Iran targets Gulf States as US warns campaign will intensify

Intense Iranian fire has targeted the Gulf Arab states as Israel and the United States kept up their air strikes targeting the Islamic Republic.

There is no foreseeable end to the fighting. Donald Trump’s administration has approved a new 151 million dollar (£112 million) arms sale to Israel after the US president said he would not negotiate with Iran without its “unconditional surrender”.

US officials also warned of a forthcoming bombing campaign they said would be the most intense yet in the week-long conflict.

Meanwhile, Iran’s president said the US demand for an unconditional surrender is a “dream that they should to take to their grave”.

Masoud Pezeshkian made the statement in a pre-recorded address aired by Iranian state television.

He also apologised for Iran’s attacks on regional countries, insisting that Tehran would halt them and suggesting they were caused by miscommunication in the ranks. His statement aired after repeated attacks on morning on Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Earlier, Iran’s UN ambassador said the country would “take all necessary measures” to defend itself.

Footage showed explosions and smoke rising over western Tehran as Israel said it had begun a broad wave of strikes.

Also early on Saturday, loud booms sounded in Jerusalem and incoming missiles from Iran had people heading to bomb shelters across Israel.

There were no immediate reports of casualties by Israel’s emergency services.

The US and Israel have battered Iran with strikes, targeting its military capabilities, leadership and nuclear programme.

The stated goals and timelines for the war have repeatedly shifted, as the US has at times suggested it seeks to topple Iran’s government or elevate new leadership from within.

In a sign of the widening nature of the conflict, sirens sounded early on Saturday in Bahrain as Iranian attacks targeted the island kingdom.

Saudi Arabia said it had destroyed drones heading for its vast Shaybah oil field and shot down a ballistic missile launched toward Prince Sultan Air Base, which hosts US forces.

In Dubai, several blasts were heard on Saturday morning and the government said it had activated air defences.

Passengers waiting for flights out at Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, found themselves ushered down into train tunnels at the sprawling airfield after the alert sounded.

Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, warned in an interview with the Financial Times that the war could “bring down the economies of the world”, predicting a widespread shutdown of Gulf energy exports that could send oil to 150 dollars a barrel.

The price for a barrel of benchmark US crude rose above 90 dollars on Friday for the first time in more than two years.

Writing for the Qatar-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera, a regional analyst warned Iran was making “a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions”.

Al Jazeera, a pan-Arab satellite news network owned and funded by Qatar’s government, has been used in the past to signal Doha’s opinions on regional matters.

Sultan al-Khulaifi, a senior researcher at the Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, wrote: “By spreading the conflict to the Gulf, Tehran is doing precisely what Israel could not do alone: steering the war away from the Israeli-Iranian axis and transforming it into a confrontation between Iran and its Arab neighbours.”

On Saturday, the defence minister of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s army chief met to discuss ways to stop the attacks coming from Iran, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported.

Saudi Prince Khalid bin Salman, a son of King Salman, spoke to Field Marshal Asim Munir in Riyadh about the Iranian attacks. Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan have signed a mutual defence pact that defines any attack on either nation as an attack on both.

Russia has provided Iran with information that could help Tehran strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region, according to two officials.

They cautioned that the US intelligence has not uncovered that Russia is directing Iran on what to do with the information.

This marks the first indication that Moscow has sought to get involved in the war.

In a social media post on Friday, Mr Trump said: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”

After a surrender, “and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s),” he wrote, the US and its allies will help rebuild Iran, making it “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before”.

Those comments were likely to raise further questions about the endgame of the war. The fighting has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran, more than 200 in Lebanon and around a dozen in Israel, according to officials in those countries. Six US troops have been killed.

Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on social media that “some countries” had begun mediation efforts.

Iranian state television reported that a leadership council had started discussing how to convene the country’s Assembly of Experts, which will select the new supreme leader.

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said in a television interview on Friday that the “biggest bombing campaign” of the war was still to come.

Israel has said that over the past week it has heavily bombed an extensive underground bunker that Iranian leaders had planned to use during the hostilities.

New information has surfaced suggesting that a deadly explosion at a school in the Iranian city of Minab, some 680 miles southeast of Tehran, was likely caused by US air strikes. The information included satellite images, expert analysis, a US official and public information released by US and Israeli military forces.

Iranian state media has said more than 165 people were killed in the blast, most of them of children.

Iran has blamed Israel and the US for the explosion. Neither country has accepted responsibility, though defence secretary Pete Hegseth has said the US is investigating.

The Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah said its fighters clashed with an Israeli force that landed late Friday in the mountains of eastern Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least three people were killed.

Israel has carried out waves of air strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hezbollah has a large presence but which is also home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 217 people have been killed by Israeli strikes since Monday and 798 others were injured.