personnel killed’.
The Iranian Red Crescent said that more than 780 people have been killed nationwide since the US and Israeli strikes began. AFP was not in a position to verify the figure.
Iran stepped up its attacks on economic targets and US missions across the Middle East as president Donald Trump warned it was ‘too late’ for the Islamic republic to seek talks to escape the war.
As drones and missiles crashed into oil facilities and US embassies in the Gulf, Washington’s ally Israel bombarded targets in Iran and pushed troops deeper into Lebanon to battle the Tehran-backed militia Hezbollah.
‘Their air defence, air force, navy, and leadership is gone. They want to talk. I said: ‘Too late!,’ Trump posted on his social media site, two days after he had agreed to talks and four days after US and Israeli strikes wiped out much of Iran’s senior leadership.
As if to underline Trump’s new stance, loud blasts echoed around downtown Tehran, AFP journalists in the city reported. According to Iranian media, US and Israeli strikes had targeted the building housing the committee that is to elect Iran’s new supreme leader.
‘The military has launched a ninth wave of strikes in Tehran. The Air Force has now begun a large-scale wave of strikes targeting the Iranian terror regime’s infrastructure in Tehran,’ the Israeli military said.
Israeli rescuers and police said at least seven people were wounded after the latest salvo of missiles fired from Iran, including in Tel Aviv and in several sites in central Israel.
As Trump dismissed any remaining hope of a negotiated solution, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar urged foreign capitals to cut all ties with Tehran ‘following the Iranian regime’s attacks on all its neighbours and the massacre of its own people’.
China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, according to the official Xinhua news agency, warned Saar in a call that Beijing opposes the strikes. ‘Force cannot truly solve problems — instead, it will only bring new problems and severe after-effects,’ he said.
The United States and Israel triggered the rapidly spreading war on Saturday with a strike on Tehran that killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several more senior Iranian figures, followed by days of air and missile raids aimed at weakening the remaining government.
But Iran’s armed forces responded with missile and drone attacks on Israel, US embassies and military bases and on its Arab neighbours around the Gulf, targeting oil and gas facilities, ports and airports, foreign missions and landmark hotels.
Qatar has shut down its massive LNG industry, shipping traffic through the strategic Straits of Hormuz has all but halted
and thousands of flights have been cancelled, leaving foreign governments scrambling to rescue trapped travellers.
The war has already sent shockwaves through world markets. Energy prices are soaring and share prices are falling. Asian giant India added its concern to China’s on Tuesday, with the foreign ministry expressing ‘great anxiety’ for the fate of its 10 million citizens in the Gulf region.
‘Our trade and energy supply chains also traverse this geography. Any major disruption has serious consequences for the Indian economy,’ ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said.
Drones meanwhile struck a fuel tank in Oman and in the UAE an oil storage zone was hit by falling debris from an intercepted drone, as Iran apparently widened its targets beyond US assets.
Qatar’s state-run QatarEnergy said it would halt some downstream production of substances including urea, polymers, methanol and aluminium after Iran attacked two gas processing plants.
The announcement prompted an immediate two per cent rise in the price of aluminium on the London Metal Exchange.
In Oman, several drones targeted the port of Duqm on its eastern coast on Tuesday. The attack was the second on the port in three days, with the sultanate hit despite acting as a mediator between Iran and the United States just days prior to the war.
The UAE says it has been targeted with more than 800 drones and nearly 200 missiles since the war erupted.
Reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh saw smoke damage on the walls and roof of the American embassy after two drones hit it overnight, starting a fire in one building.
Saudi police were swarming the diplomatic quarter and checking the IDs of everyone who entered. The Saudi foreign ministry described the attack as ‘heinous and unjustified’.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards spokesman Ali Mohammad Naini meanwhile warned that ‘the gates of hell will open more and more, moment by moment, upon the United States and Israel’.
Iran urged the United Nations Security Council to take action to stop the war.
‘The United Nations Security Council has a duty... if it wishes, it can certainly act, because there is no obstacle to its action except its own will,’ said foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog said the key Iranian nuclear site of Natanz suffered ‘recent damage’, a day after Tehran said the underground uranium enrichment plant was attacked.
‘Based on the latest available satellite imagery, IAEA can now confirm some recent damage to entrance buildings of Iran’s underground Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant. No radiological consequence expected,’ the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a post on X.
On Monday, the US State Department had urged ‘Americans to DEPART NOW’ from all of the countries and territories of the Middle East ‘due to serious safety risks’.
Israel, meanwhile, said it was seizing new forward positions inside southern Lebanon, after Hezbollah fired missiles in support of its backer Iran, provoking a furious Israeli bombardment.
Defence minister Israel Katz said Israeli forces had been authorised ‘to advance and take control of additional strategic positions in Lebanon in order to prevent attacks on Israeli border communities’.
Shortly afterwards, the military spokesman said: ‘In practice, Northern Command has moved forward... and is creating a buffer, as we promised, between our residents and any threat.’
A Lebanese army source said Israeli forces had advanced from around Kfar Kila, in an apparent attempt ‘to establish a broad security belt in south Lebanon’.
According to a Lebanese military source, following Israel’s ‘escalation’, the Lebanese army redeployed troops posted near the southern border back to their bases. Hezbollah said it had launched strikes targeting three Israeli bases.
A spokesman for the UN refugee agency said 30,000 Lebanese had been driven from their homes and registered at collective shelters, while ‘many more slept in their cars on the side of roads’.
Trump said the US-UK relationship was ‘not like it used to be’, amid a major transatlantic fallout over Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s initial refusal to let the United States use British military bases.
In an interview with Britain’s Sun newspaper, Trump said Starmer ‘has not been helpful’, adding: ‘It’s very sad to see that the relationship is obviously not what it was.
