War returns to Iran with Israel, US strikes

A Lebanese soldier has been killed, while an officer and another soldier have been wounded after a suspicious object exploded in an army vehicle in the southern Lebanese town of Mansouri, Reuters reports citing the Lebanese army.

The army says it is continuing to investigate the incident and has not provided further details.

Iran’s Head of Public Relations and Information for the health ministry has announced that since July 6, US attacks on the country have killed at least 50 people and injured more than 500 others, Al Jazeera reports.

In a post on X, Hossein Kermanpour says among those killed were five women, two children and teenagers under 18, adding that 32 women were injured, as well as 18 children and teenagers.

“So far, 28 surgeries have been performed, 460 people have been discharged, and 37 people remain hospitalised,” Kermanpour states.

Iranian state broadcaster IRIB reports that emergency water supply operations are under way in 20 villages affected by an overnight attack on a water desalination facility in Jask.

“Drinking water is expected to be fully restored within one week,” the report adds.

Kuwait accused Iran of targeting civilian sites and vital infrastructure in the country, after reporting attacks on an oil facility and a power and water plant, according to AFP.

“The repeated targeting of these vital facilities reveals a systematic hostile approach targeting civilian sites and vital infrastructure that endangers the lives and safety of civilians,” the foreign ministry said.

The US embassy in Beirut has asked all Americans not to travel to Lebanon and to reconsider travel to or through the Middle East, according to Al Jazeera.

“Due to high tensions in the Middle East, the security environment remains complex with the potential for unforeseen escalation,” the embassy said in a statement.

The US embassy in Jerusalem also released a similar statement, saying Americans “should not travel to Gaza, Northern Israel, and the Egyptian border except for the Taba crossing”.

Jordan says it has intercepted and shot down four drones in its airspace over the past 24 hours, state media reports, citing a military source.

The source in the Jordanian Armed Forces said no casualties or material damage were reported.

They affirmed the readiness of the armed forces to confront any threat that may target the security of the Kingdom and the safety of its citizens, whether it be drones or missiles, and to take the necessary operational measures to intercept and thwart it.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation says “one of the vital sites in the oil sector was subjected to repeated brutal Iranian attacks, resulting in a number of injuries and significant material losses,” according to Al Jazeera.

“The injured were provided with medical assistance and the site was evacuated, while the response to the attack is being handled in coordination with the relevant state authorities,” the statement noted, according to the country’s Kuna news agency.

Kuwait’s Fire Force has said that a number of its firefighters and a worker were injured while responding to the fire at two places following the Iranian attacks this morning, Al Jazeera reports.

“The first incident resulted, during the firefighting operation, in a number of injuries among the firefighters and one of the workers, where the site was evacuated and they were transported to provide them with the necessary medical assistance,” it said in a statement.

We reported earlier that Kuwait has announced that two of its power and water desalination plants have been hit in Iranian attacks.

The Israeli army has carried out a drone attack on Nabatieh al-Fawqa, a hilltop village in southern Lebanon, the National News Agency reports.

Recent US attacks on Hormozgan province in southern Iran have killed “about seven to eight people”, all of whom were civilians, Ahmad Moradi, a representative for the province, told Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

The report added that the attacks took place in the past two nights, with one US attack targeting one of the bridges in the province, which hit two family cars, killing six people.

The Tappeh Allah Akbar neighbourhood in Bandar Abbas was also targeted, killing a woman and leaving a one-year-old with an amputation. A driver who was supplying fuel to stations was killed in a fire.

The Iranian Education Ministry has announced the cancellation of final exams for 11th and 12th-grade students on Sunday and Monday across four southern provinces, according to Al Jazeera.

The suspension applies exclusively to Hormozgan, Bushehr, Khuzestan, and Sistan and Baluchestan due to “ongoing unstable conditions in the southern region of the country”, Tasnim reported.

An explosion has been heard in the Marjayoun plain, southern Lebanon, which was later determined to be caused by an interceptor missile, the country’s National News Agency (NNA) reports.

It added that the sound coincided with Israeli media reports that air defence systems had been activated in the city of Kiryat Shmona, near the shared border, but that the circumstances of the incident were still under investigation.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has left Beirut for Washington, where he is expected to meet Donald Trump, the Lebanese presidency said, after talks between Lebanon and Israel wrapped up in Italy, according to AFP.

Aoun will hold discussions “with several American officials on the situation in Lebanon and ways to strengthen the ceasefire”, particularly in Lebanon’s south, as well as on “the withdrawal of Israel from the Lebanese regions it occupies”, the presidency says.

Air raid warning sirens have been activated in Bahrain for the fifth time in the last few hours, AlJazeera reports.

The country’s interior ministry tells people to “remain calm and head to the nearest safe place”.

The United Nations looks set to list a Biblical site, Lebanese castles, an antelope migration path and the world’s deepest lake as world treasures under threat, including from war or climate change, AFP reports.

The 196 member states of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) are to cast votes from Friday next week on new additions to its World Heritage and World Heritage in Danger lists when they meet in Busan, South Korea.

Three sites, so far unlisted, are expected to be fast-tracked and voted straight onto the list of endangered places.

Also to be given priority are five castles in south Lebanon, an area under fire from Israel, one of which — the Crusader fortress of Qalaat al-Chakif or Beaufort Castle — Israeli troops captured in May.

A site being qualified as heritage in danger was not a reprimand but a measure meant to help states “find funding, partners and attention” to better preserve it, the director of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre, Lazare Eloundou Assomo, said.

Read more here.

Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the UN, has condemned the US attacks against Iran’s civilian infrastructure in a letter to Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, Al Jazeera reports.

Iravani wrote in the letter that the US attacks “targeted and caused extensive damage to ports, transportation networks, communications facilities, logistics hubs, radar installations, coastal defense systems and other infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population, and to the functioning of the national economy”.

He further notes in his letter that the US bears full international responsibility for all deaths, injuries, damage to vital infrastructure and environmental harm caused by the attacks.

“The continued commission of these unlawful armed attacks poses a grave threat to international peace and security, freedom of navigation, regional stability, and the security of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” Iravani adds.

Bahrain’s army says its air defences repelled a wave of Iranian attacks, as an AFP journalist in Manama reported hearing blasts after sirens sounded.

“Air defence systems thwarted” the attacks, the army says in a statement, adding that they “intercepted and destroyed a number of treacherous Iranian aerial assaults”.

In the labyrinthine alleyways of Cairo’s Garbage City, recycling specialist Peter Romany finds himself fielding calls from factories scrambling for plastic to plug supply shortfalls caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

The 25-year-old is among the hundreds of recyclers and manufacturers across Egypt benefiting from a war-driven surge in demand ever since the United States and Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz — a major shipping lane for the raw materials from which plastic is made.

At the heart of the boom is the sprawling eastern Cairo settlement of Manshiyet Nasser, where generations of garbage collectors have built one of the world’s most sophisticated informal recycling systems.

Read more here.

A fire broke out at a power generation and water desalination plant in Kuwait after an Iranian attack, Reuters reports, citing the country’s Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy Ministry.

It adds that several power generation units were shut down.

It says efforts were under way to contain the fire and carry out repairs.

The US attack that hit water desalination pumps in the coastal Bunji village, in Iran’s Jask county, has “completely disrupted the supply of drinking water to 20 villages with a population of approximately 10,000 people”,  Hamzeh Pour, the CEO of the Hormozgan Water and Wastewater Company, was quoted as saying by Tasnim.

Pour referred to the US strikes as “a series of crimes and terrorist attacks”, wherein a pumping station for extracting water from the sea and a power transformer at the Bunji desalination plant were “completely destroyed”.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reports that Israeli warplanes have carried out air strikes in two waves at dawn, targeting the Masha’ al-Mansouri area in the country’s Lebanon.