TEL AVIV/DUBAI/WASHINGTON: Iran and Israel traded missiles and airstrikes on Saturday, the day after Israel launched a sweeping air offensive against its old enemy, killing commanders and scientists and bombing nuclear sites in a stated bid to stop it building an atomic weapon.
In Tehran, Iranian state TV reported that around 60 people, including 20 children, had been killed in an attack on a housing complex, with more strikes reported across the country as Israel said it had attacked more than 150 targets.
In Israel, air raid sirens sent residents into shelters as waves of missiles streaked across the sky and interceptors rose to meet them, killing at least three people. An Israeli official said Iran had fired around 200 ballistic missiles in four waves.
U.S. President Donald Trump has lauded Israel’s strikes and warned of much worse to come unless Iran quickly accepts the sharp downgrading of its nuclear programme that the U.S. has demanded in talks that had been due to resume on Sunday.
But with Israel saying its operation could last weeks, and urging Iran’s people to rise up against their Islamic clerical rulers, fears have grown of a regional conflagration dragging in outside powers, with global economic and financial repercussions.
The United States, Israel’s main ally, helped shoot down Iranian missiles, two U.S. officials said.
Iranian fire still struck residential districts in Israel, however, and Defence Minister Israel Katz said Iran’s leadership had crossed a red line.
“If (Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei continues to fire missiles at the Israeli home front, Tehran will burn,” he said in a statement.
Iran had vowed to avenge Friday’s Israeli onslaught, which gutted Iran’s nuclear and military leadership and damaged atomic plants and military bases, killing 78 people including civilians according to Iran’s U.N. envoy.
Tehran warned Israel’s allies that their regional military bases would come under fire too if they help shoot down Iranian missiles, Iranian state television reported.
Iran’s own ally, the Yemeni Houthi group, fired missiles at Israel on Friday night but at least one appeared to go astray, injuring five Palestinians including three children in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent said.
However, 20 months of war in Gaza and a conflict in Lebanon last year have decimated Tehran’s strongest allies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, reducing its ability to project power across the region along with its options for retaliation.
Gulf Arab states that have long mistrusted Iran but fear coming under attack in any wider conflict have urged calm as worries about disruption to the Gulf region’s crucial oil exports boosted the price of crude by about 7% on Friday.
NIGHT OF BLASTS AND FEAR IN ISRAEL AND IRAN
Iran’s overnight fusillade included hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones, an Israeli official said. Three people, including a man and a woman, were killed and dozens wounded, the ambulance service said.
In Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv, emergency services rescued a baby girl trapped in a house hit by a missile, police said. Video showed teams searching through the rubble of one home.
And in the western suburb of Ramat Gan, near Ben Gurion airport, Linda Grinfeld described her apartment being damaged: “We were sitting in the shelter, and then we heard such a boom. It was awful.”
The Israeli military said it had intercepted surface-to-surface Iranian missiles as well as drones, and that two rockets had been fired from Gaza.
With Iran’s air defences heavily damaged, Israeli Air Force chief Tomer Bar said “the road to Iran has been paved”.
In preparation for possible further escalation, reservists were being deployed across Israel. Army Radio reported units had been positioned along the Lebanese and Jordanian borders.
In Iran, explosions were heard overnight across the capital, state media reported. Fars News agency said two projectiles had hit Mehraband airport, located inside the capital, which is both civilian and military.
State television reported that a 14-storey housing complex, Shahid Chamran, had been flattened by a missile. It said 60 people had been killed, though there was no immediate official confirmation.
Israel’s military did not immediately comment on that report.
Iran’s U.N. envoy Amir Saeid Iravani said 78 people had been killed in Israel’s strikes on Friday and more than 320 wounded, most of them civilians.
IRANIAN NUCLEAR SITES DAMAGED
Israel sees Iran’s nuclear programme as a threat to its existence, and said the bombardment was designed to avert the last steps to production of a nuclear weapon – even though U.S. intelligence says it has seen no sign that this is imminent.
Israeli U.N. envoy Danny Danon called the strikes “an act of national preservation”.
A military official on Saturday said Israel had killed nine Iranian nuclear scientists, and that the damage to the nuclear facilities at Esfahan and Natanz would take “more than a few weeks” to repair.
Tehran insists the programme is entirely civilian in line with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and that it does not seek an atomic bomb.
However, it has repeatedly hidden parts of its programme from international inspectors, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has reported it in violation of the NPT.
Israel, which is not an NPT signatory and is widely understood to have developed a nuclear bomb, has said it cannot let its main regional foe gain atomic weapons.
Iranian talks with the United States to resolve the nuclear dispute have stuttered this year.
Tehran implied that it would not attend the round that was scheduled for this weekend in Oman, albeit without definitively refusing.
“The other side (the U.S.) acted in a way that makes dialogue meaningless. You cannot claim to negotiate and at the same time divide work by allowing the Zionist regime (Israel) to target Iran’s territory,” state media quoted foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei as saying.
“It is still unclear what decision we will make on Sunday in this regard.”
In Rome, Pope Leo appealed “to responsibility and to reason”.
“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, founded on justice, fraternity, and the common good,” he said.
“No one should ever threaten the existence of another. It is the duty of all countries to support the cause of peace.”
-Alexander Cornwell, Parisa Hafezi and Steve Holland
