Trump Weighs U.S. Attacks on Iran, Russia Warns Against Intervention
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Live updates: Israel-Iran conflict, ballistic missile attacks, Trump weighs US involvement
All non-sheltered American planes were moved out of Al Udeid airbase in Qatar earlier this week. All of the US Navy ships that had been forward-deployed at Naval Support Activity Bahrain left port. US Central Command has also pre-positioned additional supplies of blood in the region, officials and a source familiar said.
US Central Command has also pre-positioned additional supplies of blood in the region, the officials and a source familiar said, which is standard operating procedure any time there is a possibility of an attack on US forces.
One of the officials described the changes as prudent, precautionary planning amid threats by Iran that it will attack US troops and bases in the Middle East if the US decides to join Israel in striking Iranian nuclear facilities.
The non-sheltered American planes were moved out of Al Udeid airbase in Qatar earlier this week, an official confirmed after satellite imagery showed that the area had been emptied. Additionally, all of the US Navy ships that had been forward-deployed at Naval Support Activity Bahrain — the US Navy’s base in the island country — left port earlier this week. It’s not clear where the planes and ships have been moved to during the heightened tensions.
Remember: President Donald Trump has not yet decided whether to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, CNN has reported. But if he does, Tehran has threatened to retaliate directly against the US. Iran has dozens of proxy groups in the region that can launch ballistic missiles and drones at US forces and bases. In January 2024, three US service members were killed and dozens were wounded after an Iran-backed Shia militia launched a drone attack at Tower 22, a US base on the border of Syria and Iraq.
Israel hits nuclear sites, Iran strikes hospital as war escalates
Israel said it had struck Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites. It initially said it also hit Bushehr, site of Iran’s only functioning nuclear power plant. Iran could consider closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of daily global oil consumption passes. Iran is maintaining crude oil supply by loading tankers one at a time and moving floating oil storage much closer to China, two vessel tracking firms told Reuters. Israel has the most advanced military in the Middle East, which has become more difficult to assess in recent days with the extent of the damage inside Iran. Israel wants Iran weakened enough to be forced into fundamental concessions on permanently abandoning its nuclear enrichment, its ballistic missile programme and its support for militant groups across the region. Iran has been weighing its options in responding to its biggest security challenge since the 1979 revolution. The conflict poses a fresh hurdle for Iran, which uses a shadow fleet of tankers to conceal their origin and skirt U.S. sanctions reinstated in 2018 over its nuclear programme.
Iran is maintaining crude oil supply
TEL AVIV/DUBAI, June 19 (Reuters) – Israel bombed nuclear targets in Iran on Thursday and Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital overnight, as the week-old air war escalated with no sign yet of an off-ramp.
Following the strike that damaged the Soroka medical centre in Israel’s southern city of Beersheba, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tehran’s “tyrants” would pay the “full price”.
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Defence Minister Israel Katz said the military had been instructed to intensify strikes on strategic-related targets in Tehran in order to eliminate the threat to Israel and destabilise the “Ayatollah regime”.
Israel’s sweeping campaign of airstrikes aims to do more than destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and missile capabilities. It seeks to shatter the foundations of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s government and leave it near collapse, Israeli, Western and regional officials said.
Netanyahu wants Iran weakened enough to be forced into fundamental concessions on permanently abandoning its nuclear enrichment, its ballistic missile programme and its support for militant groups across the region, the sources said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, speaking to reporters outside the damaged hospital, said “regime change” in Tehran was not a goal the security cabinet had set “for the time being”.
U.S. President Donald Trump , meanwhile, has kept the world guessing about whether Israel’s superpower ally would join it in airstrikes.
Israel said it had struck Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites. It initially said it had also hit Bushehr, site of Iran’s only functioning nuclear power plant, but a spokesperson later said it was a mistake to have said this.
An Iranian diplomat told Reuters Bushehr was not hit and Israel was engaged in “psychological warfare” by discussing it. Any attack on the plant, near Arab neighbours and housing Russian technicians, is viewed as risking nuclear disaster.
Trump has veered from proposing a swift diplomatic end to the war to suggesting the United States might join it. On Wednesday, he said nobody knew what he would do. A day earlier he mused on social media about killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei , then demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender.
A week of Israeli air and missile strikes against its major rival has wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military command, damaged its nuclear capabilities and killed hundreds of people, while Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed at least two dozen civilians in Israel.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ
Iran has been weighing its options in responding to its biggest security challenge since the 1979 revolution. A member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee Presidium, Behnam Saeedi, told the semi-official Mehr news agency Iran could consider closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of daily global oil consumption passes.
Tehran has in the past threatened to close the strait. Shipping sources said on Wednesday that commercial ships were avoiding Iran’s waters nearby.
Oil prices rose after Israel and Iran continued to exchange missile attacks overnight and Trump’s stance on the conflict kept investors on edge.
Iran was maintaining crude oil supply by loading tankers one at a time and moving floating oil storage much closer to China, two vessel tracking firms told Reuters, as the country seeks to keep a key source of revenue while under attack.
The conflict poses a fresh hurdle for Iran, which uses a shadow fleet of tankers to conceal their origin and skirt U.S. sanctions reinstated in 2018 over its nuclear programme.
Countries around the world are taking measures to evacuate their citizens from Israel and Iran and airspace in the region remains closed.
Smoke rises following an Israeli attack in Tehran, Iran, June 18, 2025. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights , opens new tab
Earlier, the Israeli military said it targeted the Khondab nuclear site near Iran’s central city Arak overnight, including a partially-built heavy-water research reactor. Heavy-water reactors produce plutonium, which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb. Iran’s atomic energy agency said the attack caused no casualties.
The Israeli military also said it attacked launch sites in western Iran after attempts to restore them were detected.
Israel, which has the most advanced military in the Middle East, has been fighting on several fronts since the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas triggered the Gaza war . It has severely weakened Iran’s regional allies, Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and bombed Yemen’s Houthis.
‘STAY AWAY FROM OUR COUNTRY’
The extent of the damage inside Iran has become more difficult to assess in recent days, with the authorities apparently seeking to prevent panic by limiting information.
Iran has stopped giving updates on the death toll, and state media have ceased showing widespread images of destruction. The internet has been almost completely shut down, and the public has been banned from filming.
Arash, 33, a government employee in Tehran, said a building next to his home in Tehran’s Shahrak-e Gharb neighbourhood had been destroyed in the strikes.
“I saw at least three dead children and two women in that building. Is this how Netanyahu plans to ‘liberate’ Iranians? Stay away from our country,” he told Reuters by telephone.
Israel has issued evacuation orders for whole sections of Tehran, a city of 10 million. Thousands of residents have fled, jamming the highways out.
Samira, 11, moved in with her grandparents in the northwestern city of Urmia after her family fled Tehran when a shopping centre near their house was struck. She said she has been unable to sleep at night.
“I’m afraid Israel will hit our home and my mom will die. I’m too scared. I just want to go home,” she said by phone.
Inside Israel, the missile strikes over the past week are the first time a significant number of projectiles from Iran have pierced defences and killed Israelis in their homes.
The director general of the Israeli hospital that was damaged in Beersheba, Shlomi Kodesh, told reporters at the site that a missile strike had destroyed several wards and wounded 40 people, mostly staff and patients.
Netanyahu, visiting the site, said he had issued instructions that “no one is immune” from Israeli attacks.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted Israeli military and intelligence headquarters near the hospital. An Israeli military official denied there were military targets nearby.
Missiles also hit a residential building in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv.
“It’s very scary,” said Yaniv, 34, who lives nearby. He said he heard a deafening explosion when the missile hit, shaking his apartment tower.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that missile and drone attacks have targeted military and industrial sites linked to Israel’s defence industry in Haifa and Tel Aviv.
Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Peter Graff and Alex Richardson
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Trump weighs strikes against Iran after Netanyahu’s incitement
Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz as a way of hitting back against its enemies, a lawmaker says. A second lawmaker says this would only happen if Tehran’s vital interests were endangered.
“Iran has numerous options to respond to its enemies and uses such options based on what the situation is,” the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Behnam Saeedi, a member of the parliament’s National Security Committee, as saying.
“Closing the Strait of Hormuz is one of the potential options for Iran,” he said.
Mehr later quoted another lawmaker, Ali Yazdikhah, as saying Iran would continue to allow free shipping in the Strait and in the Gulf so long as its vital national interests were not at risk.
Israel-Iran Conflict LIVE: Limited radiation threat from Israeli strikes; European powers & Iran meet for nuclear talks
The efficacy of GBU-57s has been a topic of deep contention at the Pentagon. Only a tactical nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Fordow because of how deeply it is buried.
According to a report by The Guardian, he has suggested to defence officials that it would only make sense for the US to launch strikes against Iran if the bomb was guaranteed to destroy the critical uranium enrichment facility.
The efficacy of GBU-57s has been a topic of deep contention at the Pentagon since the start of Trump’s term, according to two defence officials who were briefed that perhaps only a tactical nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Fordow because of how deeply it is buried.
A ‘terrible spiral of escalation’: World braces for intensifying Iran-Israel conflict
Leaders from the U.K., Russia, China, Germany and beyond have weighed in on the growing conflict, which is showing no signs of de-escalating. The Kremlin warned Thursday that U.S. intervention in Iran would set off a “terrible spiral of escalation” Russia is currently mired in its own war in Ukraine, which also involves a fight over a major nuclear power plant. China’s Xinhua state media service cited Chinese Premier Xi Jinping saying that a ceasefire between Israel and Iran is “an urgent priority” and that the use of force is not the right way to resolve the conflict. The foreign ministers of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are set to meet with their Iranian counterpart on Friday. But chances at diplomacy are looking increasingly bleak as Iran and Israel continue to trade increasingly deadly blows and leaders of the countries involved show no sign of stepping back from the brink. The White House has remained noncommittal in its comments on whether the United States would attack Iran.
Leaders from the U.K., Russia, China, Germany and beyond have weighed in on the growing conflict, which is showing no signs of de-escalating.
Chances at diplomacy are looking increasingly bleak as Iran and Israel continue to trade increasingly deadly blows.
Urgent international calls for restraint appear to be falling on deaf ears as the world braces for intensifying conflict in the Middle East.
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All eyes are on the White House, as U.S. President Donald Trump weighs carrying out direct military strikes on Iran. Such an act would represent a dramatic deepening of U.S. involvement in what has thus far been limited to attacks between Iran and U.S. ally Israel.
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The Kremlin warned Thursday that U.S. intervention in Iran would set off a “terrible spiral of escalation,” while Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told Reuters that the world is “millimeters” away from nuclear catastrophe. Russia is currently mired in its own war in Ukraine, which also involves a fight over a major nuclear power plant.
In the U.K., Prime Minister Keir Starmer chaired an emergency Cobra meeting — the country’s national crisis management system — as his government works to withdraw the families of staff at the British embassy in Tel Aviv.
The high-level intelligence meeting followed Starmer’s presence at the G7 summit in Canada, during which he joined other leaders of the group in reiterating their “commitment to peace and stability.”
But chances at diplomacy are looking increasingly bleak as Iran and Israel continue to trade increasingly deadly blows and leaders of the countries involved show no sign of stepping back from the brink.
Trump remained noncommittal in his comments on whether the U.S. would attack Iran.
“I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do. I can tell you this, that Iran’s got a lot of trouble, and they want to negotiate,” he told reporters on the White House lawn on Wednesday.
He added that “the next week is going to be big.”
The president said later from the Oval Office that he likes to “make the final decision one second before it’s due… because things change. Especially with war.”
‘Dirty work’
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stirred some controversy, saying in an interview Tuesday that Israel was doing the “dirty work” for other countries by carrying out strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
“I can only say I have the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army and the Israeli government had the courage to do this,” Merz told a German broadcaster. The foreign ministers of Germany, France, and the U.K. are set to meet with their Iranian counterpart on Friday.
John Wessels | Afp | Getty Images
Meanwhile, China’s Xinhua state media service cited Chinese Premier Xi Jinping saying that a ceasefire between Israel and Iran is “an urgent priority” and that the use of force is not the right way to resolve the conflict.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi held a phone call Thursday, during which both men strongly condemned Israel, saying the country’s actions in Iran “violated the UN Charter and other norms of international law,” according to a Kremlin aide.
The leaders, both of whom are allies of Iran, said that military action would not resolve the issues Western and Israeli leaders have over Iran’s nuclear program and that diplomacy was the only way forward.
It comes after Trump posted comments on his Truth Social platform earlier this week, demanding that Iran unconditionally surrender and warning that the U.S. has the capability to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei responded by saying that any American attack on Iran would be met with “irreparable damage” and spark a wider war.
Overnight, Israel and Iran traded missile barrages, with Israel striking Iran’s Arak and Natanz nuclear facilities, while Iran said it hit a hospital in Israel’s Negev region after aiming for a military site.
At least 30 people were injured in the strike on the hospital, authorities said, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz saying after the attack that Iran’s leader “can no longer be allowed to exist.”