Airstrikes, missiles ravage Mideast

Israel stepped up attacks on Iranian missile launchers and weapons factories, while Iran fired dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel and launched drone attacks across the Gulf. 

Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei, the powerful son of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, is alive and favoured to emerge as his father’s successor, two Iranian sources told Reuters on Wednesday.

The two Iranian sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, was not in Tehran during the strike that destroyed the leader’s compound and also killed the elder Khamenei’s wife, another son and a number of senior military and leadership figures.

Iran said the Assembly of Experts that will select the new leader will announce its decision soon, only the second time it has done so since the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979.

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Iran since the war began, according to US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). 

The tempo of the strikes on Iran was so intense that authorities postponed the mourning ceremony for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the conflict, according to Iranian state television.

The guard says it is prepared for the “complete destruction of the region’s military and economic infrastructure.” The statement came via Iranian state television.“The continued mischief and deception by the United States in the region will come at the cost of the complete destruction of the region’s military and economic infrastructure,” it says.

It alleges, without offering evidence, that the US military was using “civilian facilities ... as cover.”

Nearly every country in the Middle East has sustained damage from missile hits or shrapnel, and now Turkey joins the wider list of nations affected after an Iranian ballistic missile heading toward Turkish airspace was intercepted.

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87 killed as US sub sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka

The countries attacked by Iran are Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Oman, Cyprus, and Turkey. Turkey “was not a target” of a missile launched from Iran, heading toward Turkish airspace that was destroyed by NATO air-defence systems, a Turkish official told AFP on Wednesday.

“We believe it aimed at a base in Greek Cyprus but veered off course,” the official said wishing to remain anonymous.

Qatar on Tuesday denied that it had joined the “campaign targeting Iran” after senior western diplomatic sources told The Jerusalem Post that Doha carried out strikes inside Iran over the past 24 hours in retaliation to recent Iranian drone and missile attacks on the Gulf country.

The Qatari action reportedly came after the country said it thwarted an attempted attack on Hamad International Airport in Doha, according to remarks by Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari cited by N12. Al-Ansari said Qatar did not receive advance warning from Iran ahead of the missile launches. Spain has denied the US permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory to attack Iran as Madrid stepped up its criticism of the “unjustified and dangerous military intervention”.Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has explicitly condemned the US and Israel’s “unilateral military action” against Iran, warning that it is contributing to “a more hostile and uncertain international order”. The rebukes have been reinforced by his government’s refusal to allow the US to use bases in Rota and Morón for the continuing strikes against Iran.

José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, said on Monday that while the government wanted “democracy, freedom and fundamental rights for the Iranian people”, it would on no account allow its bases to be used in the ongoing military action. “I want to be very clear and very plain,” he told Telecinco. “The bases are not being used – nor will they be used – for anything that is not in the agreement [with the US], nor for anything that isn’t covered by the UN charter.”

France’s President Emmanuel Macron Wednesday told Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez he stood by him after President Donald Trump threatened to sever trade with Spain over it refusing US use of its bases to attack Iran, his office said.

“The president has just spoken with Prime Minister Sanchez to express France’s European solidarity in response to the recent threats of economic coercion targeting Spain,” it said.

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Lawmakers in the US Senate were set to begin voting on Wednesday on a bipartisan war powers resolution aiming to stop the military campaign against Iran and require that any hostilities against it be authorized by Congress.

The latest effort by Democrats and a few Republicans to rein in President Donald Trump’s repeated troop deployments, sponsors describe it as a bid to take back Congress’ responsibility to declare war, as spelled out in the US Constitution.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a US submarine sank an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean with a torpedo.

At least 80 were people killed in a US submarine strike on an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister told local television on Wednesday.Hegseth did not name the ship - but earlier, the Sri Lankan navy said around 140 people were missing after an Iranian ship, the Iris Dena, went down off the coast of Galle.US President Donald Trump again expressed skepticism that Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, could run Iran in the future, but did not identify another potential leader.

In an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump declined to specify anyone else, saying that “most of the people we had in mind are dead”.

Pahlavi, 65, has claimed that he is “uniquely placed” tolead a transitional government and indicated that he would be willing to return to Iran as soon as possible for the first time in 47 years.

Trump, however, has publicly repeated doubts about whether the exiled crown prince has the support necessary among Iranians in his homeland.