The Latest: Israel intensifying attacks, Iran shows defiance, nuclear site hit

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Israel’s defense minister threatened on Saturday that “the intensity of the attacks” by Israel and the United States against Iran’s ruling theocracy will “increase significantly” as the war in the Middle East entered its fourth week.

Britain condemned Iran for targeting Diego Garcia, a joint U.K.-U.S. base in the Indian Ocean. The distance of Saturday's attack suggests Tehran is able to send missiles much farther than Iran had acknowledged.

Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility was hit in an airstrike, an official Iranian news agency reported Saturday, saying there was no radiation leakage. Israel denied responsibility.

The U.S. and Israel have offered shifting rationales for the war, from hoping to foment an uprising that topples Iran’s leadership to eliminating its nuclear and missile programs. There have been no public signs of any such uprising, and the war shows no sign of abating.

The death toll has risen to more than 1,300 people in Iran, more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, 15 in Israel and 13 U.S. military members, and a number of civilians on land and sea in the Gulf region. Millions of people in Lebanon and Iran have been displaced.

Here is the latest:

Several people in northern Israel were wounded by shrapnel as the area came under constant missile fire from Lebanon. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue services said at least five people were injured in a barrage Saturday evening.

Israel has also been striking hundreds of targets in southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut after Hezbollah joined the war in support of Iran.

Rescue services also treated two people in southern Israel, including a 10-year-old boy, for shrapnel injuries from missiles launched from Iran.

The Health Ministry said Saturday that three deaths were reported over the past 24 hours, and 99 people were wounded, raising the total injured to 2,740.

The latest Israel-Hezbollah war began on March 2, when the Iran-backed militia fired rockets into northern Israel two days after the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran triggered a widening war in the Middle East.

Israel has since ordered evacuations from large parts of southern and eastern Lebanon as well as Beirut’s southern suburbs, and more than 1 million people have been displaced.

Britain has reassured Cyprus that the U.K. air base on the island won’t be used for American attacks on Iran.

The U.K. is allowing the U.S. to use bases in England and on the island of Diego Garcia to strike Iran’s missile program.

The British government says Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides on Saturday that RAF Akrotiri “would not be involved in the UK’s continuation of its agreement with the U.S. to use U.K. bases in collective self-defence of the region.”

Akrotiri was hit by an Iranian-made drone early in the conflict, causing damage but no injuries.

Iran also launched missiles at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, failing to hit the base.

Earlier Saturday, the Defense Ministry of the United Arab Emirates said it responded to three ballistic missile and eight drone attacks.

Saudi Arabia meanwhile said it downed 20 drones in a couple of hours Saturday in its eastern region, home to major oil installations. No injuries or damage was reported.

Trump’s quip the war will end “when I feel it in my bones” has drawn alarm, especially as lawmakers are asked to approve billions in new spending.

“When he feels it in his bones? That’s crazy,” said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The administration’s stated goals — of ending Iran’s ability to obtain a nuclear weapon and degrading its ballistic missile supplies, among others — have perplexed lawmakers as shifting and elusive.

″ Regime change? Not likely. Get rid of the enriched uranium? Not without boots on the ground,” Warner said. “If I’m advising the president, I would have said: Before you take on a war of choice, make the case clear to the American people what our goals are.”

The joint British-U.S. base in the Indian Ocean is almost 4,000 miles (2,500 kilometers) away. Iran previously limited the range of its ballistic missile program to 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers), but U.S. officials have said Iran’s system for satellite launches could extend their range.

Iran’s Simorgh space launch vehicle could offer greater range “at the likely cost of terminal accuracy,” said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think-tank.

“Ballistic missiles are space rockets. They launch, they go really high up and they come down really fast,” said Steve Prest, a retired Royal Navy commodore. “If you’ve got a space program, you’ve got a ballistic missile program.”

Prest said the launches were likely a message of defiance, to say “look what we can do,” in response to Trump’s claims that Iran’s military has been obliterated.

Egypt’s president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman stressed Saturday that the Iranian escalation against Gulf states endangers the safety and the stability of the region.

The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported that el-Sissi reiterated his country’s rejection of the Iranian attacks on the Gulf states, adding the the Egyptian president expressed solidarity with the Kingdom against threats.

Also Saturday, Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit welcomed the visits of el-Sissi and his Jordanian counterpart King Abdullah II to multiple Gulf states over the past few days, saying that these visits “reflect full Arab solidarity.”

Trump’s fellow Republicans appear unlikely to directly challenge him, even as the conflict drags on. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said the military operation will be over quickly.

“I do think the original mission is virtually accomplished now,” Johnson, R-La., told the AP and others at the Capitol this week. “We were trying to take out the ballistic missiles, and their means of production, and neuter the navy, and those objectives have been met.”

Johnson acknowledged that Iran’s ability to threaten ships in the Strait of Hormuz is “dragging it out a little bit,” especially as U.S. allies have largely rebuffed the president’s request for help, but said “As soon as we bring some calm to the situation, I think it’s all but done.”

The Republican president’s decision to launch the U.S.-Israel-led war with Iran is testing the resolve of the Congress, which is controlled by his party.

Under the War Powers Act, the president can conduct military operations for 60 days without approval from Congress. So far, Republicans have easily voted down several resolutions from Democrats designed to halt the military campaign.

But the administration will need to show a more comprehensive strategy ahead or risk blowback from Congress, lawmakers said, especially as they are simultaneously being asked to approve billions in new spending.

The Israeli military denied that Israel was responsible for a strike that hit Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. An official Iranian news agency reported on Saturday that the site was damaged in an airstrike but there was no radiation leakage. The Israeli military said it wasn’t aware of Israeli strikes in that region.

The denial came as Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a video statement that next week, “the intensity of the attacks” by Israel and the United States against Iran’s ruling theocracy will “increase significantly.”

A hospital and tourist site in southwestern Iran have been damaged from U.S. or Israeli strikes, killing at least one child, according to Iranian news agencies.

Strikes killed a child at the Ritaj entertainment complex in Ahvaz, according to Iran’s state news agency, and damaged the Andimeshk’s Imam Ali Hospital hospital, according to the semi-official Mehr and Fars news agencies. Both are in the Khuzestan province on the border with Iraq. The hospital said the blast created significant damage and it is no longer accepting patients, but did not give any other information.

The death toll has risen to more than 1,300 people in Iran, more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, 15 in Israel and 13 U.S. military members in the region as the war enters its fourth week.

Trump took the United States to war without a vote of support from Congress, but lawmakers are increasingly questioning when, how and at what cost the war with Iran will come to an end.

Three weeks into the conflict, the toll is increasing: At least 13 U.S. military personnel have died, and more than 230 wounded. A $200 billion Pentagon request for war funds is pending at the White House. Allies are under attack, oil prices are spiking and thousands of U.S. troops are deploying to the Middle East with no endgame in sight.

“The real question is: What ultimately are we trying to accomplish?” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told The Associated Press. “I generally support anything that takes out the mullahs,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there has to be a kind of strategic articulation of the strategy, what our objectives are.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called strikes on the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility “a brazen violation of international law.”

In a statement posted on the ministry’s website Saturday, Zakharova said such “irresponsible actions” posed a “real risk of catastrophic disaster throughout the Middle East” and were “clearly aimed at further undermining peace, stability, and security in the region.”

Authorities in Bahrain say sirens have sounded Saturday, signaling a potential attack.

The head of U.S. Central Command says in his latest video update on the war that U.S. forces “remain on plan to eliminate Iran’s ability to project meaningful power outside its borders.”

Adm. Brad Cooper also detailed steps taken to undermine Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway vital to international commerce such as oil shipments.

He says in a post on X that earlier in the week, multiple 5,000-pound bombs were dropped on an underground facility along Iran’s coastline that was used to store anti-ship cruise missiles, mobile missile launchers and other equipment “that presented a dangerous risk to international shipping.”

Cooper says intelligence support sites and missile radar relays used to monitor ship movements were destroyed.

“Iran’s ability to threaten freedom of navigation in and around the Strait of Hormuz is degraded as a result and we will not stop pursuing these targets,” he says in the video.

Cooper also said that “we have built the most extensive air defense umbrella in the world over the Middle East right now.”

Countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and Australia have also condemned Iran’s attacks on commercial vessels as well as oil and gas facilities in the region.

“The effects of Iran’s actions will be felt by people in all parts of the world, especially the most vulnerable,” they said in a joint statement Saturday.

Thousands of Iranian worshipers on Saturday converged on Tehran’s grand mosque for Eid al-Fitr prayers marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Associated Press footage showed worshippers lining up at Imam Khomeini Mosalla and in its vast courtyard for the prayers as Israel and the United States continued launch massive airstrikes against Iran.

“It’s really a painful feeling,” Masoud Alibenam, 50 said its “really a painful feeling” that the Eid prayers are being offered without Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed in the first days of the war. “The leader (Khamenei) is no longer here, and we are offering the prayers in his absence.”

Worshippers also held funeral services for Gen. Ali Mohammad Naeini, spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guard, who was killed in an Israeli strike Friday. The funeral procession of Amir Hossein Bidi, a pro-government cultural activist also was held after Eid prayers.

Jordan’s military said on Saturday this week’s attacks, which involved at least 14 missiles, left a child injured.

That brought the total number of wounded to 24 since war’s Feb. 28 start.

Over the last three weeks, a total of 240 missiles and drones have been fired at Jordan, the military said.

The Diego Garcia air base is home to about 2,500 mostly American personnel and has supported U.S. military operations from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan and strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Islands, a remote archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean off the tip of India. The islands have been under British control since 1814.

They are at the center of a U.K. spat with President Donald Trump over Britain’s plans to hand sovereignty of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius. Britain would then lease back the Diego Garcia base.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says that will safeguard the future of the base, which is currently vulnerable to legal challenge. The Trump administration initially welcomed the deal, but in January Trump called it “an act of GREAT STUPIDITY.”

Iran currently has a self-imposed limit on its ballistic missile program, limiting their range to 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles).

That puts all of the Mideast and some of Eastern Europe in range, but Diego Garcia would be far beyond it.

However, U.S. officials long have alleged Iran’s space program could allow it to build intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Britain has condemned “Iran’s reckless attacks” after its military fired missiles at the U.K.-U.S. air base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

U.K. officials have not given details of the attempted strike, which was unsuccessful. It’s unclear how close the missiles came to the base, which is about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from Iran.

The Ministry of Defense said Saturday that Iran’s “lashing out across the region and holding hostage the Strait of Hormuz, are a threat to British interests and British allies.”

Britain has not participated in U.S-Israeli attacks on Iran, but has allowed American bombers to use U.K. bases to attack Iran’s missile sites.

On Friday, the British government said U.S. bombers can also use U.K. bases, including Diego Garcia, in operations to prevent Iran attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran targeted the base before that U.K. statement.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said attacks against Iran will “increase significantly” in the coming week.

Katz spoke Saturday, hours after U.S. President Donald Trump said he was considering “winding down” military operations in the Mideast.

“This week, the intensity of the attacks that the IDF and the U.S. military will carry out against the Iranian terrorist regime and against the infrastructures on which it relies will increase significantly,” Katz said in a video statement.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a social media post Saturday that Iran has informed it of the attack on its Natanz nuclear facility.

The IAEA said it was looking into the report, adding that “no increase in off-site radiation levels reported.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a message Saturday congratulating Iranians on the new year festival Nowruz that he wished them to “overcome these severe trials with dignity.” The Kremlin press service also quoted Putin as sayin that “Moscow remains Tehran’s loyal friend and reliable partner.”

The United Arab Emirates' Defense Ministry said Saturday that it has responded to three ballistic missiles and eight drones.