Iran-Israel Proxy Conflict

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    In Crisis With Iran, U.S. Military Officials Focus on Strait of Hormuz

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    Pentagon officials are trying to prepare for all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump hints at what he might do.Iran retains the naval assets and other capabilities it would need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a move that could pin any U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, American military officials say.In meetings at the White House, senior military officials have raised the need to prepare for that possibility, after Iranian officials threatened to mine the strait if the United States joined Israel’s attacks on the country.Pentagon officials are considering all of the ways Iran could retaliate, as President Trump cryptically hints at what he might do, saying on Wednesday that he had not made a final decision.In several days of attacks, Israel has targeted Iranian military sites and state-sponsored entities, as well as high-ranking generals. It has taken out many of Iran’s ballistic missiles, though Iran still has hundreds of them, U.S. defense officials said.But Israel has steered clear of Iranian naval assets. So while Iran’s ability to respond has been severely damaged, it has robust a navy and maintains operatives across the region, where the United States has more than 40,000 troops. Iran also has an array of mines that its navy could lay in the Strait of Hormuz.The narrow 90-mile waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean is a key shipping route. A quarter of the world’s oil passes through it, so mining the choke-point would cause gas prices to soar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Iran Strategy for Trump

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      Nobody, perhaps even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.By contrast, skeptics fear that the lessons Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Trump Debates Iran Action, the Meaning of ‘America First’ Is on the Line

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      As President Trump ponders involving the United States in Israel’s attacks on Iran, the G.O.P. faces a thorny question: What does “America first” really mean?A decade ago, President Trump electrified conservatives with his promises to get the United States out of foreign entanglements and to always put — say it with me — “America first.”As he weighs involving American planes and weaponry in Israel’s attacks on Iran, a brawl has broken out in the Republican Party over what “America first” really means.I wrote today about how a swath of Trump’s base is in an uproar over the president’s increasing openness to deploying U.S. warplanes — and perhaps even 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs — against Iran in an effort to help Israel finish off its nuclear program.“Everyone is finding out who are real America First/MAGA and who were fake and just said it bc it was popular,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted on X over the weekend. She added, “Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel/Iran war is not America First/MAGA.”The anger extends well beyond Greene’s social-media account, to cable television and the podcast feeds of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Candace Owens. They are passionately arguing that intervening in Iran would contravene Trump’s long-held promise to steer the nation out of, not into, foreign entanglements, and threaten to fracture his whole coalition.It’s a remarkable fight, and one that raises a bigger question about who is really the keeper of Trump’s political flame. Is it the non-interventionists who have been there from the start, or the Republican hawks — the Senator Lindsey Grahams of the world — who are now sticking by the president?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russia Stands Aside as Israel Attacks Iran

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      Analysts say the Kremlin is prioritizing its own war against Ukraine, as well as its relations with Gulf nations that don’t want to see a stronger Iran.Iran aided the Kremlin with badly needed drones in the first year of its Ukraine invasion, helped Moscow build out a critical factory to make drones at home and inked a new strategic partnership treaty this year with President Vladimir V. Putin, heralding closer ties, including in defense.But five months after that treaty was signed, the government in Iran is facing a grave threat to its rule from attacks by Israel. And Russia, beyond phone calls and condemnatory statements, is nowhere to be found.Iranian nuclear facilities and energy installations have been damaged, and many of the country’s top military leaders killed, in a broad Israeli onslaught that began Friday and has since expanded, with no sign that Moscow will come to Tehran’s aid.“Russia, when it comes to Iran, must weigh the possibility of a clash with Israel and the United States, so saving Iran is obviously not worth it,” said Nikita Smagin, an expert on Russia-Iran relations. “For Russia, this is just a fact.”The situation reflects a dispassionate political calculus by Moscow, which is prioritizing its own war against Ukraine, as well as its need to maintain warm relations with other partners in the Middle East, which have helped Moscow survive Western economic sanctions, analysts say.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Iran Has Sustained Blow After Blow Since October 2023

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      Iran is often portrayed as one of the world’s most dangerous actors. But with attacks on its defenses, nuclear sites and proxy militias, Israel has exposed a compromised and weakened adversary.An airstrike on an Iranian Embassy building in Syria last year that killed several senior Iranian commanders. The assassination three months later of one of Iran’s top partners while he was visiting Tehran, the Iranian capital. The Israeli bombings of Iranian air defenses in April and October 2024. The systematic decimation or defeat of Iran’s strongest allies around the Middle East, including the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and former President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.Iran is often portrayed as one of the world’s most dangerous villains, a rogue state whose growing nuclear program and shadowy military capabilities threaten Israel, the United States and beyond. But the country has suffered blow after blow since war erupted between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, soon drawing in Hezbollah and then Iran itself.Those losses culminated on Friday in the start of an Israeli campaign that has gone after targets across Iran, crippled its air defenses and killed several of its top military commanders and a number of prominent nuclear scientists. The new round of conflict has killed hundreds of people in Iran and at least 24 in Israel.Earlier attacks and assassinations in Iran humiliated Tehran, causing recriminations among military officials and pushing it to launch retaliatory barrages against Israel. But the renewed fighting has shown, as never before, just how compromised and weak Iranian forces really are.“Iran has basically demonstrated again that it was outgunned and outsmarted again by Israel,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.Lacking anything close to the conventional military might of Israel or the United States, its longtime enemies, Iran’s strategy for protecting itself had for years rested on the idea that the combination of its partners in the region and its own missile capabilities would be enough to deter attacks on Iranian soil.Hezbollah sat on Israel’s northern border. Iran-backed militant groups in Iraq could target American military installations there. And Tehran could launch a barrage of missiles and drones into Israel that would potentially overwhelm Israeli air defenses and shatter the country’s sense of security.Or so the thinking went.Instead, Israel demolished Hezbollah in a war on Lebanon last year, then turned the same playbook on Iran. Israeli intelligence managed to penetrate Iran so thoroughly that Israel was able to launch drone attacks on Iranian targets from inside Iran on Friday and killed some of the most senior figures in the Iranian military’s chain of command.That in turn delayed Iran’s retaliatory response, giving Israel time to prepare for Iran’s missiles, and to launch more attacks. More

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      Diplomacy With Iran Is Damaged, Not Dead

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      The push to do a deal on the country’s nuclear program could be revived, even after the Israeli strikes scuppered the latest round of talks.If war is diplomacy by other means, diplomacy is never finished. While Israel and Iran are in the midst of what could be an extended war that could spread, the possibility of renewed talks to deal with Iran’s expanding nuclear program should not be discounted.Negotiations are on hold while the war continues, and the future of diplomacy is far from clear. Iran will feel compelled to respond to Israel, and the Israeli campaign could last for days or weeks. For now Washington does not appear to be doing anything to press both sides to stop the violence and start talking again.But the Iranians say they still want a deal, as does President Trump. The shape of future talks will inevitably depend on when and how the fighting stops.“We are prepared for any agreement aimed at ensuring Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told foreign diplomats in Tehran on Sunday. But his country would not accept any deal that “deprives Iran of its nuclear rights,” he added, including the right to enrich uranium, albeit at low levels that can be used for civilian purposes.Mr. Araghchi said Israel did not attack to pre-empt Iran’s race toward a bomb, which Iran denies trying to develop, but to derail negotiations on a deal that Mr. Netanyahu opposes.The attacks are “an attempt to undermine diplomacy and derail negotiations,” he continued, a view shared by various Western analysts. “It is entirely clear that the Israeli regime does not want any agreement on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It does not want negotiations and does not seek diplomacy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, Iran’s missile barrages killed at least six people.

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      Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to name the victims publicly.Orange-vested emergency workers were clambering over rubble on Sunday morning in the central Israeli coastal city of Bat Yam in the wake of an Iranian missile strike that killed at least six people and wounded scores of others.Paramedics were still trying to save three people who were trapped under debris, according to the Israeli military, hours after the missile evaded Israel’s air defenses. Four people remained unaccounted for, the military said.Most of those confirmed dead were women and children, according to the authorities, although they have yet to publicly name the victims. Chaotic scenes were replicated across northern and central Israel after a long night of Iranian missile attacks.Many Israelis have a certain nonchalance about missile fire, the product of both near-constant rocket attacks and the country’s sophisticated aerial defenses. But the destructive attacks in Bat Yam and elsewhere overnight — in which 10 people were confirmed killed — underscored how Israel’s current escalation with heavily armed Iran differs from fighting armed paramilitaries like Hamas and Hezbollah.In Rehovot, another city south of Tel Aviv, debris from the overnight attack filled the streets. Bloodstained bandages and white surgical gloves lay by a roadside bench. Rescue workers picked through shattered glass, searching for survivors.“Is there anyone inside?” a police officer shouted, peering into a shop damaged by the strikes.In Bat Yam, hundreds of residents who had evacuated their homes near the blast site — many of which were left uninhabitable by the explosion — gathered at a nearby school to wait for officials to tell them where to go.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Major Energy Facilities in Tehran Hit in Israeli Strikes

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      Across Iran’s capital, flames and smoke covered the sky.Israel’s latest wave of attacks on Iran took out Tehran’s main gas depot and its central oil refinery in separate parts of the capital, engulfing its sky in smoke and flame early Sunday.The Shahran fuel and gasoline depot, which has at least 11 storage tanks, was hit and set afire during the Israeli attack that began on Saturday night, Iran’s oil ministry said in a statement. Shahran is in an affluent neighborhood of luxury high rises.“The fire is terrifying, it’s massive; there is a lot of commotion here,” said Mostafa Shams, a resident of the area. “It’s the gasoline depots that are exploding one after another, it’s loud and scary.”Separately in the city’s south, Shahr Rey, one of the country’s largest oil refineries, was also struck, according to Iranian state news media. Emergency crews were trying to contain the fire, and a resident of Tehran, Reza Salehi, said he could see the flames from miles away.Israel’s targeting of Iran’s energy facilities, a crucial source of export cash for the country as well as of domestic energy, represented a significant escalation in its military campaign against Tehran.Earlier on Saturday, Israel had struck two key Iranian energy sites, including a section of the South Pars Gas Field, which is one of the world’s largest and critical to Iran’s energy production.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Expands Attack to Include Iran’s Oil and Gas Industry

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      Iran has been battling an acute energy crisis for months because of gas shortages, and repairing any damage would both be costly and take significant time.In a widening of its military campaign against Iran, Israel targeted Iran’s critical energy infrastructure at gas and petrochemical refineries on Saturday, according to a statement from Iran’s oil ministry.The statement said Israeli drones had targeted a section of the South Pars Gas Field in Bushehr Province. South Pars is one of the world’s largest gas fields and a critical part of Iran’s energy production. The Fajr Jam Gas Refining Company was also targeted, the ministry said.Iran is one of the world’s major energy producers. It has the second-largest gas reserves in the world and fourth-largest crude oil reserves.Videos posted to social media and verified by The Times showed a large fire burning at the South Pars gas refinery in Iran’s southern Bushehr Province.The explosions took production lines at both facilities offline, the ministry statement said, even as firefighters and emergency crew had largely contained the blazes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More