Iranian strikes on the U.A.E. were reported early Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was hit by drones, and Israel said it was attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. President Trump said the campaign could last weeks or more.
- Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
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- Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
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- Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
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Iran broadened its retaliatory attacks on American targets in the Gulf region on Monday and early Tuesday, as President Trump and other top officials in his administration signaled that the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran could intensify and continue for weeks or more.
As American and Israeli planes pounded targets in Iran on Monday, the fighting expanded into Lebanon, where the Iranian-allied militia Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel, prompting Israel to bombard the militia’s strongholds outside Beirut. Early Tuesday, the Israeli military said it was attacking again in Iran and in Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah command centers and weapons storage facilities in the capital, Beirut.
Around the same time, the United Arab Emirates’ Defense Ministry said its air defenses were “dealing with a barrage of ballistic missiles” from Iran. And within hours, the Saudi Defense Ministry said that the American Embassy in Riyadh had been attacked by two drones, resulting in a “limited fire” and minor damage. The embassy was closed on Tuesday.
In Washington on Monday, Mr. Trump offered an open-ended time frame for the U.S. military campaign. “Whatever the time is, it’s OK, whatever it takes,” he said, speaking at his first public event since the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran began. “Right from the beginning we projected four to five weeks, but we have the capability to go far longer than that.” Later in the day on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.”
The New York Post also reported that the president had said in an interview on Monday: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.”
The Pentagon said on Monday that the number of American service members killed in Iranian strikes had risen to six. And three American fighter jets were shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses in what the U.S. military called an “apparent friendly fire incident.” All six crew members from F-15s ejected safely and were recovered, the military said.
Iranian leaders remained defiant. The country’s top security official, Ali Larijani, denied news reports that Iran’s new leaders were seeking to negotiate with Washington, denouncing Mr. Trump for “delusional fantasies” and for plunging the Middle East “into chaos.” Iran, he said in a string of fiery social media posts on Monday, “has prepared itself for a long war.”
A senior Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps official vowed on Monday that “not a single drop of oil” would pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for about one-fifth of the world’s supply. An adviser to the Revolutionary Guards commander said on Iranian state TV that Iran would “set on fire” any ships trying to transit the strait. Traffic there has already slowed to a trickle, after the Revolutionary Guards warned ships away over the weekend, but Iran had not directly threatened them.
In another sign of an expansion of attacks in the Middle East, Qatar’s Defense Ministry said its air force had shot down two Su-24 bombers coming from Iran. It was the first report that Iran, which has fired missiles and drones at its Gulf neighbors and Israel in retaliation for the Israeli-U.S. assault, had also sent warplanes into their airspace.
Economic fallout: Oil and natural gas markets remained highly volatile as the fighting shut down shipping routes and damaged production facilities. Qatar’s state-owned energy company said that it would halt production of liquefied natural gas, cutting off a large share of the world’s supply of the fuel. Read more ›
Death toll: More than 550 people have been killed in Iran since the beginning of the war, the Iranian Red Crescent emergency service said on Monday. The Lebanese health ministry said that at least 31 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes. At least 10 people have been killed in Israel and six, including civilians, across the Gulf since Saturday, according to the authorities. Read more ›
Persian Gulf: Iranian missiles and drone attacks led to explosions in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries where the U.S. has military bases. Iranian leaders have said the attacks have targeted U.S. assets, but they have also struck Dubai’s international airport, hotels and other civilian and economic infrastructure.
Hezbollah announced in a statement that it had fired “a swarm of attack drones” at Israel around 5 a.m. local time on Tuesday, following a day of intense Israeli bombardment across Lebanon. The Israeli military confirmed that it had intercepted two drones that crossed into Israeli territory from the direction of Lebanon. Hezbollah announced on Monday that it would retaliate against Israel for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a decision that many analysts say was made at the behest of Iran.
Amazon’s cloud computing business said two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates had been struck by drones and remained “significantly impaired” early Tuesday. One of the strikes occurred on Sunday and sparked a fire at the data center, Amazon Web Services previously said. A drone also landed close to one of its facilities in Bahrain, damaging it, the company said.
Customers who use its Middle East facilities should “consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads” to facilities in other regions, the company said.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThere have been several protests in India since Sunday against the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Some of the largest have been in Uttar Pradesh state, which has a sizeable Shiite Muslim population. There have also been demonstrations in the city of Hyderabad and Indian-administered Kashmir.
The Israeli military issued an evacuation warning early Tuesday for about 50 villages in Lebanon, urging residents to leave the areas to avoid being harmed in possible strikes against Hezbollah. Some of these villages overlap with those listed in an evacuation warning issued by the Israeli military on Monday.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, said it has canceled all visa appointments through Friday, along with the U.S. consulates in Lahore and Karachi. The announcement comes after crowds tried to storm the Karachi consulate on Sunday, as 22 people across Pakistan died during protests denouncing the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMarkets in Asia took a steep downturn on Tuesday morning as the war escalated. South Korea led the slump as stocks in Seoul fell by more than 4 percent after reopening following a holiday. In Tokyo, stocks dropped by more than 2 percent, while Chinese stocks fell by 1 percent amid growing concerns about stability in the Middle East.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was attacked by two drones, according to initial estimates on Tuesday morning from the Saudi Ministry of Defense, as Iran appeared to be expanding its assault on American allies in the Middle East.
The ministry said in a statement that there was “limited fire and minor material damage to the building.” However, the embassy warned people to avoid the location, saying there had been “an attack on the facility” and issued a security alert and a shelter in place notification for the cities of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran.
“We recommend American citizens in the Kingdom to shelter in place immediately,” it said, noting that it was limiting “nonessential travel to any military installations in the region.”
The embassy’s announcement came as nations across the Middle East hosting American military bases were facing Iran’s ire following the American-Israeli war on Iran that began on Saturday and that has killed many top military and political officials in Iran, including the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Riyadh had so far been spared the spate of attacks that had rocked other Gulf cities including, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Manama, the capital of Bahrain. Most of the city’s embassies, including the U.S. Embassy, are in a secluded, heavily secured and gated neighborhood called the Diplomatic Quarters.
The fortifications there were built to prevent risks such as suicide attacks, not drones.
Still, about two hours after announcing the drone attack on the American Embassy, the Saudi defense ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed eight drones near the cities of Riyadh and Al-Kharj.
Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Gulf States in retaliation after the barrage of American and Israeli strikes over the past three days. The majority of the Iranian attacks were intercepted, according to the governments of the Gulf countries.
At least four people were killed and more than 100 others were injured in the attacks across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman as of Sunday, according to official reports tallied by The New York Times.
The toll of the fighting on American service members also rose on Monday, with six military personnel killed in the fighting so far, according to U.S. Central Command.
Iran has launched at least 390 missiles and 830 drone attacks across the Persian Gulf, home to several U.S. military bases, according to government reports. The United States Central Command said on Sunday that Iran had attacked more than a dozen locations in the region, including civilian centers like airports, hotels and residential areas.
Early on Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates’ ministry of defense said on social media that the Emirates’ air defenses were “dealing with a barrage of ballistic missiles coming from Iran.”
Similarly, the defense ministry of Bahrain said its air defense systems have successfully destroyed and downed 70 missiles and 76 drones from Iran since the conflict began.
Sirens also sounded in Israel and the military sent residents in several areas there to shelters after saying it detected launches from Iran for about an hour in the early hours of Tuesday. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem had on Monday directed that all U.S. government employees and their family members continue to shelter in place in and near their residences until further notice, and said it would be closed on Tuesday.
The hostilities in the region have left travelers scrambling. In recent days, airstrikes forced the closure of airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, Qatar. In Dubai, the largest Emirati city and the business and tourism capital of the Middle East, five-star hotels have caught fire, explosions have shattered the windows of apartment towers and the emirate’s bustling international airport was damaged, injuring four people.
The United States and Israel are also continuing to target Iran. Israel said it had targeted the Iranian regime’s broadcaster in Tehran around midnight.
In a post on social media on Tuesday in the Middle East, U.S. Central Command said “this morning, U.S. forces are hitting Iran surgically, overwhelmingly, and unapologetically.”
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMany journalists who lost their access to the Pentagon last year after they refused to sign strict rules appeared at Monday’s briefing led by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. One, Courtney Kube, a correspondent for NBC News who drew Hegseth’s wrath during his confirmation proceedings, interjected with this question: “President Trump put a four-week timeline on it. Are you saying that’s wrong?”
Hegseth scoffed at what he termed a “typical NBC sort of ‘gotcha’ type question,” but proceeded to answer it: “President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take,” he said.
The Associated Press, The Washington Post and the major broadcast networks (ABC News, CBS News and NBC News) were among the legacy outlets in attendance, even though all have lost their credentials. Absent from the briefing was The New York Times, which in December filed suit against the Pentagon over the media restrictions.
A Times spokesman said, “Reporters from The Times were not invited to the press conference in person, nor granted access when one of them asked to attend.”
A Pentagon spokesman said neither the department’s press team nor its duty officers received a request from The Times — and would have granted it if one was requested. The Times said it stood by its statement.
In his three runs for the presidency, Donald J. Trump, more than any other candidate, spoke of the limits of U.S. military power, especially in the Middle East.
In 2016, he blasted the Iraq invasion as a “big, fat mistake.” In 2023, he kicked off his third run for the White House by boasting, “I am proud to be the only president in decades who did not start a new war.”
Mr. Trump was channeling a deep and widespread pessimism that dominated the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment in the years after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The hopelessness ran through both political parties.
“In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster,” Philip Gordon, a top foreign policy adviser in the Obama White House, famously wrote in 2015. “In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.”
But it was Mr. Trump who transformed the frustrations into a popular political movement.
One year into his second term, Mr. Trump seems to have shed his earlier skepticism and turned repeatedly to the U.S. military as a low-cost, high-payoff means of solving problems that have bedeviled American presidents for decades.
In June, he dispatched B-2 bombers on a mission to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.
So far this year, he has given the green light to a high-stakes raid that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. “No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved,” Mr. Trump said hours after the operation.
Then he signed off on a major U.S.-Israeli attack that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. Mr. Trump said on social media that the attacks would continue “throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
The president’s sudden embrace of U.S. military power is a stunning reversal. Democrats warned over the weekend that he was ignoring the lessons of the long and bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The American people have seen this playbook before — claims of urgency, misrepresented intelligence and military action that pulls the United States into regime change and prolonged, costly nation-building,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
The attacks on Iran have also come at a cost to the United States. Retaliatory strikes have so far killed six U.S. troops, the military’s Central Command announced on Sunday.
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior military officials repeatedly emphasized that the United States could not bomb or kill its way to victory. America’s enemies would rearm and replace leaders lost to airstrikes and raids. Civilian casualties, an inevitability in war, would feed the enemy’s ranks.
Mr. Trump appears convinced that he and his top advisers, including Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have found a more effective way of wielding military might.
In the days leading up to the Iran attack, General Caine emphasized that an operation aimed at toppling the government or debilitating the military would be much more difficult than the capture of Mr. Maduro or the strikes on Iran last summer.
Publicly, Mr. Trump played down the risks and insisted that General Caine believed any military incursion into Iran would be “something easily won.”
The president’s string of relatively low-cost military successes in his second term seemed to have shifted his views on American military interventions.
“He has accepted that the U.S. military is very good,” said Daniel L. Byman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He seems to believe that if you avoid major ground operations and keep it limited, it’s probably going to work.”
In the aftermath of military defeats, senior uniformed leaders have often acted as a check on presidential ambitions. Gen. Colin Powell, who was wounded in Vietnam and went on to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the U.S. military should be deployed only when vital American interests were at stake, the objectives were clear and an exit strategy had been defined.
His dictum became known as the Powell Doctrine.
A decade later, Mr. Powell set aside his skepticism and made the case in a presentation to the U.N. Security Council for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision he later came to regret.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, senior Pentagon leaders like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the Joint Chiefs chairman, Mark A. Milley, who led troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, sought to temper his military instincts. The president came to loathe and distrust both of them.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals whom he viewed as out of step with the president’s policies and instincts regarding the employment of military force.
The dismissals, which are without precedent in recent decades, have had a chilling effect on those who remain, military officials said.
Mr. Trump’s view of military force is not totally unconstrained. In both Iran and Venezuela, he has repeatedly ruled out the large-scale deployment of ground forces that characterized the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
His approach to military powers, such as Russia and China, has been far more conciliatory than confrontational.
Mr. Trump has also shown a willingness to pull the plug on military interventions, such as his campaign to reopen shipping in the Red Sea by bombing Houthi militants in Yemen into submission. He wanted to see results in 30 days of the initial strikes.
When senior military leaders suggested it would take as long as 10 months to debilitate the Houthis’ air defenses, Mr. Trump cut a deal with the militants rather than continuing the operations. The United States would halt the bombing campaign, and the militia would no longer target American ships. The Houthis did not commit to ending attacks on other vessels.
“He basically seemed to conclude that the costs, including the financial costs, of continuing the operation were too high,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.
Other presidents contemplating military action often leaned heavily on advisers to craft strategies that balanced ends, ways and means to achieve a clearly defined conclusion. Today, Mr. Trump seems to be operating by instinct rather than any strict ideology or planning process.
“He has been explicit that he will not allow American power — or his own credibility — to be undermined,” said Anne Dreazen, a former Middle East analyst at the Pentagon who is now with the American Jewish Committee, which supports Jewish causes around the world. “When Iran continued using the nuclear negotiations to stall and play games, that was a serious miscalculation.”
The big question is whether Mr. Trump’s approach, with its emphasis on continued coercion through air and missile strikes, will produce a more sustainable peace than previous strategies did.
His tactics are well suited to narrowly defined objectives. In Iran, Mr. Trump’s goals are far more ambitious.
Six American service members were killed, and U.S. military jets were shot out of the sky. Investors are bracing for market turmoil, fearing prolonged disruption to oil supplies. President Trump says the military campaign against Iran could extend for weeks, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military.”
With his decision Friday to authorize war against Iran, Mr. Trump is taking the biggest gamble of his presidency, risking the lives of American troops, more deaths and instability in the world’s most volatile region, and his own political standing.
Mr. Trump, facing declining approval ratings and staring down the possibility that Republicans will lose control of Congress in the midterms, plunged the United States into what is shaping up to be its most expansive military conflict since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In just over a year since taking office, Mr. Trump has authorized military action in seven nations, even after he repeatedly promised American voters that he would end, not start, wars. During his inaugural address, he said his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.”
Even as he has struggled to provide a clear endgame for the military campaign, Mr. Trump has portrayed the operation as a resounding success. He has acknowledged the U.S. casualties as a cost of war but has spent more effort on boasting about the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, the destruction of military targets across the country, and his commitment to keeping Iran from ever being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
But interventions in the Middle East have bedeviled generations of American presidents. Conflicts there scarred the legacies of Presidents George W. Bush, who led the country into lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that came to be deeply unpopular, and Jimmy Carter, whose failed operation in 1980 to rescue American hostages in Iran has been top of mind for Mr. Trump.
Now it is Mr. Trump who is orchestrating a rapidly expanding military effort in a region whose history and religious and factional politics make it an especially complex battleground.
“Presidents are reluctant to engage in these situations unless we are provoked, attacked directly,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “Then there is usually a rally around the flag effect. You’re not going to have that now.”
While a handful of prominent voices in his movement have publicly denounced the decision to go to war, Mr. Trump’s base appears to be standing by him, for now. Still, some of the president’s allies privately worry that there is little political upside to the attacks on Iran and huge downsides, particularly the loss of U.S. troops and rising cost of oil.
Democrats have seized on the strikes to paint Mr. Trump as more focused in foreign intervention than addressing Americans’ economic worries at home.
“Trump sold voters on a ‘pro-peace’ vision of himself as an America First candidate, yet in under 13 months, he has ordered strikes on seven foreign nations and plunged our country into more open-ended conflict using taxpayer dollars,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “While he’s distracted by foreign conflicts and shiny ballrooms, Trump has failed to deliver on his promise to bring costs down for working families, who are paying more every day because of Trump’s actions.”
Early polling after the attacks show most voters are not in favor of them. A CNN poll found 59 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s decision to launch strikes against Iran, and Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 27 percent of Americans approve of the military campaign.
Should the conflict go badly or Iran descend into turmoil, it could leave Republican candidates in the midterm elections faced with difficult choices about whether to distance themselves from Mr. Trump on the issue.
And the war poses challenging questions for those looking to lead the party in the future, complicating the “America First” ideology at the core of the movement.
“This is not what we thought MAGA was supposed to be,” wrote former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who broke with Mr. Trump last year and then resigned from Congress, in a social media post. “Shame!”
In a subsequent post, Ms. Greene called the Trump administration a “bunch of sick liars,” punctuating it with an expletive. “We voted for America First and ZERO wars,” she wrote.
Still, Matthew Boyle, the Washington bureau chief of Breitbart News, said he received almost no questions or comments from listeners during his weekly three-hour radio program on Saturday, hours after the strikes. The program, he said, provides a good window into the issues animating Mr. Trump’s base.
Mr. Boyle said he discussed the war extensively and played Mr. Trump’s early morning video announcing the attacks. Listeners, he said, were more interested in other topics. He said that was a stark contrast to the program he hosted after the United States captured Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, a topic many listeners wanted to discuss.
This time, he said listeners were much more interested in the economy, immigration and crime. But he warned that could change depending on how the operation unfolds.
“It all comes down to the results,” he said.
Sensing some of the fractures among Mr. Trump’s base, the White House on Monday started to respond directly to criticism on the right. Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator and a prominent voice among Mr. Trump’s supporters, posted on social media that Mr. Trump’s messaging on the U.S. objectives in Iran “is, to put it mildly, confused.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded to Mr. Walsh with a lengthy statement. She declared Mr. Trump put out “clear objectives” that would bring the end to Iran’s “brutal attacks and threats.”
“This operation seemed like a bad idea to me before it happened, and I said so,” he wrote after Ms. Leavitt’s response. “Now that it is happening, I’m not going to suddenly change my tune. It still seems like a bad idea to me. I hope I’m wrong. But that’s how I see it.”
The Iran strikes are far from the first time that the president has tested his base’s capacity to support actions that violate his campaign promise to stay out of foreign conflicts. When he faced questions over whether his supporters would protest after U.S. forces attacked Venezuela, Mr. Trump had a succinct reply.
“MAGA is me,” he told NBC News. “MAGA loves everything I do.”
In recent months, the Make America Great Again movement has started to splinter over key issues, including Mr. Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and his struggles to address rising costs.
Raheem Kassam, the editor in chief of The National Pulse and a conservative activist, said the war with Iran would exacerbate those tensions.
“It’s not something I would have done, but it is definitely something Trump would have done,” he said. “He loves the idea of finishing the job that his predecessors couldn’t even start.”
Mr. Kassam said that Mr. Trump’s supporters trusted him to avoid U.S. casualties more than any of his predecessors, but expressed worries that the conflict does nothing to address a major vulnerability for the president.
He said Americans will only be “just starting to feel better about the economy right as they start voting because they spent too much time on Elon Musk’s failed DOGE project,” arguing Mr. Musk had failed to meaningfully cut government spending. He added: “I agree with the critics that is a big problem.”
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe United States Embassy in Riyadh early on Tuesday morning in Saudi Arabia issued a security alert and a shelter in place notification for Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran. “We recommend American citizens in the Kingdom to shelter in place immediately,” it said and urged people to avoid the embassy until further notice because of “an attack on the facility.” The Saudi Defense Ministry reported a drone attack on the embassy.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was attacked by two drones according to initial estimates from the Saudi ministry of defense in a statement early on Tuesday morning in the Middle East. The ministry said there was “limited fire and minor material damage to the building.”
The Israeli military has just issued another evacuation for residents of the Dahiyah, a Hezbollah stronghold on the outskirts of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. It is the second such warning in about three hours, and the Israeli military is already striking there, according to an announcement it made earlier. The Hezbollah-owned Lebanese broadcaster Al Manar said it was being targeted about an hour ago.
At the White House on Monday, President Trump said that destroying Iran’s missile capabilities was one of the top objectives of the U.S. attacks in the country.
But finding and destroying Iran’s entire arsenal of ballistic missiles as well as their production sites could be particularly challenging for the U.S. and Israeli militaries, which jointly began attacking Iran on Saturday.
Airstrikes alone cannot destroy the plans and know-how for building those weapons, and Iran has proved adept at acquiring the necessary equipment to restart production lines, placing at least some of them underground in fortified facilities. The Iranians have also shown that they can break their ballistic missiles apart into smaller pieces that are more easily smuggled to proxy forces and reassembled for use — potentially making the task of finding them all much more difficult.
In January, Israeli officials said Iran had largely rebuilt its ballistic missile program after the 12-day war last June. And U.S. Central Command said in a social media post on Sunday that it had used B-2 stealth bombers to attack “hardened ballistic missile facilities” with 2,000-pound bombs. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged on Monday that the sites were underground.
Over decades, Iran has developed a wide range of missiles that can hit targets well beyond its borders.
They include different types of ballistic missiles, which follow an arcing path high into the atmosphere and then use gravity to reach velocities many times faster than the speed of sound. Iran’s longest-range ballistic missile can strike targets about 1,200 miles away.
In 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency said Iran possessed “the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East.”
On Sunday, Israel claimed that it had destroyed roughly 200 of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers and damaged dozens more, but Iranian forces have continued to launch ballistic missiles into neighboring countries.
In Washington on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would continue to strike Iran until it had achieved its objectives, including destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities.
“The military is doing its darnedest to hit these things,” Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview. “We probably have a pretty good idea of where they are, but the ability to get everything and then to know that you’ve got from a battle damage assessment point of view is going to be hard — especially to do that from the air.”
Eliminating Iran’s underground missiles and production facilities, Mr. Karako added, could involve deploying U.S. or Israeli special forces troops on the ground to inspect known or suspected sites.
From 1987 to 2019, the United States was bound by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and gave up much of the Pentagon’s nonnuclear ballistic missiles as a result.
Since the United States and Russia formally exited the treaty, the Pentagon has accelerated the development of new ballistic missiles, like the Precision Strike Missile, which in tests has flown past the 310-mile range that would have previously been banned.
By comparison, Iran, which was never party to the INF Treaty, has built an arsenal of ballistic missiles categorized as “close-range” that can hit targets from about 30 to 190 miles away, “short-range” weapons that fly 190 to 620 miles, and “medium-range” missiles that have a maximum range of about 1,240 miles.
Mr. Trump said in his State of the Union address last Tuesday that he was concerned Iran was developing the longest-range category — “intercontinental” ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. Classified assessments by the U.S. intelligence community, however, disputed that notion, saying that Iran was at least a decade away from developing ICBMs.
The 2019 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency explained that Iran pursued ballistic missiles in part because it lacked a modern air force. The missiles gave the country “a long-range strike capability to dissuade its adversaries in the region — particularly the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia — from attacking Iran.”
One of the best insights into Iran’s ballistic missile program came from the interdiction of small vessels smuggling weapons from Iran to Houthi fighters in Yemen.
According to a February 2024 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. and Yemeni forces interdicted 18 vessels smuggling Iranian weapons, including ballistic missiles, to Houthi fighters between 2015 and 2023.
The Houthis’ arsenal has included several Iranian ballistic missiles, including the Fateh-110, which has a 190-mile range, the Qiam-1 with a 750-mile range and the 1,200-mile Shahab-3, the report said.
The 2019 DIA report noted that Tehran’s “desire to have a strategic counter” to the U.S. may drive an effort to develop ICBMs in the future.
Focusing on locating and destroying ballistic missiles from the sky is not new for the Pentagon.
During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the U.S. military created a special cell to search for Iraqi “Scud” short-range ballistic missiles. But the effort “met with remarkably little success,” a later C.I.A. report said.
Allied pilots, the report said, “were notoriously optimistic” about the success of their Scud-hunting attack missions.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTShortly after striking in Tehran and telling Israelis they were free to leave shelters after Iranian launches had been detected, the Israeli military early on Tuesday morning said it was attacking in Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah command centers and weapons storage facilities in the capital, Beirut.
Speaker Mike Johnson said a supplemental funding request was discussed in the classified briefing on Iran to pay for new munitions and other costs associated with a continued military operation. “It was brought up in the discussion,” he said. “There are more details to be determined, of course, on how long the operation goes and what the need is, but our appropriators certainly asked that question.”
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA video circulating on social media, and verified by The New York Times, captures the aftermath of a “friendly fire” incident in Kuwait, showing a pilot standing by her parachute, with smoke from a downed F-15 fighter visible in the background. The U.S. military said that Kuwaiti air defenses mistakenly shot down three American jets on Monday but that all six crew members ejected safely. The video shows a man approaching the pilot to offer help. “You’re fine?” he asks, to which she replies that she is. He adds: “No problem, you’re safe. Thank you for helping us.”
Speaker Mike Johnson said he expected the war powers votes later this week to fail. Asked if Congress should have voted on whether to go to war against Iran, he said the president was overseeing an “operation that was limited in scope, limited in its objective, and absolutely necessary for our defense.”
Johnson said that Iran had been “building missiles at a rapid clip to the point where our allies in the region could not keep up.”
There was no imminent threat from Iran to the United States before the bombing campaign, said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, on exiting a classified briefing on the war. If a threat to Israel is now to be considered equivalent to an imminent threat to the United States, he said, then the Trump administration is “in uncharted territory.”
After a classified briefing about Iran with senior Trump administration officials, Speaker Mike Johnson said that Israel was “determined to act with or without the U.S.,” and that after evaluating threats, President Trump made the decision to join Israel’s campaign. Trump and his administration “determined because of the exquisite intelligence we have” that strikes were warranted.
“Consequences of inaction on our part would have been devastating,” he added.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSecretary of State Marco Rubio warned that “the hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military” in the offensive against Iran, as he gave conflicting rationales for the attack underway as both a pre-emptive strike and a response to an immediate threat.
Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday, Mr. Rubio signaled plans for an escalation of the U.S.-Israeli military operation. The “next phase will be even more punishing on Iran than it is right now,” he declared.
Mr. Rubio, who was about to head into a closed-door meeting with senior lawmakers — some of whom had expressed skepticism about the administration’s justification for attacking Iran — offered a muddled message. He said the strikes were a response to an “imminent threat” but then described the campaign as pre-emptive and based on the assumption that Iran would strike at U.S. forces once Israel began bombing the country.
“The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded,” Mr. Rubio said. “We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.”
He went on to lay out military objectives that had nothing to do with immediate danger to the United States and appeared rooted instead in a longer-term mission of weakening Iran’s long-range missiles to degrade its ability to shield its nuclear program.
“The purpose of this is to destroy that missile capability,” he said, reaching beyond the administration’s initial explanation that the operation was meant to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
“What they are trying to do and have been trying to do for a very long time is build a conventional weapons capability as a shield where they can hide behind,” Mr. Rubio said. “Meaning there will come a point where they have so many conventional missiles, so many drones and can inflict so much damage that no one can do anything about their nuclear program.”
His comments reframed the U.S. participation in the strikes as being far beyond a response to a specific, time-sensitive threat, which a president has broad unilateral authority to respond to. That raised more questions about Congress’s role, a question that the House and Senate are set to weigh in on this week in a pair of votes seeking to limit President Trump’s power to continue using force against Iran.
Mr. Rubio introduced the idea, later echoed by top Republicans, that Israel had been prepared to act with or without the United States, a situation that left Mr. Trump facing a difficult decision and limited time to make it.
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said a “great concern” was that, in the wake of an Israeli attack, U.S. troops would have been the target of Iranian retaliatory attacks.
“We would have suffered staggering losses,” the speaker said after the classified briefing inside the Capitol. “And if we had waited to respond, before acting first, then those losses would have been far greater.”
Representative Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview following the briefing that part of the president’s calculation was based on an “understanding that Israel was going to take action” that would cause a “ladder of escalation.”
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, dismissed the rationale put forward by the administration and congressional Republicans, saying that there was clearly “no imminent threat to the United States.”
“If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States then we are in uncharted territory,” he added.
Mr. Rubio’s remarks, and the Republicans’ expansion on them, contradicted the administration’s previous emphasis on the possibility that Iran could soon launch missiles capable of reaching the continental United States. Mr. Rubio made that argument last week ahead of the strikes, even though American officials told reporters that U.S. intelligence agencies had no evidence Iran was on such a path.
Mr. Trump called on Iranians over the weekend to topple the leadership in Tehran and install a new government, saying that the U.S.-Israeli assault offered “probably your only chance for generations” to do so.
But Mr. Rubio and top Republicans sought to backtrack on that message on Monday.
“The objective is not regime change,” Mr. Johnson told reporters. “The objective was to take out those missiles.”
Continued attacks on Iran could mean Congress needs to approve a special funding package, the speaker said, to pay for new munitions and other costs associated with a drawn out military operation.
The need for funding “was brought up” in the closed-door briefing, which included top appropriators from both chambers, Mr. Johnson said. “There are more details to be determined, of course, on how long the operation goes and what the need is.”
Mr. Rubio, asked how long he expected the United States to be engaged in Iran, said he did not know, and he did not rule out the possibility that Mr. Trump might deploy U.S. troops to fight a ground war in the Middle East.
“We have objectives,” Mr. Rubio said. “We will do this as long as it takes to achieve those objectives.”
Exiting a classified briefing on Iran with senior Trump administration officials, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said he “found their answers completely and totally insufficient” and said that the briefing “raised more questions” for him about the military operations in the Middle East.
A high-resolution image released on Monday by a satellite imaging company, Vantor, reveals the destruction of three structures at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in Iran. It’s the first clear evidence of a strike at the site since Israeli and American forces launched their attack on Saturday. One of the structures is a dummy building that covers the only vehicle entrance to the site, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington based think tank. The first image below shows the site after the bombing. The lower image, from 2002, shows a ramp under construction at the site.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSeveral American universities have increased their presence in the Middle East in recent decades, opening campuses that now serve thousands of students from the region and around the world. Now, as war in Iran expands throughout the Mideast, those campuses are canceling classes or moving them online.
U.S. schools with a presence in the region include Georgetown, New York University, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Virginia Commonwealth, Texas A&M and Weill Cornell Medical College, the medical school of Cornell University. Many of the students attending these campuses are from the Middle East.
Members of N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus, in the United Arab Emirates, have been sheltering in place since Saturday. Classes were canceled on Monday and were scheduled to resume remotely on Tuesday, in accordance with guidance issued by the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
“As a global university, we are always on alert and our teams constantly plan and prepare for emergencies,” Wiley Norvell, N.Y.U.’s senior vice president for university relations and public affairs, said in a statement. N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus, which opened in 2010, has about 2,200 students from more than 100 countries. Mr. Norvell said everyone on campus remained safe.
Georgetown said its campus in Qatar would operate remotely on Tuesday — a status it said administrators expected to maintain “at least through the end of this week.”
Decisions about the campus, Georgetown said, would be made each day, “guided by official updates and the evolving situation.”
Georgetown’s interim president, Robert M. Groves, also said that a business school program that had been scheduled to begin Sunday in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, had been suspended and that university officials were working to evacuate students.
Classes at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Doha, the Qatari capital, have moved online, according to a school spokesman. Classes were canceled on Sunday, and the school will operate remotely through at least the end of the week.
At Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, campus facilities had also closed temporarily. “Our campus leadership in Doha has taken all appropriate steps following guidance from the Government of Qatar, including an immediate transition to remote learning and remote work,” university administrators said in a statement.
A spokesman for Northwestern University, which has a presence in Qatar, said its campus there would function remotely all week.
Classes at Texas A&M University at Qatar will be conducted remotely at least through the end of this week, the university said on its website. The Texas A&M system Board of Regents voted two years ago to wind down its operation in Qatar, and close it by 2028.
In a statement from February 2024 announcing the closure, the Board of Regents said it decided to reassess the university’s presence in Qatar because of “the heightened instability in the Middle East.”
A spokesman for Carnegie Mellon said that its students, faculty, and staff in Doha were sheltering in place. “Campus operations and classes will remain remote until further notice, and we are in regular communication with our external international security experts, the U.S. Embassy, and other governmental entities on necessary precautions and next steps,” the spokesman said.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA senior Iranian military official on Monday threatened to “set on fire” any ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast through which a fifth of the world’s oil travels.
The threat, made by Ebrahim Jabari, an adviser to the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, comes as most shipping companies have already stopped sending tankers through the strait, after the United States and Israel began their strikes on Iran on Saturday.
A few tankers have already come under attack during the conflict, including one on Monday that was flying the U.S. maritime flag and was docked in Bahrain. It was not clear who attacked the vessel.
“Not a single drop of oil” will leave the region, Mr. Jabari said on Iranian TV. Iran had on Saturday also said it was closing the strait, though some ships did travel through the waterway in the immediate aftermath of the American and Israeli attacks.
The sharp reduction in tanker traffic through the strait is raising fears that significantly less oil and gas will make it onto world markets, pushing up the cost of both commodities. A prolonged increase in oil prices could lead to higher gas prices for consumers.
Oil prices climbed 7 percent on Monday, to around $78 a barrel. That is less than some analysts expected, and oil is still cheaper than when President Trump began his second term. Still, the longer tankers stay away from the Strait of Hormuz, the less oil and gas gets out to the world, which could lift prices even more.
Iran’s economy could also be harmed if the strait remains closed. A large proportion of its oil exports go through the waterway, primarily to China.
Rebecca F. Elliott contributed reporting.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSKIP ADVERTISEMENTTwo more American service members have been killed in the war in Iran, U.S. military officials said Monday afternoon. That brings the number of dead troops so far to six.
The U.S. Central Command had reported three service members were killed and five were seriously wounded on Sunday; military officials said those troops were killed after an Iranian strike on a base housing American troops in Kuwait.
On Monday morning, the Central Command said that one of the injured service members had died of his wounds. Then, on Monday afternoon, the Central Command said that officials had recovered the remains of two previously unaccounted troops “from a facility that was struck during Iran’s initial attacks in the region.” With that, the number of Americans killed in the first three days of the war rose to six.
The Defense Department does not release the names of troops killed until at least 24 hours after their families are notified.
Administration officials have recently taken to repeating that they expect more U.S. casualties. Earlier Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth picked up that mantra.
“War is hell and always will be,” Mr. Hegseth said during a Pentagon news conference. “A grateful nation honors the four Americans we have lost thus far.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he expected the United States to “take additional losses.”
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAn oil tanker flying the U.S. maritime flag was attacked as it was docked in the port of Bahrain, according to Crowley, the Florida-based company operating the vessel. One shipyard worker was reported dead and two others injured, the company said in a statement, adding that the ship had “suffered damage due to aerial impacts.”
It is not clear who attacked the tanker, the Stena Imperative. American mariners operate U.S.-flagged vessels, and Crowley said the mariners on the tanker had reported no injuries. The attack caused a fire onboard, which Crowley said was extinguished in short order.
The Stena Imperative is part of a fleet of roughly 10 commercial tankers that can be called on to help support the U.S. miliary in times of conflict. However, the ship was not in Bahrain for that purpose, a Crowley spokesman, David DeCamp, said in an email. It was there, he said, “for planned maintenance and regulatory-required inspections,” adding that it had no fuel cargo.
The vessel was attacked shortly after 2 a.m. local time on Monday, according to Crowley. It was in a dry dock at Khalifa bin Salman Port at the time, according to Kpler, a global ship-tracking firm.
The port sits north of Qatar and across the Persian Gulf from Iran, where the United States and Israel have been conducting airstrikes since Saturday. Iran and allied militias have responded with strikes around the gulf and on U.S. targets in the region.
Last month, Iranian gunboats intercepted the same tanker as it entered the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, south of Bahrain, according to the British maritime risk insurance broker Vanguard Tech. The Iranian crews ordered the tanker to stop and prepare to be boarded, though the ship managed to accelerate and continue its voyage, Vanguard said.
At least five other oil tankers have been attacked since that episode, according to a Times analysis of satellite imagery, maritime reports, ship tracking data and official statements. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps claimed responsibility for three of the attacks, according to Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
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