Israel warned of more attacks on Iran on Saturday after Iran’s deadly retaliatory strikes on Israel overnight and into the morning. Three people were killed and dozens were wounded in Israel, after a series of blistering Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear programme and its armed forces the previous day.
Israel’s assault on Friday used warplanes, as well as drones smuggled into the country in advance, to assault key facilities and kill top generals and scientists. Iran’s UN ambassador said 78 people were killed and more than 320 wounded in the attacks.
Israel said the barrage was necessary before Iran got any closer to building an atomic weapon, although experts and the US Government have assessed that Tehran was not actively working on such a weapon before the strikes.
It also threw talks between the United States and Iran over an atomic accord into disarray days before the two sides were set to meet Sunday.
Footage shared by an affiliate of Iran’s State TV showed a fire after an Israeli strike at Zagros Khodro, a former car manufacturing plant in Borujerd.
The State-run IRNA news agency also reported an Israeli strike on Saturday around Abadan in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province. Other strikes appeared to be happening in Kermanshah near a military barracks. The Israeli military says seven soldiers were lightly wounded on Friday night in an Iranian missile strike in central Israel.
It says they were briefly hospitalised and sent home. This is the first report of military casualties in the operation. It gave no further details on where the soldiers were located.
Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has appointed General Majid Mousavi as the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace division, to replace General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. The Guard’s aerospace division oversees Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles.
Israel’s main international airport, Ben Gurion International Airport will stay closed until further notice, according to airport authorities. The airport near Tel Aviv was been closed to traffic since Israel attacked Iran’s military and nuclear facilities on Friday morning and Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes at Israel. The announcement came as Lebanon, Jordan and Syria said they were reopening their airspaces on Saturday after closing them.
In one of the strongest appeals for peace since the election in early May of the first American pontiff, the Pope has appealed on Israel and Iran to show responsibility and act reasonably. “The situation in Iran and Israel has seriously deteriorated,” Pope Leo XIV said during an audience in St Peter’s Basilica. He stressed that “the commitment to building a safer world free from the nuclear threat must be pursued through respectful encounters and sincere dialogue to build a lasting peace”. Leo also noted that “no one should ever threaten the existence of another”.
However, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz issued the stark warning after an assessment meeting with the army’s chief of staff. He says Iran will pay a heavy price for harming Israeli citizens.
Israel’s military has threatened more strikes on targets in Iranian capital. The Israeli military said around noon on Saturday that its fighter jets “were set to resume striking targets in Tehran”.
Meanwhile, the UN nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency - confirmed in a post on X that the Isfahan nuclear site in Iran was targeted several times on Friday.
“No increase in off-site radiation levels has been reported as of now,” the agency said.
Iranian state television identified the two killed as General Gholamreza Mehrabi, the deputy of intelligence for the armed forces’ general staff, and General Mehdi Rabbani, the deputy of operations.
It did not say where the men were killed.
Israel’s strikes on Friday killed multiple high-ranking officers within Iran’s armed forces, including the chief of staff of the army and the head of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
Satellite images analysed on Saturday confirm some of the damage sustained by Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal by the Israeli assault on the country. Images from Planet Labs PBC taken on Friday showed damage at two missile bases, one in Kermanshah and one in Tabriz, both in western Iran.
At Kermanshah, where the base is up against a mountainside, burns could be seen across a wide area after the attack. In Tabriz, images showed damage at multiple sites on the base.
Iran has not acknowledged the damage, though it reported on Israeli strikes in the area.
Meanwhile, in a rare gesture of solidarity, Al-Azhar al-Sharif, the Sunni world’s foremost institution of religious learning, has condemned Israel’s attack on Iran, describing Israel as a “rogue entity”. “The arrogance displayed by the Israeli occupation reflects the darkest form of occupation in modern history,” the Cairo-based university said in a statement early Saturday. It called on the international community to take “urgent actions to halt the repeated violations committed by this rogue entity”.
Iran is a powerhouse of Shiite Muslims in the region and often at odds with Sunni nations.
Israel has paused natural gas supplies to Egypt amid its conflict with Iran, authorities in Cairo said.
The move has forced the Egyptian Government to stop supplying gas to some industries, according to a Friday statement from the Ministry of Petroleum. Some power plants that use natural gas in their operations have also reported fuel oil shortages amid peak summer demand, it said.
Egypt faces a deepening domestic gas shortfall, with a more than 7 per cent shortage in its daily gas needs to operate its power grid.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman on Saturday called further nuclear talks with the United States “meaningless” after Israeli strikes on the country, state television said.
The comments by Esmail Baghaei further threw possible talks between the two nations, initially scheduled to take place Sunday in Oman, into doubt.
“The US did a job that made the talks become meaningless,” Baghaei was quoted as saying. He added that Israel has passed all Iran’s red lines by committing a “criminal act” through its strikes.
However, he stopped short of saying the talks were cancelled. The Mizan news agency, which is run by Iran’s judiciary, quoted him as saying: “It is still not clear what we decide about Sunday talks.”