Middle East crisis live: Trump continues criticism of Nato allies over resistance to get involved in war on Iran | US-Israel war on Iran

Turkey’s top diplomat on Tuesday lashed out at Israel after it claimed to have killed Iran’s powerful national security chief Ali Larijani, denouncing its targeting of Tehran’s leaders as “illegal”.

“Israel’s political assassinations, especially those targeting Iranian statesmen and politicians, are truly illegal activities outside the normal laws of war,” foreign minister Hakan Fidan told a news conference.

Larijani’s death has not been confirmed by Iran, AFP reported.

Three Lebanese soldiers were killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday, the Lebanese army said, as Israel carried out new raids and again ordered residents of vast parts of southern Lebanon to evacuate.

Lebanon was drawn into the Middle East war when pro-Iran Hezbollah launched rockets towards Israel in response to US-Israeli strikes that killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Donald Trump has continued to lambast Nato countries over the resistance to assist the US in the war on Iran.

This comes after US allies in Europe and beyond ruled out sending warships to the strait of Hormuz, despite threats from the president that Nato faces “a very bad future” if members fail to help reopen the vital waterway.

“I am not surprised by their action,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Because I always considered NATO, where we spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year protecting these same Countries, to be a one way street.”

He said that the member countries “will do nothing for us, in particular, in a time of need” before heralding the success of US forces degrading Iran’s military capabilities, naval forces, and air defenses.

“We no longer “need,” or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance – WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea,” Trump insisted on social media.

He added:

The United States has been informed by most of our NATO “Allies” that they don’t want to get involved with our Military Operation against the Terrorist Regime of Iran, in the Middle East, this, despite the fact that almost every Country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be allowed to have a Nuclear Weapon.

Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, said he believed the implications of the war in the Middle East are “negative on Ukraine” and expressed the fear that the slow moving peace negotiations with Russia could collapse as a result.

The president, on a visit to London, said he believed that the war in the Middle East “takes the focus away, I think, from the peace negotiations in Ukraine” while Russia’s economic and military position has strengthened.

“I hope that the peace negotiations on Ukraine don’t collapse like the negotiations between Iran and the US did,” Stubb said, as at the end of a set of downbeat observations on the state of the war in eastern Europe.

The surge in oil prices, caused by the US-Israel attack, would prop up the Kremlin’s treasury at a point when the Russian economy was “actually doing extremely badly,” he said. Some forecasters predicted a Russian recession later in 2026.

Gulf nations and the US were making heavy use of Patriot interceptors to protect themselves from Shahed drone attacks by Iran which were “taking some of the necessary air defence systems away” from defending Ukraine, Stubb added.

Though Stubb has sometimes been dubbed a “Donald Trump whisperer” for his good relationship with the US president, cemented over a round of golf at Mar a Lago a year ago, he said his personal influence was limited.

“I have no illusions about who can convince president Trump on anything. Especially, I don’t. If I get one idea of 10 in on Ukraine, it’s good,” Stubb said in response to a question from the Guardian at an event at the Chatham House think tank.

Joe Kent’s resignation from the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) is being met with derision inside the Trump administration this morning, making it unlikely that it will trigger internal splits or opposition to the war in Iran.

Several senior Trump advisers have long made clear that they have not cared about him or his views for some time, evidenced by the fact that Kent has played no role in any major operation or policy in Trump’s second term.

There does appear to be some anger towards Kent for making such a splashy resignation, however, including from his own former colleagues.

DNI Tulsi Gabbard is set to face a bruising Worldwide Threats Hearing on Capitol Hill this week, where she is now certain to be asked about Kent’s resignation.

Earlier this month, the former US secretary of state under Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, who also was deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser during the Obama administration, was asked by Bloomberg about the US-Israeli relationship.

The interview came after the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes on Iran, a position that was later walked back on. Blinken’s comments made to Bloomberg were revealing. He said:

This has been a long story when it comes to Iran. And back during the Obama administration the Israelis were pushing President Obama to take military action against Iran and were warning that they would do it themselves if he didn’t and he wouldn’t because he thought the better way to get at the nuclear programme, which is what we were focused on, was through very muscular diplomacy backed up by very, very strong sanctions, that we rallied the world to put in place and then we got the Iran nuclear agreement.

In the days after the October 7 attack on Israel … by Hamas the Israelis were insisting that in the north Hezbollah – from Lebanon – was about to attack and they wanted to strike pre-emptively against Hezbollah and President Biden said ‘look we are with you and we will always be with you in defending Israel and if you are attacked we are there’ but we are not there if you are going to start something.

And we came within about 30 minutes of having a war in the north based on bad information that the Israelis had about an imminent attack from Hezbollah.

Joseph Kent’s resignation letter in full:

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term. Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.

In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasem Soleimani and by defeating ISIS.

Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran. This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women. We cannot make this mistake again.

As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.

I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

It was an honor to serve in your administration and to serve our great nation.

The head of the US national counter-terrorism center, Joseph Kent, has resigned over the US-Israel war on Iran.

He said in a letter to Donald Trump posted on X that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation”.

As my colleague Shrai Popat notes in our US politics live blog, Kent, a former Green Beret and CIA operative, was confirmed to his position in July last year. His nomination was criticized for Kent’s proximity to white nationalist activists such as Nick Fuentes, and for the revolving cast of far-right activists his campaigns employed.

An Israeli airstrike killed at least three people including a child in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, local health authorities said, the latest violence jeopardising the ceasefire which has been under strain during the Israeli-US war against Iran.

Medics said the airstrike targeted a vehicle in the western area of Khan Younis, south of the enclave, killing three people, including a child, and wounding 12 other people. There was no immediate Israeli comment, Reuters reported.

Israel’s military has continued to strike Gaza during the regional war with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On Sunday it killed 12 people in Gaza, including nine police officers in one strike that Israel said targeted a Hamas cell. The military has cited threats or fire from Hamas as the reason for its attacks.

Britain’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, attended the final talks between the US and Iran and judged that the offer made by Tehran on its nuclear programme was significant enough to prevent a rush to war, the Guardian can reveal.

Powell thought that progress had been made in Geneva and that the deal proposed by Iran was “surprising”, according to sources.

Two days after the talks ended, and after a date had been agreed for a further round of technical talks in Vienna, Donald Trump and Israel launched the attack on Iran.

Powell’s presence at the talks, and his close knowledge of how they were progressing, was confirmed by three sources.

One source said he was in the building at Oman’s ambassadorial residence in Cologny acting as an adviser, reflecting widespread concern about the US expertise on the talks represented by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy on multiple issues.

Kushner and Witkoff had invited Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) to the Geneva talks, to provide technical expertise, though Kushner would later claim that he and Witkoff had “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter in this”.

Nuclear experts would later say that Witkoff’s pronouncements on the Iran nuclear programme were riddled with basic errors.

Drone and rocket attacks reportedly targeted the US embassy in Baghdad early on Tuesday and a separate strike killed four people at a house reportedly hosting Iranian advisers in the Iraqi capital, security officials said, pulling the country deeper into the war in the Middle East.

The strikes came hours after air defences thwarted a rocket attack at the embassy and a drone caused a fire at a luxury hotel frequented by foreign diplomats in Baghdad’s fortified green zone, Agence France-Presse reported.

NBC News reported on 6 March that the US president, Donald Trump, had privately expressed “serious interest” in deploying US troops on the ground inside of Iran, citing two American officials. The president has not said he wants to do this publicly but has not ruled ‌out sending ⁠US ground troops into Iran either.

Trump has oscillated on the war’s trajectory and has given divergent reasons for the assault, deemed by many observers as having been launched illegally alongside Israel.

As my colleague Jason Burke notes in this analysis piece, some have suggested Trump could order US marines who are on their way to the Middle East to seize Kharg Island, which is Iran’s principal oil export hub, to pressure Tehran.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, was asked about the possibility of US troops on the ground in a Sky News interview. He said:

Even suggesting that a foreign country can put ‘boots on the ground’ of another country, invade another country, occupy the land of another country is something very much rogue, very reckless, illegal and against all international law.

There is no mandate for Americans to do that and they are doing this because they are so drunk off power they think they can do whatever they want and this is not the case.

When asked what it would mean for US marines if they were to land on Kharg Island, the Iranian deputy foreign minister said: “Just read what happened in Vietnam.”

Oil and gas prices have risen again after Iran carried out attacks on production facilities for the first time since the start of the war with the US and Israel.

Brent crude, the international benchmark oil price, climbed 3% to $103.2 (£77.52) a barrel on Tuesday and was up nearly 50% from levels before the war began on 28 February.

Wholesale gas prices rose nearly 3% to €52 (£45) a megawatt hour, compared with about €30 before the war.

For the first time, Iran successfully targeted oil and gas production facilities, rather than just refineries, terminals and storage.

The UAE said a drone struck the Shah natural gasfield – one of the largest in the world – on Monday and set it on fire.

Operations remained suspended on Tuesday while officials assessed the damage. You can read more here:

Donald Trump’s attempt to blame Iran for the deadly strike on an elementary school stemmed from an early US intelligence assessment that initially suggested the missile was Iranian but was almost immediately dismissed, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The CIA initially told the president that they did not believe the missile that struck the school was a munition used by the US because the fins appeared to be positioned too low for it to be a Tomahawk cruise missile.

Within 24 hours, the CIA realized that early assessment had been wrong after it became clear from additional videos, taken at other angles, that the missile was in fact a Tomahawk, the people said on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.

But Trump had already settled on the explanation that Iran was responsible for the strike before he raised it to reporters on Air Force One last Saturday, even as the defense secretary Pete Hegseth was more cautious and said only the matter was under investigation.

Trump repeated his position at a news conference the following day. While he appeared to accept the missile that hit the school was a Tomahawk – a missile used only by the US and a handful of allies including the UK, Japan and Australia – he suggested it belonged to Iran.

The president’s efforts to pin responsibility on Iran comes as an ongoing Pentagon investigation into the strike has reached similar conclusions, finding that the missile in question was a Tomahawk fired by the US military, which relied on outdated intelligence. The strike is believed to have killed at least 175 people, many of them children, making it one of the deadliest targeting errors in recent decades.

Hundreds of Starlink systems sent by the US and Israel have been seized in Iran, the Fars news agency has quoted the country’s ministry of intelligence as having said in a statement.

It was reported that the ministry seized the systems during “a nationwide operation”.

The statement said the law prohibits the acquisition and use of “illegal” Starlink systems. It says the crime, in times of war, “is punishable by the most severe punishment”.

Iran is on the 18th day of an internet blackout, as we reported in an earlier post, but some residents have reportedly been using SpaceX’s Starlink devices to bypass the restrictions.

It has just gone past 15:25pm in Tehran, and 13:55pm in Tel Aviv and Beirut. Here is a quick recap of events:

• Israel said it killed the Iranian national security chief, Ali Larijani, in overnight strikes, a claim that if confirmed would make him the most senior Iranian figure to be assassinated since the former supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the US-Israeli war.

• Iran has not confirmed Larijani’s death. There are reports that he could only be injured.

• The Israeli military said a separate airstrike killed the Basij paramilitary force commander, Gholamreza Soleimani, along with other senior Basij figures.

• For the past hours, massive explosions were reported in different parts of Tehran and other cities across Iran, including Ahvaz, Isfahan and Shiraz.

• The UAE shut down its airspace this morning as its military reported it was responding to missile and drone “threats” from Iran.

• The closure was soon reportedly lifted, with authorities saying “the situation stabilised”, allowing flights to resume.

• Gulf countries came under renewed missile and drone attack from Iran.

• There was a reported drone and rocket attack targeting the US embassy in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital, early on Tuesday.

• Charities have warned of the devastating humanitarian impact of the Israeli assault on Lebanon, where authorities say more than one million people have been displaced.

The IDF has said it has launched a “wave of extensive strikes” across the Iranian capital of Tehran. Explosions have been reported across Tehran and other major Iranian cities since the early morning following Israeli attacks.