Sirens sounded again in the early hours of this Thursday in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, and alerts were sent to residents’ phones ordering them to seek shelter amid missile and drone strikes launched from Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force announced that, in response to the second night of strikes ordered by Washington, it had attacked two bases used by the U.S. on Kuwaiti soil and two others on Bahraini soil. Other Iranian sources said they hit a Patriot air-defense system in Kuwait, military fuel depots in Bahrain and an antenna facility in Qatar.
Meanwhile, a U.S. strike hit an area surrounding the Iranian nuclear plant of Bushehr, according to statements to state media made by the vice-governor of Bushehr province, who did not specify the damage caused by the attack.
Iran’s Health Ministry said the U.S. strikes over the past two nights have killed 14 people and wounded 78, more than 40 of whom remain hospitalized. Ministry spokesman Hossein Kermanpour did not specify how many of the fatalities were civilian and how many military.
The Revolutionary Guard warned U.S. armed forces not to “repeat their acts of aggression” or, otherwise, Iran’s “devastating response” would broaden. Bahrain’s military, meanwhile, said in a statement that its systems “confronted, intercepted and destroyed an undetermined number of treacherous Iranian aerial attacks.” In Qatar, Al Jazeera reported that many citizens were awakened by mobile alerts telling people to stay inside their homes, away from windows or glass doors, because the blast wave from drones and missiles that struck nearby or were intercepted could shatter glass.
Still, the Iranian strike was, to some extent, restrained and did not last long. Qatar’s foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani, phoned his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, on Thursday morning to discuss the escalation between the United States and Iran over the past two days. The Qatari official criticized the attacks—allegedly by Iran—on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the week that prompted the U.S. military’s forceful response, and stressed that “these actions undermine confidence,” endangering the fragile cease-fire signed on June 17 between Washington and Tehran; he therefore proposed a return to dialogue.
One of the infrastructures struck by the United States was a railway bridge on the Tehran–Mashhad line, where the body of the former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei’s father, is scheduled to be buried this Thursday following a week of mass funeral rites in several cities in Iran and Iraq.
Also on Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei lashed out at the United States’ European allies, accusing them of “deliberate complicity” after, during this week’s NATO summit, the alliance’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said that bases on European territory had been used for “5,000 takeoffs” in missions related to Operation Epic Fury against the Asian country.
Those remarks, which have already caused friction with several European capitals that said they had denied the U.S. access to their bases, were meant to appease a Donald Trump angry at what he sees as a lack of European support for his war on Iran, but they did not go unnoticed in Tehran.
“Those who provided their territories, military bases and infrastructure to enable the aggression cannot evade responsibility for their contribution to an unprovoked aggression and its serious consequences,” the Iranian spokesman said, adding that Rutte’s “self-satisfaction” “does not reflect strength” but rather “a servile, flattering-courtier mentality.”
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