Israel and Iran have broadened their strikes against each other on the third day of an escalating war that has killed and injured hundreds of people, as Donald Trump called for an end to the conflict and warned Tehran against striking US targets in the region.
G7 leaders flying to Canada for a summit that starts on Monday are likely to try to use their time with the US president to urge him to keep the US out of the conflict and use his influence with Israel to broker a ceasefire.
Trump claimed he was working behind the scenes on a deal. “We will have PEACE, soon, between Israel and Iran!” he said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “Many calls and meetings now taking place. I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand.”
His envoys face a challenge that appears to be deepening by the day, however, with Israel and Iran widening their attacks, and the casualty tolls rising.
Israel attacked Iran’s energy industry and defence ministry on Saturday night, leaving a fuel depot ablaze through the night outside Tehran. It followed with evacuation warnings to civilians living near arms factories and on Sunday launched a rare daytime raid on the capital.
Iran fired at least 70 missiles towards Israel and several evaded air defences. They hit a refinery in the north, killed four people in a Palestinian-majority town near the Sea of Galilee and brought down part of a high-rise apartment block in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv.
It was the heaviest missile barrage the country has faced, and the damage was shocking to many Israelis. Despite enduring years of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon, and months of missiles fired from Yemen by the Houthis, none of those groups could deploy the scale or destructive power of the Iranian attacks.
At least 14 people were killed, three were missing and hundreds injured by Sunday morning. Benjamin Netanyahu visited the site of the Bat Yam strike on Sunday to see the damage and meet rescue workers. “Iran will pay a very heavy price for the premeditated murder of civilians, women and children,” the prime minister said.
In Iran the toll is many times higher, with at least 224 fatalities since Israel began its attacks, according to Iran’s health ministry. Spokesperson Hossein Kermanpour said on social media that 1,277 people had also been hospitalised, claiming that more than 90% of the casualties were civilians.
Related: ‘There’s a smell of death in the air’: chaos in Tehran as residents try to flee or find shelter
A finance analyst in Tehran said: “This is a massacre. The blasts haven’t stopped. Children are crying and we fear many civilians have been killed. There’s a smell of death in the air. I can’t stop crying.”
An Israeli strike on Sunday killed the intelligence chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Kazemi, along with two other officers, the IRNA state media news agency reported.
“Three intelligence generals, Mohammad Kazemi, Hassan Mohaghegh and Mohsen Bagheri, were assassinated and fell as martyrs,” the agency said, citing a Revolutionary Guards statement.
Late on Sunday the Israeli military said that it was striking surface-to-surface missile sites in Iran, its latest move in three days of escalating conflict.
IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani wrote on X: “We are operating against this threat in our skies and in Iranian skies.”
As fuel depots outside Tehran blazed on Saturday, Trump presided over the US’s biggest military parade in decades. He later said the arsenal on display could be deployed against Iran if it targeted American assets.
The US president said in a social media post: “If we are attacked in any way shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the U.S. Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before.”
There is little question that Israel would like the US to join its campaign. Only American weapons have the capability to reach parts of the Iranian nuclear project such as the Fordow uranium enrichment plant, which is buried deep under a mountain.
But while Iran has called off talks with the US on the future of its nuclear programme, and accused Washington of being Israel’s “partner” in the offensive launched on Friday, it has held off attacking US bases, embassies or other targets.
With most of its top military leaders assassinated, Israel claiming domination of Iranian airspace from western Iran to Tehran, and several key nuclear sites seriously damaged, the regime in Tehran faces an unprecedented threat to its stability and possibly even its survival.
Netanyahu has made no secret of his desire for regime change and on Sunday told Fox News that it “could certainly be the result” of the Israeli campaign.
Trump has been more wary, and his administration vetoed a recent Israeli plan to kill the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel briefed the White House on the “credible” plan for assassination, but it was rejected by Americans as a dangerous escalation.
The US president reiterated on Sunday as he departed for the G7 summit that he hoped for a deal between Iran and Israel, but added that “sometimes you have to fight it out”. He refused to say if he had asked Israel to pause its strikes.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, signalled on Sunday that Iran was open to attempts to de-escalate. If Israeli strikes on Iran stopped, “our responses will also stop”, he said, perhaps in an appeal to Trump’s promotion of himself as the ultimate dealmaker, and his election pitch that he would end America’s decades of overseas wars.
The US is already trying to promote an exchange of messages with Iran to “calm tensions” with Israel, although the effort falls short of formal mediation, the Haaretz newspaper reported quoting foreign sources.
Trump has spoken about the war with Iran’s ally Vladimir Putin and the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who has been in direct contact with the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, since Friday.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, called the leader of Oman, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq al-Said, who had been due to host US-Iran talks, a government spokesperson said. They discussed the importance of halting the conflict and stopping Iran getting nuclear weapons.
For Israel, Saturday night was the bloodiest of the conflict, despite its success in knocking out much of Iran’s military hierarchy and parts of its missile systems over the previous day.
An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that even advanced air defences could not stop every missile when Iran launched large barrages, as it did on Saturday night.
“In these amounts, of hundreds of projectiles, sadly there will be hits,” the official said. “Even the greatest aerial defence system doesn’t get to 100%.”
Iran deployed about 70 missiles overnight, and dozens of drones, although Israel has a higher success rate intercepting those slower-moving projectiles. Over two nights, Iran fired about 270 missiles at Israel and 22 of them evaded air defences.
One of those appeared to target a refinery in the northern city of Haifa. In a statement to the Tel Aviv stock exchange, Bazan Group said there were no injuries at its plant but pipelines and transmission lines were damaged, forcing some facilities to shut down.
Netanyahu said he ordered the pre-emptive operation because Iranian progress towards developing nuclear weapons posed a critical security threat.
After taking out the top of the military hierarchy and vital nuclear scientists, as well as striking key parts of the nuclear programme, Israel appears to be widening its campaign.
It hit energy facilities overnight including an oil depot near Tehran that blazed through the night and a refinery in Bushehr province on the Gulf, and has told people living near arms factories in Iran to evacuate their homes.
An Israeli military official said in the coming days there would be more attacks on “dual use” facilities and strikes to prevent Iran expanding its stockpile of missiles, estimated to stand at about 2,000 before Friday.
Additional reporting by Deepa Parent
