Category World News

Iran reports hospitals, civilians affected during war with US, Israel

Iranian authorities say a number of hospitals have been temporarily put out of service and thousands of civilians affected by the ongoing war with the United States and Israel, as Tehran also escalates attacks across the region.

Speaking to state television on Wednesday at noon in Tehran, a spokesman of the Iranian Red Crescent Society said nearly 20,000 civilian buildings, including at least 16,000 residential units, have been affected after more than 11 days of war. Mojtaba Khaledi said 77 healthcare facilities have been affected, but did not say how many were hospitals or whether any were directly struck.

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“Some of them are out of order, so we can’t admit patients in them, and in some, patients were in the surgery room or undergoing other medical operations” while hit by attacks, he said, adding that 16 Red Crescent centres were affected, with personnel moved to other places to continue rescue operations.

Khaledi was speaking in front of what the Red Crescent described as “an administrative building related to a bank” that was attacked last night in the capital. He pointed out that a number of residential buildings in the immediate area had their windows broken or sustained additional damage.

He said 65 schools and educational facilities have also been affected across the country since the start of the war, some seriously, but did not elaborate.

The most horrific incident so far in the war is the Minab elementary school in southern Iran, where 167 people, mostly students, were killed on the first day of the conflict.

Iranian armed forces, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), signalled on Wednesday that they now consider banks and economic interests of the US and Israel across the region, as well as technology companies offering military applications, to be legitimate targets.

As both sides emphasise they are ready for weeks, if not months, of war, the Iranian government has sought to assure that it has strong stockpiles of essential goods, including foodstuffs and medicine, as well as contingency plans in motion to import necessities.

Iranian officials have also repeatedly stressed the civilian toll of the conflict, with Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian telling Al Jazeera on Tuesday that more than 12,000 people have been wounded and most of the 1,250 confirmed killed so far have been civilians, including 200 children and 200 women.

The Israeli army said on Monday that it has killed more than 1,900 military personnel and commanders and wounded thousands during its ongoing air attacks. It has not commented on reports of civilian casualties.

The Health Ministry’s Jafarian said 11 healthcare workers were killed and 55 wounded, including physicians, nurses and emergency workers. He said 29 clinical facilities were damaged, 10 are now inactive, and patients are to be evacuated from seven other facilities across the country.

The head of the Bushehr University of Medical Sciences, Allahkaram Akhlaghi, announced on Tuesday that the Persian Gulf Martyrs Hospital in the southwestern city – where a key IRGC naval base is located – is out of service for now after shockwaves from explosions caused by US attacks “damaged parts of the facility”.

Patients were moved to a nearby hospital, he added. According to a Health Ministry update on Tuesday afternoon, at least 18 ambulances and 21 medical emergency centres have been damaged across the country.

Iran welcome to compete in FIFA World Cup, Trump tells Infantino

FIFA President Gianni Infantino ‌says Iran’s participation in the World Cup would be welcomed by United States President Donald Trump, with whom he met and discussed the upcoming tournament amid the ongoing war in the Middle East.

Infantino said on Wednesday that Trump “reiterated that the Iranian team is welcome to compete in the tournament”, which is being cohosted by the US, Mexico and Canada in June and July.

During a meeting to discuss preparations for the competition, “we also spoke about the current situation in Iran,” Infantino, the head of world football’s governing body, wrote on Instagram.

“During the discussions, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States,” he wrote.

All of Iran’s group games are scheduled to take place in the US.

“We all need an event like the FIFA World Cup to ⁠bring people together now more than ever, and I ⁠sincerely thank the President of the United States for his support, as it shows once again that Football Unites the World,” Infantino said.

The comments marked the first time that Infantino, who in December created a FIFA peace prize and awarded it to Trump, has acknowledged the war in the Middle East.

The US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The attacks have killed 1,255 people and wounded more than 12,000 in Iran in the first 12 days of the war.

Tehran has responded by launching waves of missiles and drones at Israel, several military bases in the Middle East where US forces operate and at infrastructure in the region.

Iran was ⁠the only nation missing from a FIFA planning summit for World Cup participants held last week in Atlanta, Georgia, deepening questions over whether the country’s football team ⁠would compete on US soil this summer amid an escalating regional war.

Trump told the online news magazine Politico that he is not concerned about Iran’s participation because it is a “very badly defeated country”.

If the US refuses to host the Iran team, it could risk being removed as a World Cup host by FIFA.

That is what happened to Indonesia three years ago when the country refused to welcome Israel for the men’s Under-20 World Cup eight months after the Israeli team qualified. FIFA dropped Indonesia just weeks before the scheduled first game and moved that tournament to Argentina.

The head of the Iranian Football Federation cast doubt on his team’s participation in the sporting extravaganza after the defection this week of several Iranian female footballers during the Asian Cup in Australia.

“If the World Cup is like this, who in their right mind would send their national team to a place like this?” Mehdi Taj asked on Iranian state television.

Fans from Iran were already banned from entering the US in the first iteration of a travel ban announced by the Trump administration in December.

Iran are scheduled to play two of their World Cup group games in Los Angeles and one in Seattle.

If both the US and ‌Iran ‌finish second in their respective groups, the two countries could meet in a July 3 elimination match in Dallas.

Should Iran withdraw from the sport’s quadrennial showpiece, it would be the first time a country did that since France and India pulled out of the 1950 finals in Brazil.

This week, FIFA’s World Cup chief operating officer said the tournament is “too big” to be postponed because of the global turmoil caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Heimo Schirgi said FIFA continues to closely monitor the Iran war.

India’s Supreme Court allows first-ever passive euthanasia death

India’s Supreme Court has allowed the country’s first case of passive euthanasia – withdrawal of artificial life support – for a 32-year-old man who has been in a vegetative state for more than 12 years.

A bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and K V Viswanathan on Wednesday permitted the withdrawal of life support to Harish Rana, a resident of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, who suffered severe head injuries after falling from a building in 2013.

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“The patient’s next of kin and the medical boards have reached the opinion that CAN [clinically administered nutrition] administration should be discontinued,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted the Supreme Court bench as saying.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Rana’s father, seeking permission to withdraw life-sustaining treatment for his son. The family said Rana was being kept artificially alive.

The court in its ruling said Rana exhibited “no meaningful interaction” and had been dependent on others for “all activities of self-care”.

“His condition has shown no improvement,” the court was quoted as saying by legal news website, Bar and Bench.

India recognised passive euthanasia in 2018, permitting the removal of life support under strict conditions to allow death to occur naturally. But this marks the first time that a court has approved its use for an individual.

Doctors had already concluded that Rana has virtually no chance of recovery.

But because he does not have a living will – a legally binding document outlining preferences for medical care in the event of a terminal condition – he has not been able to give his consent for passive euthanasia.

His parents, therefore, had petitioned the court to allow him to be taken off life support.

Active euthanasia, in which substances are directly administered to cause death, remains illegal in India.

But the debate in India over allowing someone to die dates to the 2011 case of Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse who spent 42 years in a vegetative state following a brutal sexual assault.

The Supreme Court rejected a plea by Shanbaug’s family to end her life, and she died from pneumonia in 2015 aged 66.

But the court did issue a landmark opinion, recognising passive euthanasia under strict safeguards and with judicial approval.

The move relied on earlier judgements that recognised the constitutional right to die with dignity, and served as a prelude to the expanded 2018 ruling on passive euthanasia.

Iran’s strategic patience tactic failed, what comes next could be far worse

For years, Iran’s leaders believed time was on their side.

After the United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Tehran effectively adopted what later came to be described as a “strategic patience” approach. Rather than immediately counter-escalating, Iran chose to endure economic pressure while waiting to see whether diplomacy could be revived.

The logic behind the strategy was simple: eventually, Washington would recognise that confrontation with Iran was against its own interests.

Today, that assumption lies shattered.

The collapse of diplomacy and the outbreak of war have forced Iran’s leadership to confront a painful reality: their belief that the US would ultimately act rationally may have been a profound miscalculation.

If Iran survives the current conflict, the lessons Iranian leaders draw from this moment may motivate them to pursue a nuclear deterrent.

The strategy of waiting

After the first Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA and launched its “maximum pressure” campaign in 2018, Tehran initially avoided major counter-escalation. For nearly a year, it largely remained within the deal’s limits, hoping the other signatories, particularly Europeans, could preserve the agreement and deliver on the promised economic benefits despite US sanctions.

When that failed, Tehran began gradually increasing its nuclear activities by expanding enrichment and reducing compliance step by step while still avoiding a decisive break.

The pace accelerated after Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament passed a law mandating a significant increase in nuclear activities, in the wake of the assassination of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The shift was reinforced further by the 2021 election of conservative President Ebrahim Raisi.

The ultimate goal was to rebuild negotiating leverage, as Tehran believed that broader geopolitical and regional trends were gradually shifting in its favour. From its perspective, China’s rise, Russia’s growing assertiveness, and widening fractures within the Western alliance suggested that Washington’s ability to isolate Iran indefinitely might weaken over time.

At the same time, Iran pursued a strategy of reducing tensions with its neighbours, seeking improved relations with Gulf states that had previously supported the US “maximum pressure” campaign. By the early 2020s, many Gulf Cooperation Council countries had begun prioritising engagement and de-escalation with Iran, culminating in moves such as the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by China.

Against this backdrop, even as tensions rose, Tehran continued to pursue diplomacy. Years of negotiations with the Biden administration aimed at restoring the JCPOA ultimately produced no agreement. Subsequent diplomatic efforts under Trump’s second presidency also collapsed.

Underlying this approach was a fundamental assumption: that the US ultimately preferred stability to war. Iranian officials believed Washington would eventually conclude that diplomacy, rather than endless pressure or a major war, was the most realistic and least costly path forward.

The joint US-Israeli assault on Iran has now exposed how deeply flawed that assumption was.

The return of deterrence

While Tehran based its strategy on mistaken beliefs about the rationality of US foreign policy, Washington, too, is misreading the situation.

For years, advocates of the maximum pressure campaign argued that sustained economic and military pressure would eventually fracture Iran internally. Some predicted that war would trigger widespread unrest and even the collapse of the regime.

So far, none of those predictions has materialised.

Despite the enormous strain on Iranian society, there have been no signs of regime disintegration. Instead, Iran’s political base — and in many cases broader segments of society — has rallied in the face of external attack.

Furthermore, Iran spent years reinforcing its deterrence capabilities. This involved expanding and diversifying its ballistic missile, cruise missile and drone programmes and developing multiple delivery systems designed to penetrate sophisticated air defences. Iranian planners also drew lessons from the direct exchanges with Israel in 2024 and the June 2025 war, improving targeting accuracy and coordination across different weapons systems.

The focus shifted towards preparing for a prolonged war of attrition: firing fewer but more precise strikes over time while attempting to degrade enemy radar and air defence systems.

We now see the results of this work. Iran has been able to inflict significant damage on its adversaries. Retaliatory attacks have killed seven Americans and 11 Israelis, placing a growing strain on US and Israeli missile defence systems, as interceptors are steadily depleted.

Iranian missile and drone strikes have hit targets across the region, including high-value military infrastructure such as radar installations. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent global energy markets into turmoil.

Apart from the immense cost of war, the US decision to launch the attack on Iran may have another unintended consequence: a radical shift in Iranian strategy.

For decades, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei maintained a longstanding religious prohibition on nuclear weapons. His assassination on the first day of the war may now motivate the new civilian and military leadership of the country to rethink its nuclear strategy.

There may now be fewer ideological reservations about pursuing nuclear weapons. The logic is simple: if diplomacy cannot deliver sanctions relief or permanently remove the threat of war, nuclear deterrence may appear to be the only viable alternative.

Iran’s actions in this conflict suggest that many leaders now see patience and diplomacy as strategic mistakes. These include the unprecedented scale of Iranian missile and drone attacks across the region, the targeting of US partners and critical infrastructure, and political decisions at home that signal a harder line, most notably the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader.

The choice of Khamenei’s son breaks a longstanding taboo in a system founded on the rejection of hereditary rule and reflects a leadership increasingly prepared to abandon previous restraints.

If a more zero-sum logic of deterrence takes hold across the region, replacing dialogue as the organising principle of security, the Middle East may enter a far more dangerous era in which nuclear weapons are viewed as the ultimate form of deterrence and nuclear proliferation can no longer be stopped.

Russia kills two in Ukraine’s Kharkiv; war grinds on, focus on Middle East

Russian drone strikes on the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv have killed two people and wounded several others, local officials said.

“A civilian enterprise caught fire as a result of the enemy strike,” Kharkiv regional governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said on Wednesday, adding that three women and four men had been hospitalised.

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Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov confirmed Syniehubov’s remarks, posting on the Telegram messaging app that preliminary information showed two people were killed.

Governor Syniehubov said the wounded were in serious condition and receiving necessary medical assistance.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, lies about 30km (18 miles) from the Russian border.

It was encircled at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion four years ago but withstood early advances by Moscow’s forces, who were later pushed back in 2022. The city has since been a frequent target of Russian air and drone attacks.

The United States is pushing Kyiv and Moscow to agree to an elusive peace deal, with the war now in its fifth year, but a third round of three-party talks has been derailed by the sprawling war in the Middle East, launched by the US and Israel against Iran.