Iran fired missiles and drones at targets across the Gulf including oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and a ship off the coast of the Emirates, while Israeli and the United States struck targets across the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia and other states said they intercepted multiple drone attacks.
Six members of the Iranian women’s soccer team will remain in Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday, while one of the squad members who was previously granted asylum changed her mind and planned to return to Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump said in social media posts there were no reports of Iran planting explosives in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil is shipped. The U.S. said it took out more than a dozen minelaying Iranian vessels Tuesday to help prevent any attempt to close the waterway.
Iran's vow not to allow any oil through the strategic strait has led to market volatility and fears of shortages, especially in Asia, which is dependent on oil shipped from the region.
Israel struck a building in the center of the Lebanese capital Beirut as part of its campaign against Hezbollah. The Lebanese group has been carrying out attacks against Israel in support of Iran.
Here is the latest:
Some restaurant owners in India say they are struggling to secure liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, forcing them to scale back operations.
India has invoked emergency powers requiring refiners to divert more fuel for domestic use, a move hospitality sector groups say has tightened supplies for restaurants. The squeeze is being felt most acutely by restaurants in major cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“I will have to shut down my business. How can I run my restaurant without fuel?” said Amit Bhatia, a restaurant owner.
India relies heavily on oil and gas shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has attacked several ships in the strait and threatened any ships that try to pass through, effectively closing it.
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, said the U.S.-Israeli attacks violate international law.
Meloni, in an address to the Italian Senate on Wednesday, described a broader international crisis “in which threats are becoming increasingly terrifying and unilateral interventions outside the confines of international law are multiplying.”
She said the “the American and Israeli intervention against the Iranian regime” should be understood as part of that broader crisis.
An Associated Press journalist in Doha, Qatar’s capital, saw air defenses intercept incoming fire.
Israeli’s air force carried out three airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs Wednesday.
The strikes on the suburb of Haret Hreik and nearby areas came after the Israeli military warned that it would attack several buildings in the area.
The United Arab Emirates said Wednesday afternoon its air defenses were trying to shoot down incoming Iranian fire.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says overnight Israeli strikes on eastern and southern Lebanon have killed 14 people and wounded more than two dozen people.
The ministry said seven were killed and 11 wounded in a strike on the southern village of Chehabiyeh, while seven were killed and 18 wounded in a separate strike on the village of Tamnine el-Tahta in the eastern Bekaa valley.
The ministry did not give further details but the state news agency said that the strike on Tamnine el-Tahta hit a home where a Syrian family lived. A resident in the area said the area struck was a small concrete block factory.
The European Union’s top official says the Iran war has already cost the 27-nation bloc’s citizens around 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in energy imports and warns Europe must resist the temptation to buy Russian oil and gas again.
“Gas prices have risen by 50% and oil prices have risen by 27%. If you translate that into euros — the 10 days of war have already cost European taxpayers an additional 3 billion euros in fossil fuel imports,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
“That is the price of our dependency,” she told EU lawmakers in Strasbourg, France, noting the price of European renewables and nuclear energy has remained steady.
Von der Leyen rejected calls for the EU to return to buying Russian energy, which the bloc has stopped doing since President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday a Ukrainian is heading to Gulf countries.
The delegation including military specialists and led by Defense Council secretary and chief negotiator Rustem Umerov will help strengthen defenses as tensions rise following Iranian attacks.
In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian specialists could help protect lives and stabilize the situation in the region.
He added it is impossible to predict how long the crisis will last but stressed that protecting lives and restoring stability is urgently needed, including for Ukraine.
A court in Sri Lanka has ordered a hospital to hand over the bodies of 84 Iranian sailors killed in a U.S submarine attack off the island nation’s southern coast.
Galle National Hospital Director Ranga Sabapathige said he received the order from the Galle magistrate to return the bodies to Iranian officials.
The Iranian officials will travel from the capital Colombo to Galle on Wednesday for the transfer, he said.
Bahrain sounded its air raid siren late Wednesday morning.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in central Beirut early Wednesday wounded four people.
The strike came without warning and it was not immediately clear who was the target of the attack on an apartment in Beirut’s Aicha Bakkar neighborhood.
The strike was the second in central Beirut in less than a week.
Lebanon’s minister of social affairs says the war has displaced 780,000 people in the country so far.
Haneen Sayed told reporters after meeting President Joseph Aoun on Wednesday morning that 120,000 displaced people are staying in shelters around Lebanon.
They discussed the challenges of the response and the humanitarian aid arriving to support the displaced, Sayed said.
Sayed added that a European Union plane arrived Tuesday with aid that will be distributed in shelters.
She said additional aid shipments from Jordan, France and other countries are expected.
A joint Iranian military command said Wednesday that banks and financial institutions are now targets in the Middle East.
The Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters issued a statement identifying the targets.
It came after Iranian media reported staff at a bank in Tehran had been killed in Israeli-American airstrikes.
The threat would put at risk particularly Dubai, which is home to many international financial institutions, as well as Saudi Arabia and the island kingdom of Bahrain.
Two Iranian drones struck near Dubai International Airport on Wednesday and wounded four people, authorities said.
The Dubai Media Office, which issues statement on behalf of the city-state’s government, said the attack caused “minor injuries to two Ghanaian nationals and one Bangladeshi national, and moderate injuries to one Indian national.”
Flights have continued, the office said.
Dubai International Airport, home to the long-haul carrier Emirates, is the world’s busiest for international travel. Authorities have been trying build up its flight schedule though the airport has been targeted in the war.
Another ship came under attack Wednesday in the Persian Gulf, the British military said.
A bulk carrier was hit by a projectile off a distance from the United Arab Emirates, the British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.
“There is no report of any environmental impact,” the center said. “The crew are reported safe and well.”
It was the third attack reported Wednesday.
Speculation over the health of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei grew Wednesday after the son of Iran’s president mentioned hearing news about him “being injured.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, is the son of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Mojtaba Khamenei long has been a secretive figure within Iran. His father and wife both were killed in an Israeli airstrike Feb. 28 that started the war.
Khamenei has not been seen since, nor has he given any statement since becoming supreme leader on Monday.
In an overnight post on the app Telegram, Yousef Pezeshkian, the son of President Masoud Pezeshkian, wrote: “I heard news about Mr. Mojtaba being injured. I asked friends who were in contact. They said, thank God, he is healthy and there is no problem.”
He did not elaborate.
The Iranian women’s soccer team is in a hotel in Malaysia awaiting travel arrangements to return home, officials said Wednesday.
Iran’s embassy in Malaysia confirmed the squad members landed in the capital Kuala Lumpur early Wednesday and are expected to depart when flights are available and Iran’s airspace reopens, according to the Bernama news agency.
“They want to return home,” the embassy told Bernama.
The Asian Football Confederation said the team is staying at a Kuala Lumpur hotel in the meantime and will receive support from the confederation until their travel arrangements are confirmed, a spokesperson said.
Six women from the Iranian squad will remain in Australia on humanitarian visas after accepting offers of asylum shortly before their scheduled return home.
Some tankers, believed linked to Iran, are continuing to get through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf.
Some of the ships getting through are so-called “dark” transits, meaning they aren’t turning on their Automatic Identification System tracks, which show where vessels are.
Vessels carrying sanctioned Iranian crude often turn off their AIS trackers.
The security firm Neptune P2P Group said Wednesday that seven ships had passed through the strait since March 8. Of those, five were linked to Iranian-associated shipping, it said.
The commodity-tracking firm Kpler said Iran has restarted crude exports through its Jask oil terminal on the Gulf of Oman.
A tanker loaded roughly 2 million barrels at Jask on March 7, the firm said.
A projectile hit a cargo ship Wednesday in the Strait of Hormuz, setting the vessel ablaze after the United States targeted Iranian minelaying vessels that could target the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center, run by the British military, said the vessel had been hit just north of Oman in the strait.
It said the crew was evacuating the ship.
Iran did not immediately claim the attack though it has been targeting ships in and around the strait, disrupting a waterway that sees a fifth of all oil and natural gas traded pass through it.
The UKMTO earlier reported on another attack targeting a vessel off Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates.
Qatar issued a warning to the public Wednesday morning of a possible Iranian attack.
An Associated Press journalist in Qatar heard explosions as air defenses intercepted incoming fire over Doha, the country’s capital.
Qatar says it won’t serve as a mediator for Iran as it remains under attack from Tehran.
Mohammed bin Abdulaziz al-Khulaifi, Qatar’s minister of state for foreign affairs, made the statement to the Qatari-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera in an interview aired Wednesday.
He noted both Qatar and Oman had been attacked even though they worked to “build bridges between Iran and the West.”
“We will not be able to fulfill that role under attack, and that’s something the Iranians need to understand,” al-Khulaifi said. "The regional countries are not an enemy of Iran, and the Iranians are not understanding that idea.”
Russia said its consulate in the Iranian city of Isfahan was damaged in airstrikes targeting the central Iranian city.
The state-run Tass news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying there were “no casualties or serious injuries” in the strike Sunday, which targeted the nearby governor’s office in the city.
“Windows were shattered in the office building and residential apartments, and several employees were thrown back by the blast wave. Fortunately, there were no casualties or serious injuries,” Zakharova said.
Videos circulating online and broadcast by local news channels from an apparent strike site in the densely populated Aicha Bakkar area of central Beirut show two floors of a multistory building engulfed in flames.
The strike came without warning. There were no immediate reports concerning who was targeted or the number and extent of casualties.
The structure that was hit is several buildings away from Dar al-Fatwa, the country’s highest Sunni Muslim religious authority.
The strike was in an area far from Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the Israeli military had issued evacuation warnings earlier in the renewed conflict with Hezbollah.
Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry said early Wednesday it destroyed five drones heading toward the kingdom’s vast Shaybah oil field in the Empty Quarter desert. It added that it intercepted and destroyed two drones in the Eastern Province.
Kuwait said it downed eight drones over the tiny, oil-rich nation.
Two more members of the Iranian women’s soccer team were granted asylum in Australia before their teammates departed the country, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday, but one of the women changed her mind and planned to return to Iran.
Six women from the Iranian squad will remain in Australia on humanitarian visas after accepting offers of asylum shortly before their scheduled return home, Burke said. The names and photographs of the team members initially granted asylum have been widely published, including by Burke, and it was not immediately clear which of the women reversed her decision.
The rest of the team’s departure from Sydney, Australia, happened late Tuesday during fraught and outraged protests at the delegation’s hotel and the airport. Iranian Australians sought to prevent the women from leaving the country, citing fears for their safety in Iran.
A boy runs inside cement pipe turned into a bomb shelter as air raid sirens warn of incoming Iranian missile strike in Michmoret, Israel, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
A man passes in front of a destroyed building that housed a branch of Al-Qard Al-Hassan, a non-bank financial institution run by Hezbollah, which was hit by an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Protesters wave Iranian flags and hold a portrait of the late Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei to support his selection as the new Iran's Supreme Leader in Baghdad, Monday, March 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
A displaced woman holds a child as another stands beside her between rows of tents at the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, which has been turned into a shelter for people displaced by Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon and Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Smoke rise from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, Lebanon, Tuesday, March 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
