The new threat landed during an ongoing surge of strikes across multiple fronts, with Trump signaling diplomatic progress while warning that diplomacy could be met with wider military action if a deal fails to materialize quickly. In a social media post, he said “great progress is being made” in talks with Iran to end military operations, but he set a narrow timeline and tied it to whether the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened “immediately.” If those conditions were not met, he warned, the United States would broaden its offensive by “completely obliterating” power plants, oil wells and Kharg Island, and he added that desalination plants could be targeted as well.
Trump’s language focused on energy and water infrastructure, a choice that drew legal attention in the context of international rules on armed conflict. The cluster reporting said legal scholars describe the laws of armed conflict as permitting attacks on civilian infrastructure such as energy plants only when the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, a bar described as “high,” and said excessive suffering of civilians can constitute a war crime.
In Iran, Iranian state and diplomatic messaging pushed back on the idea of direct negotiations. Esmail Baghaei, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said Tehran received a 15-point proposal from the Trump administration containing “excessive, unrealistic and irrational” demands, while denying that there were any direct talks. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, whom Trump said he was negotiating with, described Iranian forces as “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever,” according to state media.
The military backdrop in the region continued on parallel tracks of threats and counter-threats. The report said the U.S. and Israel launched another new wave of strikes on Iran as the war continued with no end in sight, and it described Iran and its regional allies keeping up attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf. It said an Iranian attack in Kuwait hit a power and desalination plant, killing one worker and wounding 10 soldiers, according to KUNA news agency, while an Iranian strike was also tied to an overnight disruption of electricity in the area around Karaj near Tehran, according to a 22-year-old resident who spoke anonymously on condition of anonymity out of security fears.
As Iran attacked and the U.S. and Israel struck, other regional incidents underscored the broadening geographic spread of conflict. The reporting said a fire broke out Monday at an oil refinery in Haifa for a second time during the monthlong war, and it said sirens sounded near Israel’s main nuclear research center as Israel’s military said it had taken out two drones launched from Yemen—where the Iran-backed Houthis entered the war on Saturday with their first missile attack. It also said Saudi Arabia intercepted five missiles targeting its oil-rich Eastern province, and that a missile interception led to a fireball over Dubai, while a drone hit a Kuwaiti oil tanker in Dubai waters early Tuesday, according to the Dubai Media Office.
The U.N. track in Lebanon brought another escalation signal as civilian protection concerns rose. The reporting said the U.N. Security Council planned to convene an emergency session Tuesday after officials said three U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon were killed in less than 24 hours, following a request from France. The UNIFIL mission did not say who was responsible, but the report said two of the peacekeepers were killed when an explosion of “unknown origin” destroyed their vehicle, and a third was killed earlier when a UNIFIL base was hit by a projectile; all three were from the Indonesian army, according to U.N. officials. The Israeli army said it was reviewing the deaths to determine whether they resulted from Hezbollah activity or Israeli fire, noting that they “occurred in an active combat area,” as the fighting continued in a combat zone where Israel is battling Hezbollah.
In parallel, the reporting described additional violence in Lebanon, including an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb that killed one person and wounded 17, including four children, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. It also noted that over the weekend Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would widen its invasion by expanding the “existing security strip” in southern Lebanon.
The cluster also described how the conflict has fed into energy-market concerns. It said Iran’s attacks on regional energy infrastructure and its “stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz” threatened global supplies of oil, natural gas and fertilizer, and it reported that Brent crude was trading around $115 Monday, up nearly 60% from when the war started. It also reported that Trump said Iran agreed to allow 20 oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday as “a sign of respect,” adding that there was no information on whether those ships were actually moving.