Israel carries out fresh strikes on Tehran and Beirut as Iran targets US bases in Gulf

Israel carries out fresh strikes on Tehran and Beirut as Iran targets US bases in Gulf Explosions heard across Iranian capital on Wednesday as part of ‘broad-scale strikes’ against regime Middle East crisis – live updates Israel carried out another wave of strikes on Tehran and Beirut on Wednesday while Iranian missiles continued to fly toward Israel and the Gulf as the war with Iran entered its fifth day. Explosions were heard across Tehran in the early hours of the morning as the Israeli military announced “broad-scale strikes” on Iranian regime targets. Police stations and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps headquarters in the Kurdish regions of north-western Iran were also razed by strikes, Kurdish media reported. Iran’s death toll soared, as estimates of those killed by strikes rose to 800 to 1,500 people in five days of war. US and Israeli officials said the war was so far going better than they expected, but it was unclear what the end goal of their campaign was as they had offered contradictory aims. The Trump administration has said at various times that its goal was regime change, destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capacity and its navy, preventing it from getting a nuclear weapon, and putting a stop to its support for proxies across the region. The US president, Donald Trump , said that some of the individuals he was considering as possible post-war leaders of Iran were killed in the opening days of the war. On Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late shah of Iran, Trump said he preferred “someone from within” Iran. In Iran, funeral proceedings for the late head of state, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei , started in Tehran on Wednesday morning. The body of Khamenei, killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on Sunday, is due to be on display for three days in a large compound in central Tehran for the public to view. The funeral came as Iran’s senior clerics met to appoint a new supreme leader, a position that functions as both head of state and commander in...