The U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran in an attack early Saturday morning on the country’s capital, according to the Associated Press, as talks over Iran’s nuclear program failed to produce the result President Donald Trump desired.
Targets of the strikes were not immediately clear.
The AP reported that a cloud of smoke was rising from Tehran’s downtown area. The apparent strike happened near the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to the AP report.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Israel had launched a “preemptive” strike against Iran early Saturday. He described the attack as being done “to remove threats,” according to a statement.
The Israeli government declared a state of alert across the country because of the expectation of Iranian retaliation. “This is a proactive alert to prepare the public for the possibility of missiles being launched toward the State of Israel,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a post on X.
Trump has threatened to take action for months, and amassed the largest military buildup in the region since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He initially argued the U.S. would intervene to assist anti-government protesters, thousands of whom were killed in January. But as protests waned and nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran renewed in February, Trump began threatening to use force if Tehran didn’t agree to curb its nuclear program.
The strikes mark the latest military intervention in Trump’s increasingly muscular foreign policy, and come after U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. They also underscore the president’s willingness to take major military gambles abroad, even at the risk of escalating feuds with foes and destabilizing alliances.
But the Trump administration has said little publicly about what it would do to avoid civil unrest if the strikes manage to destabilize a regime that has prevailed for nearly half a century.
