Russia advises it citizens against travel to Iran and Israel
MOSCOW, June 13 (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Ministry on Friday urged Russian citizens to refrain from travelling to Iran or Israel and told those "in the conflict zone" to stay well away from military objects and busy public places.
Israel launched a barrage of strikes across Iran on Friday, saying it had attacked nuclear facilities and missile factories and killed a swathe of military commanders in what could be a prolonged operation to prevent Tehran building an atomic weapon.
Russia earlier on Friday said that the Israeli strikes were unprovoked and in breach of the United Nations charter, and accused Israel of wrecking diplomatic efforts to reach a deal to allay Western concerns about Tehran's nuclear programme.
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Sky News
37 minutes ago
- Sky News
Israel-Iran live: Dozens injured after Tehran retaliates with waves of missiles
Sirens sound across Israel as Iranian drones launched - IDF The Israeli military has just said alerts have been activated in several parts of the country, warning of an incoming wave of Iranian drones. The IDF said the air force is "working to intercept and attack wherever necessary to eliminate the threat". Jordan reopens airspace to commercial flights Jordan, which borders Israel to the east, has reopened its airspace to civilian aircraft this morning. State-run Petra news agency said skies were cleared for take-off in the past hour, signalling the country believes there is no immediate danger of further attacks. Jordan's airspace had seen Iranian drones and missiles cross through, with Israeli fighter jets likely engaging targets there. The crossfire disrupted east-west travel through the Middle East, a key global aviation route. Dozens injured as Israel and Iran exchange attacks Israel launched aerial attacks across Iran yesterday, with Tehran responding last night and into the early hours today. The Iranian ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, said 78 people have been killed and more than 320 injured Among those killed were three of Iran's top military leaders: General Mohammad Bagheri, who oversaw the entire armed forces; General Hossein Salami, who led the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard; And General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the ballistic missile programme. Iravani said most of the injured are civilians. Israel's ambulance service reported 34 people were injured on Friday night in Tel Aviv, most with minor injuries. Police later said one person died. Hours later, an Iranian missile reportedly hit homes in the central Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, killing two people and injuring 19. All of these figures are based on tallies from authorities and have not been independently verified. Two killed in Iranian missile attack Israel's paramedic service Magen David Adom says two people have been killed in central Israel. Israel does not disclose the location of missile strikes, but it's believed this attack was in Rishon Lezion, as we reported in the posts below. At least another 19 are injured, while the country's fire and rescue service said four homes have been badly damaged. In pictures: Aftermath of Iranian missile strike in central Israel We reported a short time ago a rocket is said to have landed near homes in Rishon Lezion, just south of Tel Aviv - see our 4.32 post. These are the latest images from the coastal town, where at least 21 people have been injured. Rocket casualty figure rises to 21 In an update to the previous post, paramedics now say 21 people are being treated and evacuated after a rocket strike in Israel's coastal plain. We're also looking into reports that two people have been killed. Thirteen hurt in rocket strike, say paramedics Israel's emergency medical service, Magen David Adom, says 13 people have been hurt in a rocket attack - including a 30-year-old man who's in a critical condition. The rocket is said to have landed near homes in Rishon Lezion, just to the south of Tel Aviv, but the MDA didn't specify the location in its post. Eli Bin, director of the service, told Israel's Channel 12 that several people were still trapped. Israel says new wave of missiles fired from Iran Israel's military says more missiles have been launched from Iran and that it is working to intercept them. It says air raid sirens have sounded in several areas of the country as dawn breaks (it's two hours ahead of the UK). Pictures from Tel Aviv appear to show streaks in the sky of missiles being intercepted. Explosions and air raid sirens were also heard in Jerusalem, a witness tells Reuters news agency. How Iran's retaliatory attack unfolded The sky lit up over Israel's biggest city, Tel Aviv, on Friday evening and the sound of Iranian missiles being intercepted boomed out. Air raid sirens went off across the country, including in Jerusalem, and people were told to seek shelter. Authorities said 34 people were injured in Tel Aviv's metropolitan area. Here's how the situation played out. Latest images show aftermath of Iran missile strike New pictures are coming in showing damage caused by Iranian missile strikes in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, where several cars and buildings were destroyed. However, many of the missiles launched at Israel were shot down by its sophisticated Iron Dome defence system.
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Israel's strikes on Iran's nuclear sites are long overdue
Israel is only slightly larger in area than Wales, with a population more than three times as big. It would, therefore, take only a handful of relatively crude atom bombs, in the 50 kiloton range say, to destroy it as a functioning state. Given this degree of vulnerability, a surprise attack by Israel on Iran's nuclear sites was always a distinct possibility. For the United States and its European allies a nuclear-armed theocracy in Tehran would be a deeply damaging development; for Israel it would present an existential threat. Since the revolution of 1979 that brought it into being, the Islamic regime has consistently called for the destruction of the 'Zionist entity'. While Israel has reached some form of accommodation with most of its former enemies in the Arab world, Iran has remained its implacable foe, creating a web of terrorist proxies and hovering menacingly on the nuclear brink. Now, after years of warnings and actual, though limited, operations, the government of Binyamin Netanyahu has waded into the Rubicon. Israel's airstrikes on Iran were unprecedented in scale and scope, the initial wave involving two-thirds of its air force launching some 300 weapons against some 100 targets. How the Islamic regime reacts to this calculated affront to its authority could determine its fate. • How Israel attacked Iran: from masked men in the desert to devastation Israel's practical goals in launching the attacks are open to interpretation but the rightness of its cause is not. In their insatiable hunger for the destruction of the Jewish state, and by their unceasing efforts to attain the means for that destruction, the mullahs in Tehran and their henchmen in the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have brought destruction upon themselves. No country can be expected to stand idly by while an avowed enemy works steadily, decade after decade, in secret to create the ultimate weapon. Israel's initial attacks have been too big to be symbolic, but on their own they may not be powerful enough to put to an end Iran's nuclear ambitions entirely. Israel's fighter fleet cannot carry the most effective deep-penetration munitions made by the Americans, and a shortage of tankers makes sustained long-range operations difficult. Mr Netanyahu may be hoping for any one of a number of outcomes. He may indeed be intent on destroying the bulk of Iran's nuclear weapons infrastructure, or he may regard the air campaign as an arm twister intended to force Tehran to once and for all renounce nuclear weapons at the negotiating table. Or he could hope to deal a potentially fatal blow to the Iranian leadership's prestige, further exposing its weakness following the hobbling by Israel of its warrior proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, and the fall of its principal Arab ally, the Assad regime in Syria. These latter developments have seriously weakened Iran's ability to strike at Israel and have provided Israel's prime minister and his hawkish administration with a window of opportunity in which to act. A showdown with Iran might also help unify a country increasingly divided by Mr Netanyahu's prosecution of the war in Gaza. Whatever the end state desired by Mr Netanyahu, and he cannot himself be sure, the argument for this action is beyond dispute. If Israel cripples Tehran's nuclear programme it will have performed a service for all law-abiding nations, just as it did when it attacked the nuclear facilities of Iraq and Syria. Before the attack, Iran announced that it would begin work on an additional uranium enrichment site not previously disclosed to UN inspectors seeking to enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A report just released by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency shows how for decades Iran lied and deceived its way towards an atomic bomb. That this state sponsor of terrorism, with the blood of countless innocents on its hands, should become a nuclear power is as terrifying as it is abhorrent. In protecting itself Israel is protecting the world.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Out of the shadows: drone-op claims show Israel's Mossad leaning in to its legend
Israelis were celebrating on Friday what many see as a stunning new success by their country's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Hours after launching 200 warplanes in a wave of strikes against Iran, Israeli officials released footage they said showed the Mossad agents deep inside Iran assembling missiles and explosive drones aimed at targets near Tehran. According to unnamed security officials who briefed Israeli media, similar precision weapons were launched from trucks smuggled into the country and a 'drone base' hidden somewhere near Tehran. This was established well in advance of Friday's attack and used to destroy Iran's air defences, the officials said. The Mossad, an abbreviation of the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations in Hebrew, has scored many such victories in almost 80 years of undercover operations, earning a unique reputation for audacious espionage, technological innovation and ruthless violence. The new operation in Iran comes just 10 months after the service managed to sabotage thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, an attack that killed 37 people and injured about 3,000 others while crippling the militant Islamist organisation. The service then contributed to the air offensive that wiped out Hezbollah's leadership in a matter of days. Over decades, the Mossad has built up deep networks of informants, agents and logistics in Iran. This has allowed a series of operations including the assassination with a remote-controlled automatic machine gun of a top Iranian nuclear scientist travelling at speed in a car on a remote road, the infection with malware of computers running key parts of Iran's nuclear programme and the theft of an archive of nuclear documents. Last year, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated with a bomb placed in his favourite room in a government guesthouse in Tehran. 'This most recent operation is impressive, of course, but Iran has been an open book for Israeli intelligence for a decade or more,' said Yossi Melman, a veteran Israeli security reporter and author. Melman said those pictured setting up missile launches in the grainy videos released by the Mossad were likely to be Iranians. 'The boots on the ground inside Iran are not Israeli, so they have to be recruited, trained, equipped, and deployed. Then all the components of the weapons have to be smuggled in. It all needs a lot of professionalism and skill.' Unusually, Israeli officials have highlighted the role of Aman, the military intelligence service, in building up targeting information for the Israeli offensive. Though Aman and the Mossad often work closely, it is the foreign service, much smaller, that gets most of the attention. Even then, most of the Mossad's work is never known outside tightly restricted circles. For decades, few had even heard of the Mossad, which was formally established in 1949. Former agents were ordered not to tell even their family or their previous employment and the service never admitted its involvement in any operation. Yossi Alpher, who took part in some of the service's best-known operations in the 1970s, told the Guardian last year: 'Everything the Mossad did was quiet, no one knew. It was a totally different era. The Mossad was just not mentioned. When I joined, you had to know someone to be brought in. Now, there is a website.' The Mossad's senior officials have long been more likely to spend their time on sensitive diplomatic missions, briefing senior Israeli decision-makers on regional political dynamics or building relationships abroad than recruiting spies or running operations such as that targeting Iran this week. For decades, the Mossad oversaw years-long clandestine efforts to build up 'enemies of Israel's enemies', such as Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Syria, and Christians in what is now South Sudan. As with many of its efforts, this had mixed success. The Mossad is blamed by some for ignoring warnings about the reputation of Maronite Christian militia in Lebanon for brutality and ethnic hatred, and encouraging Israel's disastrous invasion of that country in 1982, in which thousands of civilians were killed. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency. The mythical reputation of the Mossad has been bolstered by films and TV series, with screenwriters attracted to some of the service's best-known exploits. One of the most famous is the 1960 capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer who was a key organiser of the Holocaust. Others include stealing warships from the French navy in 1969, warning of impending attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 and providing key intelligence for the famous raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976 that freed Jewish and Israeli passengers hijacked by Palestinian and German extremists. In 1980, the service set up and ran a diving resort on Sudan's Red Sea coast as a cover for the clandestine transport of thousands of members of Ethiopia's Jewish community to Israel. The Mossad spies lived among tourists before being forced to close down the operation after five years. After a deadly attack by Palestinian extremists on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the Mossad led a campaign to disrupt the networks and groups responsible. The effort ended when a Mossad team shot dead a Moroccan waiter in Norway in the mistaken belief he was a Palestinian Liberation Organization security official, and then made further errors leading to their arrest and trial by local authorities. In 1997, an effort to kill Khaled Meshaal, a powerful Hamas leader, went badly wrong when the Mossad team was caught in Amman by local security forces. Israel was forced to hand over an antidote and relations with Jordan were badly damaged. In 2010, agents were caught on CCTV camera in Dubai during another assassination. Then there is the failure to learn anything that might have warned of the Hamas raids into southern Israel on 7 October that killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and led to the abduction of 251. The attack prompted the Israeli offensive in Gaza, the current war with Hezbollah and, indirectly, the new confrontation with Iran. Former Mossad officials say the service only gets noticed when things go wrong. This is not quite true, though – as the release of the Iran videos shows. Melman said one of the Mossad's aims – particularly with the publicity – is to sow fear among Iranians. 'The aim is psychological. The Mossad is telling the Iranian regime: we know everything about you, we can wander into your home when we like, we are an omnipotent force,' said Melman. 'It's also a very good way to boost the morale of the Israeli public.'
