#iran

International scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs intensified in 2018 after the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal—known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—and again in late 2024, following direct military strikes between Iran and Israel, as well as the reelection of Donald Trump. In Trump’s second term, Washington resumed talks with Tehran for the first time since pulling out of the JCPOA. However, in June 2025, after the UN nuclear watchdog declared Iran in violation of its nuclear nonproliferation agreements, the United States bombed Iran’s major nuclear facilities. Despite ongoing negotiations in early 2026, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale offensive against Iran in February with a stated aim of destroying its nuclear and missile capabilities. Although there has reportedly been some damage to one Iranian nuclear site, there is no confirmed evidence of major damage to the country’s overall nuclear facilities. Joint U.S.-Israeli strikes also killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has retaliated by targeting Israel and U.S. military sites across the region, as well as several other Gulf countries, adding to concerns about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

Does Iran have a nuclear weapon? Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon, but it has a long history of engaging in secret nuclear weapons research in violation of its international commitments. Western analysts say the country has the knowledge and infrastructure to produce a nuclear weapon in fairly short order should its leaders decide to do so. The United States, Israel, and other Middle Eastern partners regard Iran as a primary threat to their interests in the region, and view its potential acquisition of nuclear weapons as a game-changing scenario to be steadfastly prevented—by force if necessary.

Revelations in the early 2000s about the country’s secret nuclear sites and research raised alarms in world capitals about Iran’s clandestine pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Iran’s nuclear program has since been the subject of intense international debate and diplomacy, which culminated in the 2015 JCPOA. The United States unilaterally withdrew from that agreement in 2018. Since then, international monitors say that Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear activities, again heightening concerns about its “breaking out” to develop a nuclear weapon.

At least 1,245 civilians have been killed, including 194 children, by the US-Israeli war on Iran, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran group.

In Lebanon, at least 486 people have been killed by Israeli bombing, while 11 have been killed in Israel. Seven US troops have been confirmed dead and 140 injured, eight severely.

The Lebanese Red Cross condemned an Israeli strike on one of its ambulances in the Tyre district of south Lebanon on Monday night, which injured two emergency workers.

U.S. military investigators think American forces likely were responsible for a strike that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, a U.S. official said. The investigation hasn’t reached a final conclusion, the official said.

President Donald Trump’s military strikes in Iran have likely cost American taxpayers over $1 billion using cursory estimates—with hundreds of millions lost on lost aircraft over the weekend—with a price tag that could approach $100 billion, depending on how long it can stretch on.

As Congress returns to session this week amid a new conflict in the Middle East, a crucial question hangs over Washington: Who gets to decide when America's military can be sent to war?

The Constitution says that only Congress has that power, with limited exceptions. In the four days after hostilities began, the Trump administration has struggled to articulate whether any of those exceptions apply to this situation. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has called this a "war," undermining the argument that it's a different kind of military action that doesn't require congressional authorization. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others have said the strikes against Iran were in response to an imminent threat against American troops in the region—only to later back down from that claim. President Donald Trump has made overlapping and contradictory claims about the conflict's aims, and on Tuesday seemed to claim responsibility for initiating Saturday's attack.

President Donald Trump stood in front of regional leaders during a visit to the Middle East in May and declared a new era of US foreign policy in the region, one that is not guided by trying to reshape it or change its governing systems.

“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” the US president said in rebuke of his hawkish predecessors.

Less than a year later, Trump ordered an all-out assault on Iran with the stated goal of bringing “freedom” to the country, borrowing language from the playbook of interventionist neoconservatives, like former President George W Bush, whom he spent his political career criticising.

Analysts say the war with Iran does not fit with Trump’s stated political ideology, policy goals or campaign promises.

Instead, several Iran experts told Al Jazeera that Trump is waging a war, together with Israel, that only benefits Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“This is, once again, a war of choice launched by the US with [a] push from Israel,” said Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC.

“This is another Israeli war that the US is launching. Israel has pushed the US to attack Iran for two decades, and they finally got it.”

Netanyahu, who promoted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has been warning for more than two decades that Iran is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear bomb, and even Trump administration officials have acknowledged that Washington has no evidence that Tehran is weaponising its uranium enrichment programme.

After the US bombed Iran’s main enrichment facilities in the 12-day war in June last year – an attack that Trump says “obliterated” the country’s nuclear programme – Netanyahu pivoted to a new supposed Iranian threat: Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

“Iran can blackmail any American city,” Netanyahu told pro-Israel podcaster Ben Shapiro in October.

“People don’t believe it. Iran is developing intercontinental missiles with a range of 8,000km [5,000 miles], add another 3,000 [1,800 miles], and they can get to the East Coast of the US.”

Trump repeated that claim, which Tehran has vehemently denied and has not been backed by any public evidence or testing, in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said of the Iranians.

But the US president’s own National Security Strategy last year called for de-prioritising the Middle East in Washington’s foreign policy and focusing on the Western Hemisphere.

Only 21 percent of respondents in a recent University of Maryland survey said they favoured a war with Iran.

The June 2025 war, initiated by Israel without provocation, also came in the middle of US-Iran talks.

“Netanyahu’s agenda has always been to prevent a diplomatic solution, and he feared Trump was actually serious about getting a deal, so the start of this war in the middle of negotiations is a success for him, just like it was last June,” Jamal Abdi, the president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Al Jazeera.

Earlier this month, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that “if it were not for Iran, there wouldn’t be Hezbollah; we wouldn’t have the problem on the border with Lebanon”.

Carlson said, “What problem on the border with Lebanon? I’m an American. I’m not having any problems on the border with Lebanon right now. I live in Maine.”