Summary
President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum late Saturday, threatening to attack Iranian power plants unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. The remarks were posted on social media as Trump spent the weekend at his Florida home, and they were delivered in tandem with reports that Iranian missiles struck southern Israel, damaging buildings and injuring dozens near the country’s nuclear research area.
The threatened attacks focused on Iran’s energy infrastructure. Trump said he was giving Iran 48 hours to open the vital waterway and warned that the U.S. would destroy “various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” as part of what he framed as a response to failure to allow passage.
Israeli officials and rescue workers reported that Iranian missile strikes hit two southern communities, Dimona and Arad, in an area of Israel’s sparsely populated Negev desert. Israel’s military said it was not able to intercept the missiles that hit the cities, and it described the strikes as the first time Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s air defense systems in the area around the nuclear site.
Rescue workers said a direct hit in Arad caused widespread damage across at least 10 apartment buildings, with at least three badly damaged and at risk of collapsing. They said at least 64 people were taken to hospitals, while Dimona was described as about 20 kilometers (12 miles) west of the nuclear research center and Arad around 35 kilometers (22 miles) north.
The AP report said the air-defense failure was viewed by Iran-linked officials as a sign of a shift in the war’s dynamics. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on X that if the Israeli “regime” could not intercept missiles in the heavily protected Dimona area, it was “operationally, a sign of entering a new phase of the battle,” according to the AP account of his post.
The Strait of Hormuz became a central backdrop to the threats. The AP report said the waterway connects the Persian Gulf to global oceans and that attacks on commercial ships and threats of further strikes have stopped nearly all tankers from carrying oil, gas and other goods through the passage. It said the disruption has contributed to cuts in output from some of the world’s largest producers because their crude has nowhere to go.
Iran warned it would respond directly if its energy facilities were targeted. The report said Iran cautioned early Sunday that any strike on its energy facilities would prompt attacks on U.S. and Israeli energy and infrastructure assets in the region, citing a statement carried by Iran’s state media and semiofficial outlets and attributed to an Iranian military spokesperson.
The AP account also described earlier damage and contested claims within the broader exchange of strikes. It said Iranian missiles struck Israel after Tehran’s main nuclear enrichment site at Natanz was hit earlier in the day and that Israel had denied responsibility for that Natanz strike; the report also said the Iranian judiciary’s official news agency Mizan reported there was no leakage. The International Atomic Energy Agency said on X that it had not received reports of damage to the Israeli center or abnormal radiation levels, and it said it was looking into the Natanz strike.
Beyond the immediate battlefield, the report described targets and delivery-range questions that appeared to widen the war’s reach. It said Iran also targeted the joint U.K.-U.S. Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean, about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) away, and that U.K. officials did not provide details of the strike that targeted Diego Garcia. The AP report added that it was unclear how close the missiles came to the island and that Iran had previously asserted that it limited its missile range to below 2,000 kilometers (over 1,200 miles).
As shipping threats continued, Gulf-region effects also moved into the reporting. The AP report said a missile alert sounded Saturday night in Dubai, and that Saudi Arabia said it downed 20 drones in its east, an area with major oil installations. It also reported that the death toll in the war had surpassed 1,500 according to Iran’s state broadcaster, citing Iran’s health ministry, and it said Israel reported deaths from Iranian missiles and additional deaths in the occupied West Bank.
On the political and military front, Israel’s leader and senior military officials continued to characterize the fighting as ongoing and difficult. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said more emergency crews were being sent to the scene and called the evening “very difficult,” while Israel’s army chief, Gen. Eyal Zamir, had told reporters earlier that “The war is not close to ending.”