Key Points
- Israel has warned Iranian officials in Lebanon to leave immediately.
- Iran says it has selected new leader to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Israel’s military said it has hit Iranian commanders in the Lebanese capital, expanding the scope of its campaign to the heart of Beirut after days of strikes that have left nearly 400 people dead.
The drone strike was the first within the city limits of Lebanon’s capital since Israel-Hezbollah hostilities resumed last week, and came amid heavy bombardment on Beirut’s southern suburbs and the country’s south and east.
Israel said it targeted key commanders of Iran’s elite Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards but did not name them.
“The commanders of the Quds Force’s Lebanon Corps operated to advance terror attacks against the state of Israel and its civilians, while operating simultaneously for the IRGC in Iran,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
Lebanon says four people were killed in the strike, part of a rapidly rising death toll that has reached 394 people, the health ministry said on Sunday local time, including at least 83 children and 42 women.
Israel has warned any representatives of Iran in Lebanon to leave immediately or risk being targeted, and struck an area near the Iranian embassy in Lebanon earlier this week.
New leader selected in Iran
Iran on Sunday local time indicated it had chosen Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as his successor, after Israel struck fuel depots in Tehran overnight and the conflict widened after Bahrain said an Iranian attack had damaged one of its desalination plants.
“The name of Khamenei will continue,” said Ayatollah Hosseinali Eshkevari, a member of the clerical council charged with electing a new leader, in a video published in Iranian media.
“The vote has been cast and will be announced soon,” Eshkevari said, without providing further details.
The council’s secretary, Hosseini Bushehri, would announce the successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who was killed earlier in the conflict — Ahmad Alamolhoda, another cleric, told state media.
Two Iranian sources told Reuters news agency last week that Mojtaba Khamenei, who built influence inside Iran’s security forces and vast business networks under his father, remained the clear favourite.
Choosing him would signal that hardliners remain firmly in charge.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday Washington should have a say in the selection. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long,” he told ABC News.
Israel said it continued to target senior Iranian figures, including Abolqasem Babaian, the recently appointed head of the military office of the supreme leader, killed in a Saturday strike.
As fighting escalated on day nine of the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, thick black smoke hung over Tehran on Sunday, residents said, after strikes on oil storage facilities had lit up the night sky with plumes of orange flame.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the large-scale attack marked a “dangerous new phase” of the conflict and amounted to a war crime.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was not seeking negotiations to end the conflict, which has driven up global energy prices, disrupted business and snarled air travel.
Trump has justified the biggest US military operation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq by saying Tehran posed an imminent threat to the United States, without providing evidence.
The US and Israel have discussed sending special forces into Iran to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium at a later stage of the war, Axios reported, citing sources.
Asked on Saturday about sending ground troops to secure nuclear sites, Trump said it was something they would only do if the Iranians were “so decimated that they wouldn’t be able to fight at the ground level.”
The US-Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,332 Iranian civilians and wounded thousands, according to Iran’s UN ambassador.
Iranian attacks have killed 10 people in Israel.
At least six US service members have been killed, with Iran saying on Sunday it had struck US bases in Kuwait.
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