The four-day Middle East conflict widened on Tuesday as Iran stepped up missile and drone attacks in the region and Israel hit targets in Lebanon.
Iran targeted Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain, continuing its counterattack after the U.S. and Israel began their joint attack on Saturday.
The Iranian regime is using mobile launchers to carry out indiscriminate missile strikes and “inflict maximum harm” across the region, said U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the region.
The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh twice came under attack while Iranian drone strikes prompted the U.A.E. to raise its combat readiness and extend its two biggest airlines’ pause on all scheduled flights.
A drone struck the parking lot of the U.S. consulate in Dubai, according to a U.S. official and Dubai’s government media office. No casualties were reported, Dubai’s government and the U.S. official said.
Iran has made hundreds of attempts to hack into security cameras in government and financial institutions in Israel and Persian Gulf countries since the war began on Saturday, Check Point, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company, said in a report.
The U.S. closed embassies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Lebanon and ordered some diplomats across the region to leave after retaliatory strikes by Iran.
The State Department has also urged U.S. citizens to leave more than a dozen countries in the region via commercial transportation, citing “serious safety risks,” and instructed nonemergency U.S. government employees and their families to evacuate from the U.A.E., Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan and Bahrain.
Markets sold off sharply before paring losses, while oil prices continued to rise.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, President Trump discussed his reason for the initial strikes, saying he believed Iran was “going to attack first.”
A top Pentagon official told lawmakers on Tuesday that U.S. military goals in Iran include eliminating the country’s missile and drone program, drawing a distinction between the Trump administration’s aims and those of Israel, which sought to kill Iran’s supreme leader.
The U.S. is aiming to address Iran’s ability to “project military power” against its forces in the region, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby told senators, including Iran’s missiles and attack drones and its ability to produce them, as well as the Iranian navy.
Colby’s comments came a day after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. anticipated an Israeli strike on the Islamic Republic, which would in turn have put U.S. forces in the region at risk for reprisals from Iran. Rubio’s comments sparked questioning from Sen. Angus King (I., Maine) about whether Israel had forced the U.S. into conflict. Colby said he understood U.S. military objectives to be aimed at eliminating its missile program, and that Trump had made the decision to strike.
Asked on Tuesday about the notion that Israel’s plans to attack Iran might have forced Trump’s hand, the president responded: “No. I might have forced Israel’s hand.”
Lawmakers from both parties have been raising questions about what the Trump administration’s goals are in Iran ahead of a vote in Congress on resolutions to limit the president’s powers. Colby, who has previously publicly opposed committing the U.S. to open-ended wars in the Middle East, said he would support the president if he decides to put U.S. boots on the ground in Iran, which Trump has left as a possibility on the table.
Before a meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, Trump said Iran’s military has been largely neutralized since Saturday. He said that the U.S. Navy would begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil supply moves, to thwart an Iranian blockade.
Trump said many possible successors to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the initial strikes along with several top political and military leaders, are dead. “Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody,” adding that the “worst case” scenario for Iran is that “somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person.”
Trump, a Republican, is open to supporting groups in Iran willing to take up arms to dislodge the regime, U.S. officials said, an idea that could turn Iranian factions into ground forces at least rhetorically backed by Washington. But the president on Tuesday said “somebody from within” would be the best option to lead Iran.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it was conducting simultaneous strikes against Iranian forces in Tehran and the Hezbollah militia—a Shiite group backed by Iran—in Lebanon.
Israeli strikes hit the building that hosts the Assembly of Experts, the body of 88 Shia clerics whose primary role is to select Iran’s new supreme leader, Iranian state broadcaster IRIB reported.
The offices in the city of Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran, were evacuated before the strikes and no casualties were reported, IRIB reported.
Israel said it killed Ali Zadeh, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ secretive Quds Force in Tehran who was responsible for Lebanon and coordinated with Hezbollah and other proxies.
The Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday that they had hit an underground compound known as Minzadehei where it said Tehran was carrying out nuclear weapons-related work.
Israel’s military said it struck Hezbollah command centers, weapons storage sites and satellite communications facilities across Beirut it said were operating under civilian cover. The targets included sites used for gathering intelligence and coordinating attacks, it said.
Israel’s military also said it struck more than 160 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including command centers and personnel belonging to Hezbollah’s Radwan Force special-operations unit.
France is sending its Charles de Gaulle aircraft-carrier battle group to the Mediterranean, President Emmanuel Macron said, as part of a French military buildup in the region in response to Iranian missile and drone attacks.
The U.K. is sending to Cyprus the HMS Dragon guided-missile destroyer and helicopters that can shoot down drones, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday, after attacks by Iran on RAF Akrotiri, a British base in Cyprus.
Iran’s military strikes across the Middle East might reflect hard-line views that Tehran moved too quickly to seize off ramps following past U.S. and Israeli incursions, and that it needed to blunt U.S. support for the war through stepped-up aggression, International Crisis Group analysts said.
Yasmine Farouk, a Crisis Group project leader, said Persian Gulf nations face “many options that are bad” in responding to Iran because they don’t want to appear allied with the U.S. and Israelis in offensive operations.