Beirut/Tel Aviv7:52 p.m. March 24
Tehran9:22 p.m. March 24
Iran War Live Updates: Tehran Fires New Barrages After U.S. Claims Progress on Talks
Israeli officials said missiles launched from Iran had hit Tel Aviv and other parts of the country, and the Kurdish region of Iraq was also struck. In Bahrain, an Iranian missile hit Emirati military forces.
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Associated Press, Agence France-Presse
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Waves of Iranian missiles targeted Israel and Iraq on Tuesday, and Persian Gulf nations also reported new strikes after the United States and Iran sent conflicting signals about whether they were negotiating an end to the war.
The strikes were the latest reminder that Tehran is still able to inflict damage across the region, despite claims by American and Israel officials that its ballistic missile program has been severely battered.
The Israeli authorities said missiles launched from Iran hit Tel Aviv and other parts of the country on Tuesday. A direct hit in Tel Aviv caused extensive damage to at least three residential buildings, they said. At least six people were treated for injuries in Tel Aviv, according to the national emergency service.
In the semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, a volley of six Iranian ballistic missiles killed six Kurdish fighters and wounded 30 others, the regional government said. Iran did not immediately comment publicly on the attack.
Persian Gulf nations also reported more drone and missile launches. In Bahrain, an Iranian missile attack killed a Moroccan contractor working for the Emirati armed forces and injured five Emirati service members, the Emirati defense ministry said on Tuesday.
The continued hostilities followed President Trump’s comments on Monday that the United States and Iran were engaged in “very strong talks” to end the war and that he would postpone a deadline for a threatened attack on Iranian power plants. Iran denied that any negotiations were happening.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Lebanon: Israel’s defense minister said its military would expand its occupation of southern Lebanon, retaining control of territory south of the Litani River. The waterway has long served as a geographic boundary in conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah. It is unclear whether Israel would deploy troops across the entire area or rely on its air force for some parts.
Saudi Arabia: The kingdom’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing Mr. Trump to continue the war against Iran, according to people briefed by American officials on the conversations.
Group of 7: Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to travel to France on Friday to discuss the war and other topics with diplomats from the Group of 7 nations.
Death tolls: Iran’s U.N. ambassador said that at least 1,348 civilians had been killed in the country since the start of the war — a toll that has not been updated for over a week. More than 1,000 people in Lebanon have been killed, the authorities there said on Thursday. At least 15 people were killed in Iranian attacks on Israel, officials said. The American death toll stood at 13 service members.
Energy crisis: Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil, along with recent attacks on oil and gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, is rippling through the world’s economy. The international benchmark for crude oil was trading above $100 on Tuesday. The Philippines declared a state of national energy emergency, and South Korea is urging people to take shorter showers and to avoid charging phones and electric vehicles at night.
Iran: A former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps general, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, has been named as Iran’s top security official, an aide to the Iranian president announced on Tuesday. He replaces Ali Larijani, who was killed in an Israeli attack last week.
Qatar is not currently engaged in any mediation efforts between Washington and Tehran, the spokesman for the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, marking a shift in Qatar’s willingness to engage with Iran diplomatically.
“Our focus at this time is entirely dedicated to defending our country and addressing the losses resulting from the various attacks that the State of Qatar has endured,” the spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, said during a weekly news briefing in Doha.
Mr. al-Ansari said there had been no new communication between his government and Tehran since a single telephone call between the Iranian and Qatari foreign ministers in the early stages of the war.
Qatar, a peninsula that juts out from the Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf, has traditionally played a significant diplomatic and economic role in the region.
On Monday, President Trump said the United States and Iran were engaged in “very strong talks” to end the war and that he would postpone a deadline for a threatened attack on Iranian power plants. Iran, however, refuted that any negotiations were happening.
Mr. al-Ansari, for his part, said Qatar wasn’t involved in any talks, “if they exist.”
“I am not privy to the details of the current negotiations, but we stand ready to help, of course, if there is any role for Qatar,” he said.
Mr. al-Ansari said that Qatar and its neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council have seen their trust in Tehran dissipate.
“It’s now up to the Iranians, post this war of course, to decide how they’re going to rebuild the trust that was lost due to their attacks on our sovereignty,” he said.
Since the U.S. and Israel initiated a military campaign against Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran has retaliated by launching thousands of missiles and drones at Israel and several Persian Gulf nations, including Qatar.
During the June 2025 Iran-Israel war, Iranian forces fired missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which serves as the regional headquarters for the U.S. Central Command, in retaliation for the American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. At the time, Qatar opted for restraint, successfully mediating a conclusion to the hostilities.
Recent strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas export plant, sent global gas prices soaring. Mr. al-Ansari said it could take up to five years to repair the damage.
He also emphasized on Tuesday that the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council would need to re-evaluate and overhaul its collective defense protocols once the fighting stops.
“One of the most significant outcomes of this war is the shattering of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf region,” Mr. al-Ansari said. “The regional security framework in the Gulf was based on certain axioms. Many of these axioms have been bypassed in the current war.”
A woman was killed and two others were injured in northern Israel on Tuesday after an afternoon of rocket and drone fire from Lebanon, officials from the Israeli military and emergency service said. The woman who died had been struck by a “large projectile,” Eli Bin, who is head of the emergency service, told Israel’s Channel 12. It was not immediately clear whether the projectile was from a rocket, drone or debris from an interception.
Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that ticket prices could increase if the war in the Middle East continued to disrupt energy supplies. “If oil prices stay where they are today, that’s 11 billion of expense for us, and that would require prices to be up 20 percent to break even, to cover that cost,” he said.
The man chosen to replace Ali Larijani, Iran’s top national security adviser who was killed in an Israeli strike last week, is a hard-line former deputy commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards who is little-known to most Iranians but has a long history of helping the organization expand its reach into Iran’s politics.
The appointment of the former commander, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, was announced on Tuesday by a senior aide to Iran’s president.
Mr. Zolghadr’s appointment provided more evidence that hard-line military figures had consolidated their power in Iran, said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert on Iran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group that promotes a close U.S. partnership with Israel and confrontation with Iran.
Though the increase in the Guards’ power has been decades in the making, Mr. Taleblu said in a post on X, “there can also be no doubt that the war expedited and accelerated the ongoing trend of increasing I.R.G.C. control of the country.”
The Revolutionary Guards are the military spine of the Islamic republic and are ideologically committed to maintaining Iran’s system of clerical rule. The Guards control the development and deployment of ballistic missiles and drones, protect the country’s nuclear development facilities, supervise proxy militias across the Middle East and control a sizable portion of the economy.
After Mr. Larijani’s killing last week, some analysts expressed worry that Iran’s military would tighten its control over the country, dimming the prospects for a quick end to the war.
Mr. Larijani oversaw a brutal crackdown that killed thousands of antigovernment protesters in January, but he was still seen as a relative pragmatist who served as a bridge between the military and more moderate political factions.
Mr. Zolghadr helped the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, come to power in 2005, and he later acknowledged that Iran’s hard-line conservative forces had carried out a “multilayered plan” to help Mr. Ahmadinejad win. Mr. Zolghadr went on to serve as a deputy interior minister during Mr. Ahmadinejad’s first term.
When tensions building between Iran and the United States during the presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Zolghadr, as a deputy interior minister, said that if the United States were to attack Iran, Iran would fire “tens of thousands of missiles at American targets every day" in response.
In 2010, Mr. Zolghadr became a senior aide to Iran’s judiciary chief at the time, Sadegh Larijani, the brother of Ali Larijani. Since 2021, Mr. Zolghadr has led Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, a body that advises Iran’s supreme leader.
Before Iran’s 1979 revolution, which deposed the Shah and established the Islamic state, Mr. Zolghadr was active in an armed group that carried out attacks against the monarchy. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, he led a unit that carried out cross-border operations.
The damage in Tel Aviv on Tuesday morning was caused by a direct hit from a ballistic missile fired from Iran that had not been intercepted, a representative for the Israeli military said. On Saturday, two ballistic missiles similarly evaded Israel’s air defenses and hit two desert cities near the country’s main nuclear research center. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said on Sunday that Israel had intercepted 92 percent of the missiles fired from Iran during the more than three weeks of war.
President Trump’s threat to “obliterate” power stations in Iran if its leaders failed to open the Strait of Hormuz suggests that the United States is willing to violate international humanitarian law as part of its military campaign, according to current and former human rights officials.
“If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday.
He later extended the deadline to Friday.
The president’s threat appears to be part of his erratic messaging campaign, which is often construed as bluster or misdirection.
“Trump is openly threatening a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. “And people aren’t saying anything because they’re numb to it.”
By threatening to attack civilian infrastructure, Mr. Trump has once again pushed the United States into territory more familiar to its enemies than its allies.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued four arrest warrants to Russian military officers and officials charging them with war crimes for attacking “Ukrainian electric infrastructure.”
International law, specifically Article 52 of the first additional protocol of the Geneva Conventions, prohibits attacks on civilian objects. These laws are meant to protect civilians and those who can no longer fight, such as wounded soldiers, from the “barbarity of war.”
Energy infrastructure such as power grids often has civilian and military uses. In the case of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, prosecutors deemed the strikes a violation of humanitarian law. Despite the charges, Russian forces continued their campaign.
“I see no difference between what Trump is threatening to do in Iran and what the International Criminal Court charged four Russian commanders for doing in Ukraine,” Mr. Roth said.
The court also issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Trump’s close ally, accusing the Israeli military of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Human rights groups say Israel’s actions in the territory constituted genocide.
“What we are seeing from all sides — the United States, Iran and Israel — is a race to the bottom in which threats against civilian infrastructure are becoming normalized,” said Sarah Yager, the Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “This kind of rhetoric doesn’t just escalate tensions irresponsibly, it signals a dangerous willingness to erode the very rules designed to protect civilians in war.”
The U.S. military’s recent history of targeting power infrastructure goes back to the early 1990s, when the American-led air campaign during the Persian Gulf war damaged the Iraqi power grid, water treatment plants and parts of its oil industry.
At the war’s end, most of Iraq’s electricity-generating plants were destroyed. The country, once an urbanized modern society, was set back decades, drawing condemnation from human rights groups.
By 1999, when the United States and NATO started its air war over Yugoslavia to protect civilians in Kosovo from further repression and abuse by Yugoslav forces, the Pentagon had changed its tactics targeting energy infrastructure. U.S. forces dropped a new weapon designed to temporarily shut down power stations without destroying them.
The weapons currently in the Pentagon’s arsenal spread tens of thousands of thin graphite strands over several acres. Released by hundreds of small submunitions the size of a soda can, the strands wreak havoc on unprotected electric wires and transformers. Their effect is designed to be temporary. Power can be restored once the graphite strands are cleared off and damaged electrical components are replaced.
According to a 2009 U.S. Air Force fact file, the devices are called Power Distribution Denial Munitions and can be released from Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs.
In a 2001 report, the RAND Corporation said a cluster bomb version was used in 1999 during attacks on several Yugoslav power distribution centers, “draping enemy high-voltage power lines like tinsel and causing them to short out.”
The munitions were used again in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq, according to a U.S. defense official involved in the current targeting process for the war in Iran.
The U.S. military currently does not have plans to completely destroy Iranian power plants, added the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military matters. But the military could disable the plants if there were a need to do so.
Israel’s defense minister said on Tuesday that the country’s military plans to expand the territory under its control in southern Lebanon, suggesting it was ramping up its ground offensive against the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah.
In a statement, the minister, Israel Katz, said Israel will retain control of the territory south of the Litani River, which runs a few miles from the Israeli-Lebanese border at its closest point and is 15 to 20 miles away at its farthest. The river has long served as a geographic boundary in conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah.
It is unclear whether Israel would deploy troops across the entire area or rely on its air force to enforce its dominance over some parts of the area.
The statement also suggested Israel was laying the groundwork to remain in large parts of Lebanon as President Trump tries to engage in talks with Iran to end the regional war.
“Hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon, who were evacuated, will not return south of the Litani River until the security of northern residents is assured,” Mr. Katz said, referring to Israelis living near Israel’s border with Lebanon.
Israel, he added, bombed five bridges along the river, which he asserted Hezbollah had used to send reinforcements to fight against Israel.
The bridges are also a lifeline for civilians still living there, who rely on them for medicine and access to hospitals.
After a previous round of fighting ended in a cease-fire agreement between the parties in late 2024, the Israeli military set up five outposts inside Lebanon in areas near the border.
But now, some in the Israeli government are hoping Israel will take over a much larger piece of territory.
“The current campaign in Lebanon must end with a fundamental change,” Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-line Israeli finance minister behind much of his country’s recent expansions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said this week. “The Litani must become our new border with the state of Lebanon.”
Israel’s operation in Lebanon began earlier this month, after Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with its patron, Iran, following the surprise Israeli-American attack on Tehran on Feb. 28 that started the regional war.
Israel launched a ground maneuver into Lebanon that it said was meant to push Hezbollah fighters away from its border, and also carried out extensive airstrikes across the country, including targeting its capital, Beirut. Those airstrikes brought widespread destruction to residential neighborhoods and killed more than 1,000 people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Israel said its air force is targeting Hezbollah commanders and their fighters.
Mr. Katz said the Israeli military is targeting villages near the Lebanese border that have mostly emptied after Israel issued evacuation warnings to the population.
He said the practice of flattening houses there follows “the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza,” where Israel has used bulldozers to erase entire neighborhoods.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon.
Taline Shehab’s family should have been celebrating her 5th birthday on Sunday. Instead, they are in mourning.
An Israeli airstrike killed her on March 12 as she slept in the family’s apartment near Beirut. Her father, Mohamad Shehab, a well-known cameraman who had just finished work on a popular Lebanese television series, was also killed. Her mother, Natalie Shehab, who owns a clothing store, remains in a coma, unaware that her husband and only child are gone.
The Shehabs are among the more than 1,000 people, including at least 118 children, who have been killed this month in Lebanon, according to the health ministry, as airstrikes that Israel says are targeting the Iran-backed group Hezbollah pummel Lebanese towns and cities. More than a million people — one in six in the country — have been forced from their homes.
“My brother and his daughter are not just numbers,” said Ali Shehab, Mohamad’s brother. “They were people with a family, with loved ones who cared for them.”
Ms. Shehab’s Instagram account preserves glimpses of the family’s life together: weekend getaways, beach holidays in Turkey, photos of Taline as a newborn. In some videos, Mohamad and Taline dance together in their living room. In others, Taline unwraps toys under a Christmas tree.
The Israeli military said in response to questions about the killings that the strike on the apartment building had targeted another man, whom it called a Hezbollah commander, asserting that it “takes measures to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians.” The strike, unlike many others Israel has carried out in Lebanon, was not preceded by an evacuation warning.
The same day as the Shehab family was killed, a few miles from their destroyed home, Hussein Bazzi, a chemistry professor at Lebanese University, was finalizing plans for distance learning after classes had moved online because of the war. Israeli airstrikes were pounding Beirut’s outskirts, but like many of his colleagues, Dr. Bazzi, director of the Faculty of Sciences, believed the campus would never be targeted.
“We all thought it was safe,” said Hala Chamieh, a fellow professor.
That afternoon, Dr. Bazzi sent a text message to colleagues, confirming everything was in place for online classes for the week ahead. Barely an hour later, he was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with another professor, as they stepped out into a courtyard where he was known for tending to the plants.
The Israeli military later said that his colleague, Murtada Srour, was a Hezbollah operative, a claim that Ms. Chamieh denied. Israel made no such allegation about Dr. Bazzi and said in response to questions that he was not the target of the attack.
Early that Thursday evening in the southern town of Ain Ebel, the war upended another fragile sense of safety. For weeks, many residents had refused to leave the sleepy Christian village despite sweeping Israeli evacuation warnings, hoping that they would be spared.
That was until an airstrike killed three young men in Ain Ebel. They had clambered onto the roof of a house to fix a satellite dish, trying to keep the village connected as the war closed in, residents said.
The Israeli military said in response to questions that it had struck Hezbollah operatives “while they were observed attempting to install surveillance equipment on a rooftop.” Residents of the village said the three men, who were Christians, had no affiliation with Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim militant group.
“These are youth that have never picked up a gun — they were not a threat to anyone,” said Rakan Ashkar Diab, a friend of the men who lives in Ain Ebel.
One of them was Chadi Ammar, a 23-year-old aid worker with a Roman Catholic religious organization, the Order of Malta. He loved basketball and volunteered to decorate the streets of the town for Christmas.
“Wherever the village needed him, he was there,” said Mr. Diab, who played on the same basketball team.
Mr. Ammar was juggling several jobs and planning to start a business. He was eager to build a life beyond the cycles of crisis that define Lebanon’s southern borderlands with Israel, Mr. Diab said. When war erupted again this month, Mr. Ammar told his friend that those plans looked uncertain. But Mr. Diab reassured him.
Just give it a bit of time, he said, and things would get better.
Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
A Moroccan contractor working for the Emirati armed forces was killed by an Iranian missile attack in Bahrain, the Emirati defense ministry said on social media. Five Emirati armed forces members were injured in the attack, it added. The ministry did not clarify why Emirati armed forces members were deployed in Bahrain — a different Persian Gulf nation — saying only that the incident happened during “a routine mission.”
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said Tuesday on social media that the country could host talks between the United States and Iran. Pakistan has emerged as a potential mediator between the two countries in recent days. Pakistani officials have built a close relationship with President Trump over the past year, and the country ticks a few boxes: It is a non-Arab Muslim country that doesn’t host a U.S. military base, and is a neighbor of Iran and a close ally to Saudi Arabia. Sharif has spoken multiple times with President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran this year.
President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines declared a national energy emergency on Tuesday, saying that high oil prices caused by the war in the Middle East were threatening the country’s energy security.
The Philippines imports 90 percent of its oil from the Middle East, making it one of the Asian countries most vulnerable to supply disruptions there. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed by Iran, the Philippines has had to turn to Russia and China, and to other Southeast Asian countries, for fuel.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Philippines’ Department of Energy said it had enough gasoline in reserve to last 53 days, enough diesel for 46 days and enough jet fuel for about 39 days. Diesel prices have doubled since the war began, surpassing 120 pesos, or $2, per liter.
Many government offices have switched to a four-day workweek to save energy, and Mr. Marcos has called on the public to car pool. The government has also been handing out 5,000 pesos each to tens of thousands of autorickshaw and jeepney drivers around Manila who are suffering from the higher prices.
Mr. Marcos is under intense pressure to deal with the situation. A coalition of transportation workers has called for mass protests around Manila, the capital, on Thursday and Friday about the price spike and what they consider inadequate measures by the government. On Tuesday, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a major newspaper, published a column with the headline, “Nation on brink: This oil crisis may destroy everything we built.”
Since the war began, Mr. Marcos has expressed concern about its economic ramifications for the Philippines. “We are victims of a war that is not of our choosing,” he said earlier this month in a statement. Economists have warned that the fallout could be severe, noting the potential loss of remittances from thousands of Filipinos working in the Middle East.
Many of them have lost their jobs because their workplaces in countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shut down. The Philippine economy is heavily dependent on remittances from overseas workers, and in 2024, the Middle East accounted for roughly 18 percent of the total, according to the Philippines’ central bank.
As part of the emergency declaration on Tuesday, Mr. Marcos signed an executive order that would allow the government to “implement responsive and coordinated measures under existing laws to address the risks posed by disruptions in the global energy supply and the domestic economy.” His government has not said what specific actions it might take under the order.
The pain in the Philippines has been mirrored across other parts of Southeast Asia, which is heavily dependent on oil that moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Like the Philippines, many countries in the region have precariously low oil reserves and have imposed energy conservation measures.
Jason Gutierrez contributed reporting.
Oil prices resumed their rise and stocks fell as trading began in the U.S. on Tuesday morning. The S&P 500 stock index fell 0.7 percent, erasing some of its 1.1 percent rise from Monday, the index’s best day since the war began. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose to around $103 a barrel, after finishing Monday below $100 a barrel for the first time in roughly two weeks.
Yosef and Norma Livne were in a safe room in their fifth-floor apartment in Tel Aviv one street away from the strike when it hit on Tuesday. “There was a huge explosion and the smell of something burning,” Yosef Livne said. “The building shook.”
The missile fell between buildings, leaving a deep crater in the ground. The authorities said it contained about 200 pounds of explosives and that a few residents in the area had been lightly injured.
About six hours after a direct strike in Tel Aviv from part of what Israel said was an Iranian missile, volunteers are replacing shattered windows in nearby apartments with strips of plastic and city workers are shoveling shattered glass. The whole facade of an older building adjacent to the blast site has been blown away.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East, according to people briefed by American officials on the conversations.
In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said.
Prince Mohammed, the people familiar with the discussions said, has argued that Iran poses a long-term threat to the Gulf that can only be eliminated by getting rid of the government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also views Iran as a long-term threat, but analysts say Israeli officials would probably view a failed Iranian state that is too caught up in internal turmoil to menace Israel as a win, while Saudi Arabia views a failed state in Iran as a grave and direct security threat.
But senior officials in both the Saudi and American governments worry that if the conflict drags on, Iran could deliver ever more punishing attacks on Saudi oil installations and the United States could be stuck in an endless war.
In public, Mr. Trump has swung wildly between suggesting that the war could end soon and signaling it would escalate. On Monday, the president posted on social media that his administration and Iran had held “productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities,” though Iran disputed the idea that negotiations were underway.
The consequences of the war for Saudi Arabia’s economy and national security are enormous. Iranian drone and missile attacks, launched in response to the American-Israeli assault on Iran, have already created huge disruptions in the oil market.
Saudi officials rejected the idea that Prince Mohammed has pushed to prolong the war.
“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always supported a peaceful resolution to this conflict, even before it began,” the Saudi government said in a statement, noting that officials “remain in close contact with the Trump administration and our commitment remains unchanged.”
“Our primary concern today is to defend ourselves from the daily attacks on our people and our civilian infrastructure,” the government added. “Iran has chosen dangerous brinkmanship over serious diplomatic solutions. This harms every stakeholder involved but none more than Iran itself.”
Mr. Trump has at times seemed open to winding down the war, but Prince Mohammed has argued that would be a mistake, the people briefed on the conversations said, and has pressed for attacks against Iran’s energy infrastructure to weaken the government in Tehran.
This article is based on interviews with people who have had conversations with American officials, and who described the discussions on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of Mr. Trump’s talks with world leaders. The New York Times interviewed people with a variety of views on the wisdom of continuing the war and of Prince Mohammed’s role in advising Mr. Trump.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the administration “does not comment on the president’s private conversations.”
Prince Mohammed, an authoritarian royal who has led a sustained crackdown on dissent, is respected by Mr. Trump and has previously influenced the president’s decision-making. Prince Mohammed has argued that the United States should consider putting troops in Iran to seize energy infrastructure and force the government out of power, according to the people briefed by U.S. officials.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has given more serious consideration to a military operation to seize Kharg Island, the hub of Iran’s oil infrastructure. Such an operation, with airborne Army forces or an amphibious assault by Marines, would be immensely dangerous.
But Prince Mohammed has advocated ground operations in his conversations with Mr. Trump, according to people briefed by American officials.
The Saudi views of the war are shaped by economic factors as much as political ones. Since the war began, Iran’s retaliatory attacks have largely choked off the Strait of Hormuz, hobbling the region’s energy industry. The vast majority of Saudi, Emirati and Kuwaiti oil must pass through the strait to reach international markets.
While Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have built pipelines to circumvent the strait, those alternative routes have come under attack as well.
Analysts familiar with Saudi government thinking say that while Prince Mohammed probably preferred to avoid a war, he is concerned that if Mr. Trump pulls back now, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East will be left to confront an emboldened and furious Iran on their own.
In this view, they say, a half-finished offensive would expose Saudi Arabia to frequent Iranian attacks. Such a scenario could also leave Iran with the power to periodically close the Strait of Hormuz.
“Saudi officials certainly want the war to end, but how it ends matters,” said Yasmine Farouk, director of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula project for the International Crisis Group.
A 2019 Iran-backed attack on Saudi oil facilities — which briefly knocked out half of the kingdom’s oil production — pushed the prince to reconsider his antagonistic approach to the Islamic Republic.
Saudi officials later pursued a diplomatic détente, re-establishing relations with Iran in 2023, in part because they realized that their country’s alliance with the United States offered only partial protection from Iran, Saudi officials have said.
Other countries in the region, including the United Arab Emirates, also pursued warmer relations with Iran in the past few years for similar reasons.
After Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war, against the advice of several Gulf governments, Iran responded by shooting thousands of missiles and drones at countries in the region, derailing their efforts to bring Iran into their fold, Gulf officials have said.
“What little trust there was before has completely been shattered,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, told reporters last week.
Saudi Arabia has a large stockpile of Patriot interceptors that it is using to protect itself from the barrage of Iranian attacks that have rained down on its oil fields, refineries and cities.
But interceptors are in short supply globally. Drone and missile attacks in Saudi Arabia have already struck a refinery and the U.S. embassy, while fragments from intercepted projectiles have killed two Bangladeshi migrant workers and injured more than a dozen other foreign residents.
Since the beginning of the war, Mr. Netanyahu has pushed for military operations that could force the collapse of Iran’s government. U.S. officials have focused on degrading the country’s missile and naval capabilities and have been more skeptical that the hard-line government in Iran can be driven from power.
Though Israeli strikes have killed a large number of leaders, the hard-line government remains in control.
Saudi officials have long expressed concerns that a failed state in Iran poses a grave threat to them, analysts say. They fear that even if Iran’s government fell, elements of the military — or militias that could emerge in the power vacuum — would continue to attack the kingdom and are likely to focus on oil targets.
Some government intelligence analysts have told other officials that they think Prince Mohammed sees the war as an opportunity for him to increase Saudi Arabia’s influence throughout the Middle East, and that he believes Saudi Arabia can protect itself even if the war continues.
In conversations with Prince Mohammed, Mr. Trump has raised worries about the price of oil and the damage it is doing to the economy. The Saudi leader has assured him that is only temporary, according to people briefed by American officials.
But American and regional officials are deeply skeptical that oil markets will quickly recover from the war. Saudi Arabia cannot make up the shortfalls caused by the war because its overland pipeline can only carry a fraction of the oil that normally transits through the Strait of Hormuz, economists say.
While Saudi Arabia is better positioned than the other Gulf countries to weather the closure of the strait, it could face dire ramifications if the waterway is not reopened soon.
Even before the war began, Prince Mohammed was facing serious financial challenges as he approached the 2030 deadline he had set for himself to transform Saudi Arabia into a global business hub. His government is forecasting budget deficits for several years to come as ambitious megaprojects and vast investments in artificial intelligence strain the country’s limited resources.
A prolonged war with Iran would put all of that at risk. The prince’s success hinges on creating a secure environment for investors and tourists.
Asked last week whether the Saudi government preferred an immediate end to the war or a longer conflict in which Iran’s capabilities were degraded, Prince Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told reporters that the only thing that officials cared about was halting Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries.
“We’re going to use every lever we have — political, economic, diplomatic and else-wise — to get these attacks to stop,” Prince Faisal said.
Vivian Nereim in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and David E. Sanger in Washington contributed reporting.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to travel to France on Friday to discuss the war and other global crises with the top diplomats from the Group of 7 nations, the State Department said. In addition to Iran, Rubio plans to talk with the diplomats at the previously scheduled meeting outside Versailles about Russia’s war in Ukraine and other “threats across the world,” the department said.
A former Revolutionary Guards general, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, has been named Iran’s top security official, an aide to the Iranian president announced on Tuesday. He replaces Ali Larijani, an experienced politician who was killed in an Israeli attack last week.
Zolghadr was named secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, the aide, Seyyed Mehdi Tabatabaei, said in a post on X. The decision was made “with the approval and consent” of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and by decree of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Tabatabaei said.
Zolghadr has held senior positions across Iran’s government, including in the Guards, the judiciary, the interior ministry, and the Expediency Discernment Council, an advisory body, according to a resume published by Tasnim, a semi-official Iranian news agency.
Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, said in a news conference that there are currently no Qatari mediation efforts between the warring parties, adding that Doha is focused on defending the country and addressing the impact of recent attacks. He said the Gulf’s regional security system has been overtaken by recent developments and called for reassessment while noting existing defense agreements have proven effective.
Gulf states host major U.S. military bases that underpin regional security arrangements. Qatar has previously played a central role in mediating ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, making the absence of current efforts notable.
Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Tuesday that the war in Iran violated international criminal law. He appeared to criticize his own government for not being prepared to be more clear in its condemnation. He went on to say that there seems little doubt that “the justification based on an imminent attack on the U.S. does not hold water.” Steinmeier, who made the comments at an event in Berlin, went on to call the war a politically disastrous mistake.
The Israeli military released a flurry of new evacuation warnings for southern Lebanon on Tuesday, ordering residents of nine towns and villages to leave their homes and flee several miles north. The sweeping evacuation orders in the country’s south in recent weeks have heightened fears of a large-scale Israeli ground invasion. Hours before the new warnings, Israel’s defense minister said that the country intends to control areas as deep in Lebanon as the Litani River, which lies around 15 to 20 miles north of the Israeli border.
President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines on Tuesday declared a state of national energy emergency amid global oil supply disruptions caused by the war in the Middle East.
Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
The Lebanese government has withdrawn its approval of Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Reza Sheibani, and given him until March 29 to leave the country, Lebanon’s foreign ministry said Tuesday. The Lebanese government cited “Iran’s violation of diplomatic norms and established protocols between the two countries,” but did not elaborate. The government typically uses such language to refer to interference in Lebanese internal affairs, especially in regard to Iran’s support for the Hezbollah militia.
Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, said Monday that Israel intends to control areas in Lebanon as deep as the Litani River as it continues its operations against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia. He also confirmed that the Israeli military is following a model used last year in the war in Gaza, where swaths of buildings were razed in urban areas, as part of operations against what Israeli officials said was a renewed Hamas insurgency. The demolitions exacerbated what was already a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Katz said Tuesday that the Israeli military is flattening homes in border villages as part of the operations, claiming that they are being “used as terrorist positions.” Katz said Tuesday that Israeli forces had destroyed all five bridges over the Litani River, saying that Hezbollah used them to transport militants and weapons. The bridges are vital for the Lebanese population living south of the river, the majority of whom have been displaced by the fighting.
Iranian missile attacks hit the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq on Tuesday, killing six Kurdish fighters and wounding 30 others, the Kurdistan Regional Government said in a statement. The volley of six Iranian ballistic missiles came in two separate attacks at dawn on Tuesday, according to the statement.
“While we condemn in the strongest terms this attack and all other terrorist attacks on the Kurdistan Region, we affirm that we have every right to respond to any aggression against our people and our land,” said the statement, from the KRG’s Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs. Iran did not immediately comment publicly on the attack.
One of the waves of Iranian missiles launched toward Israel on Tuesday resulted in four impact sites, the Israeli authorities said. It was not clear if all were missile hits or debris from interceptions. They caused extensive damage to at least three residential buildings and set cars on fire. In Tel Aviv, six people were treated for injuries, said Eli Bin from the national emergency service. One of the strikes in Tel Aviv was an Iranian missile with a warhead of around 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds, said Col. Miki David of the Israeli military. This missile was “something we have not yet encountered in the war,” David said.
The Israeli military reported more Iranian missiles launches toward Israel on Tuesday. It said search and rescue teams were going to several places in southern and central Israel where impacts were reported. Yoel Moshe, an official with the national emergency rescue service, said that they were searching an impact site in Tel Aviv for casualties. Earlier on Tuesday, an impact was reported in northern Israel after reports of Iranian missile launches.
Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, at the briefing in Canberra with the E.U. chief on Tuesday condemned Iranian actions in the Strait of Hormuz.
“This is having an impact on the global economy,” he said. But he did not directly respond to a reporter’s question about whether Australia might get drawn into securing the strait, saying his country has provided support for the United Arab Emirates at its request, including moving an aircraft to the region and supplying “AMRAAMs” or Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles for defense.
Asked whether the E.U. would contribute to a maritime operation to secure the Strait of Hormuz, Ursula von der Leyen, the E.U. chief, said, “Leaders in the European Union have been very clear that when the hostilities end, they could envisage an operation.”
“We think that it is time to go to the negotiation table and to end the hostilities,” she added Tuesday in Australia. “The situation is critical for the energy supplies worldwide. We all feel the knock-on effects on gas and oil prices, our businesses and our societies.”
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said she is “deeply concerned” about the conflict in the Middle East. Speaking at a briefing on Tuesday in Canberra, Australia’s capital, she called on Iran to “immediately” cease retaliatory attacks and allow free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that has been rendered perilous in recent weeks. “The recent attacks by Iran on unarmed commercial vessels in the Gulf, attacks on civilian infrastructure including oil and gas installations and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces is unacceptable and must be condemned,” she said.