Middle East crisis live: Trump claims Iran war will be over ‘very soon’ but Tehran says it will determine when | US-Israel war on Iran

Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.

Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot north-east of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Iran’s environmental agency and the Iranian Red Crescent Society had warned Tehran residents to stay at home, warning the toxic chemicals spread by airstrikes on five fossil fuel installations around the city could lead to acid rain and damage the skin and lungs.

On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water and air – hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.”

A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry on Tuesday had harsh words for Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.

In response to von der Leyen’s remarks that the “people of Iran deserve freedom, dignity, and the right to decide their own future”, Esmaeil Baqaei posted on X: “Please spare the hypocrisy”.

“You’ve made a career out of standing on the wrong side of history — green-lighting occupation, genocide, and atrocities, and now laundering U.S./Israeli crime of aggression and war crimes against Iranians,” Baqaei wrote.

Baqaei continued: “Where was your voice when more than 165 innocent IRANIAN little angels were massacred in the city of Minab? Why don’t you say anything when hospitals, historical sites, oil facilities, diplomatic police headquarter, firefighting stations and residential neighborhoods are wickedly targeted?

“Silence in the face of lawlessness and atrocity is nothing less than complicity.”

A UK government minister has said she expects police to take “robust action” against those expressing support for the Iranian regime ahead of a pro-Palestinian rally in London this weekend.

Sarah Sackman was speaking in advance of the annual annual Al Quds Day march in London on Sunday, which is organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC).

The body says that the event has taken place peacefully for the past 40 years and will attempt to highlight the ongoing plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

However, previous events have included participants waving the flag of the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Hezbollah, which is banned in the UK as a terrorist organisation. Rhetoric including chants calling for death to America and Israel have also been highlighted in the past.

The Courts minister, Sarah Sackman, told LBC radio on Tuesday: “Those expressing support for the malign regime in Iran and the IRGC and its proxies have no place in our society.”

“They shouldn’t be on the streets of London calling for hate and hostility against this country. That’s thoroughly anti-British and I expect the police and the Home Secretary to take the necessary action against those people.”

On Times Radio, she said: “I’m clear that hate marches like the Al Quds march has no place in British society and the authorities and the police should take the enforcement action needed against these marches.”

The Metropolitan Police has said it has not ruled out a range of options ahead of the march, including seeking the imposition of an outright ban on the rally this weekend.

The bombing of a primary school in Minab on 28 February killed scores of people, most of them seven- to 12-year-old girls. The strike is the worst mass killing of the US and Israel’s war on Iran so far – and has been described by Unesco as a “grave violation” of international law.

On Saturday, the US president, Donald Trump, declared that Iran was responsible for the school bombing. “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran … they’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”

The president presented no evidence for his claim. His assertion has not been repeated by spokespeople for the US military, who have said only that they are “investigating” the bombing.

But a growing body of evidence indicates that the strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school was carried out by the US. Here is what we know – and why it points to the US being responsible.

As the conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate, we would like to hear how people living, working or travelling in the region have been affected.

Whether you are in the region or impacted in other ways, please get in touch.

Please note that while we’d like to hear from you, your security is most important. We recognise it may not always be safe or appropriate to record or share your experiences, so please think about this when considering whether to get in touch with the Guardian.

IP addresses will be recorded on a third-party web server, so for true anonymity, use our secure messaging service, however, anything submitted on the form below will be encrypted and confidential if you wish to continue.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said that with the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late ayatollah, as Iran’s new supreme leader, the US and Israel have failed in their goal for a regime change.

In an interview with PBS News Hour that aired Monday night, Araghchi said that he did not think that US and Israel have a realistic endgame and are now just sowing chaos.

“They thought that, in a matter of two or three days, they can go for a regime change, they can go for a rapid, clean victory, but they failed…they failed to achieve their goals at the beginning, and now, after 10 days, I think they are aimless,” Araghchi said.

When asked about the widespread disruptions the conflict has caused in the delivery of oil, which in turn is causing volatility across markets worldwide, Araghchi maintained that the spike in oil prices was not Iran’s fault.

“This is not our plan,” Araghchi said. “The oil production, the transportation of oil has been slowed down or stopped not because of us, because of the attacks and aggression made by Israelis and Americans against us. So they have made the whole region insecure. And this is why the tankers, the ships are scared to pass through the strait of Hormuz.

He continued “We have not closed that strait. We have not – we are not preventing them to navigate in that strait. But this is the result of the aggression by Israelis and Americans, which has made the whole region insecure, unstable.”

When anchor Amna Nawaz pushed Araghchi on the issue, pointing out that the Irani military had conducted airstrikes on multiple oil facilities in other nations – and that a spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had said: “If you can tolerate oil at more than $200 per barrel, continue this game” – Araghchi maintained that “what we are doing is only defending ourselves”.

“We are facing an act of aggression, which is absolutely illegal. And what we are doing is the act of self-defense, which is legal and legitimate. Well, we have already warned everybody in the region that, if the US attacks us, since we cannot reach the American soil, we have to attack their bases in the region, their facilities, their installations, their assets.

“And as a result, the war would be spread into the whole region. So this is the consequences, the consequence of the U.S. aggression against us. We are not responsible for that.”

In comments made during a visit to the National Health Command Centre on Monday night, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s war on Iran is ‘not done yet’, AFP reports.

“Our aspiration is to bring the Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny; ultimately, it depends on them. But there is no doubt that with the actions taken so far, we are breaking their bones – and we are not done yet,” Netanyahu said.

The Israeli military has issued a warning that its forces will be targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in the area of Tyre and Sidon on the western coast of southern Lebanon.

Earlier, the Israeli military warned that it would also be operating in the area south of the Litani river, about 74 kilometres (46 miles) south of the capital of Beirut.

Avichay Adraee, a spokesman for the Israeli military, reiterated earlier evacuation orders and urged residents in all those areas to leave.

French president Emmanual Macron has used a visit to Cyprus to announce that France and its allies are preparing “a purely defensive, purely support mission” to reopen the strait of Hormuz, where dozens of ships have been stranded since the start of the war.

On a one-day trip to the eastern Mediterranean island – the EU’s nearest member state to the Middle East – he said the mission would start “as soon as possible after the most intense phase of the conflict is over”.

Greece’s shipping minister has described the situation in the strait as “alarming”, saying numerous tankers have found themselves stuck in the key waterway since the US and Israeli airstrikes against Iran began. Around a fifth of the world’s oil supplies pass through the strait every day.

“It is essential for international trade, but also for the flow of gas and oil, which must be able to leave this region once again,” Macron told reporters.

The French leader also pledged that the European Union would do everything possible to stand by Cyprus where several EU nations have rushed to deploy warships and fighter jets following a drone strike against a British base on the island.

More on that here:

If you’re just tuning in to our live coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran, here’s a recap of the latest key developments. It’s 10.30am in Tehran, 9am in Beirut and Tel Aviv and 3am in Washington DC.

• Donald Trump said the war was “very complete, pretty much” and ahead of schedule. But the US president also suggested as it enters its 11th day that he was not yet declaring the US mission accomplished, saying: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.”

• Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said his country was prepared to continue missile attacks for as long as necessary and that talks with the US were no longer on the agenda.

• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they would not allow “one litre of oil” to be shipped from the Middle East if US-Israeli attacks continued. Trump responded by saying the US would hit Iran “20 times harder” if it blocked tanker traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which handles a fifth of the world’s oil supply.

• Oil prices tumbled from four-year highs and global shares rallied after Trump suggested the Iran war could end “very soon”.

• Israel’s military said it had launched new attacks in central Iran and struck the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where Israel has extended its campaign against the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.

• Four fighters from the Iran-backed Kataeb Imam Ali group were killed on Tuesday in airstrikes blamed on the US in northern Iraq, the armed faction said.

• Trump said the US would waive oil-related sanctions on “some countries” to ease the shortage, after speaking with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

• Tehran was choked in black smoke after an oil refinery was hit, an escalation in strikes on Iran’s domestic energy supplies.

• Turkey said Nato air defences had shot down a ballistic missile that was fired from Iran and entered Turkish airspace.

• In Australia, the government said five Iranian women’s football team players had been granted humanitarian visas after they sought asylum fearing persecution in Iran.

• At least 1,332 Iranian civilians have been killed and thousands wounded since the US and Israel began attacking on 28 February, according to Iran’s UN ambassador.
  With agencies