JERUSALEM –
Iran and Israel traded strikes on Tuesday as a three‑week war showed no sign of abating, even as U.S. President Donald Trump heralded “very good talks” he said could halt the fighting. Israel’s military said it carried out a “large wave” of airstrikes across multiple areas of Iran after what Israeli officials described as a “direct hit” on an upscale building in Tel Aviv earlier in the day.
AFP images from Israel’s commercial hub showed a three‑storey façade sheared away and streets carpeted in rubble. First responders reported at least four people lightly injured at four different locations in the city. Several Israeli media outlets, citing police assessments, said the Tel Aviv damage appeared consistent with a cluster munition missile bearing three to four warheads, each of roughly 100 kilograms of explosives.
Iranian outlets, meanwhile, reported that U.S.-Israeli aircraft struck two gas facilities and a pipeline hours after Trump publicly stepped back from an earlier threat to attack Iran’s energy sites. The president said his administration was speaking with an unidentified “top person” and warned that if talks fail in the next five days, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”
Tehran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has been reported in Iranian media as involved in contacts, flatly rejected the premise. He said there were “no negotiations” underway and accused Trump of seeking “to manipulate the financial and oil markets.”
Energy shock risks and a widening regional battlefield
Oil prices, which briefly eased on Trump’s remarks, rebounded on Tuesday with Brent crude again topping $100 a barrel. The volatility underscores the war’s proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for about one‑fifth of the world’s crude, and to Gulf energy infrastructure. The International Energy Agency’s chief, Fatih Birol, has warned that a protracted conflict could trigger a supply shock worse than the combined impact of the 1970s oil crises and Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine.
The fighting now spans multiple fronts. Israel pounded Hezbollah‑controlled districts of Beirut overnight and struck Bshamoun, south of the capital, killing two people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. AFP photographs from Beirut showed smoke rising from gutted buildings as rescue teams navigated buckled rebar and shattered concrete. Israel also struck several service stations it links to Hezbollah, which it has vowed to dismantle.
Israel’s attacks in Lebanon have killed more than 1,000 people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, and displaced more than a million. Iran has reported at least 3,230 dead, including 1,406 civilians, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency; AFP has said it cannot access strike sites or independently verify tolls inside Iran. In Iraq, the autonomous Kurdistan region accused Iran of killing six of its fighters in the first deadly attack on regional security forces since hostilities began. Qatar said the war has caused the “breakdown of the security system in the Gulf region.”
The escalating firepower has coincided with a sharper focus in Western capitals on how to shield their own energy security and maritime posture, with officials in Washington and European capitals weighing potential emergency stock releases and further sanctions calibrations even as diplomacy remains halting.
Diplomacy in fits and starts
Signals on possible talks multiplied but remained contradictory. U.S. outlet Axios reported that Trump confidants Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner may meet an Iranian delegation in Pakistan as soon as this week, potentially joined by Vice President JD Vance. Asked about the reports, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said “speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.”
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Monday he spoke with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and pledged Islamabad’s help. “Pakistan is one of the few countries with warm ties with both Tehran and Washington,” said Michael Kugelman of the Atlantic Council, noting the country’s outreach. “It’s been engaging heavily at the highest levels with both capitals over the last year, going back to the brief Iran conflict last summer,” he said. Traditional mediator Qatar said Tuesday it “supports all diplomatic efforts” to end the war.
Even so, officials and analysts cautioned that the president’s messaging, paired with intensified military operations, created substantial room for miscalculation. “Trump has been a master of sudden pivots and switches. So it’s sometimes hard to know if there is a strategy or if it’s just always improvisation,” said Garret Martin, a professor of international relations at American University in Washington.
Diplomats say any structured negotiations would almost certainly have to grapple not only with cease-fire arrangements, but with nuclear issues, regional missile activity and guarantees around shipping lanes-areas governed in part by existing U.S. sanctions law and past frameworks such as the 2015 nuclear deal, which Washington left in 2018 and which Tehran has since largely hollowed out.
Weapons, law and urban vulnerability
The reported use of a cluster‑type missile against a dense urban area in Tel Aviv-and the dozens of strikes in Beirut’s southern suburbs-highlight the heightened risks to civilians. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, transfer and stockpiling of such weapons, has been ratified by more than 110 countries, though Israel, Iran and the United States are not parties. Under international humanitarian law, all sides remain bound by the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution when conducting attacks, particularly in populated areas and near vital infrastructure such as fuel depots and power lines.
Those obligations stem from the core rules of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, which form the backbone of modern laws of war and require militaries to distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians, and between military objectives and civilian objects.
Urban warfare in Lebanon and Israel follows a long pattern of cross‑border hostilities dating to the 2006 Israel‑Hezbollah war and subsequent years of sporadic rocket exchanges and airstrikes. Iran and Israel, for their part, have waged a covert and increasingly overt contest across the region-on land, at sea and in cyberspace-complicating efforts by outside parties to localize escalations or erect off‑ramps.
Global markets, chokepoints and the limits of coercion
Beyond immediate humanitarian costs, the war has jolted global energy supply chains, insurance premia for tankers transiting the Gulf, and confidence in critical nodes such as liquefied natural gas terminals. Since hostilities erupted, Tehran has retaliated by throttling traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and by striking Gulf energy sites and U.S. diplomatic facilities as well as targets in Israel, contributing to market stress. The IEA-created in 1974 to coordinate emergency stock releases among advanced economies-has mechanisms to mitigate short‑term shocks, but a prolonged impairment of Hormuz would strain even robust strategic reserves.
Financial markets whipsawed on Tuesday, with equities rallying on the president’s optimism before oil prices ticked higher again. The mixed signals reflect the tension between battlefield realities and intermittent hints of a diplomatic track-compounded by the risk that strikes on energy infrastructure, or on maritime shipping, could trigger abrupt supply disruptions.
For policymakers, the episode is reinforcing debates over strategic petroleum reserves, diversification away from single chokepoints and the pace of the energy transition, even as immediate decisions are being driven by war‑room assessments rather than long‑term planning.
Lives upended from Beirut to Tel Aviv
The human toll deepened as residential neighborhoods absorbed the blasts. In Bshamoun, a resident described returning to a home that no longer exists.
“There’s nothing left. It’s all burned or destroyed… No walls, the windows are gone, the facade is gone, all my hard work has been lost,”
said Abbas Qassem, 55, weeping beside the wreckage of his flat.
In Tel Aviv, shattered glass and mangled balconies testified to the power of the munition that tore into an affluent district in broad daylight. Emergency crews sealed off streets and combed courtyards for shrapnel. In Beirut’s southern suburbs, plumes of smoke rose above apartment blocks as residents ferried elderly relatives to clinics crowded with the wounded.
Aid groups say the strain on hospitals and basic services is growing acute, particularly in Lebanon, where years of economic crisis had already hollowed out public systems before the latest bombardment.
Maritime arteries and regional security
The Strait of Hormuz remains the fulcrum of the global oil and gas trade, and even partial restrictions reverberate worldwide. Tanker operators weigh rerouting and higher insurance costs against contractual obligations, while import‑dependent economies from South Asia to Europe brace for inflationary pressure. Qatar’s description of a “breakdown of the security system in the Gulf region” captures a wider anxiety: that regional deterrence arrangements and ad hoc de‑confliction channels are eroding amid direct exchanges between state adversaries.
The legal status of the strait-as an international waterway where coastal states and outside navies both assert rights of passage and protection-is again under scrutiny in Western and Asian capitals that depend on uninterrupted flows.
Against that backdrop, third‑party mediation has grown more urgent. Pakistan’s outreach reflects both geography-it shares a border with Iran-and longstanding security ties with Washington. Qatar, which hosted critical talks in other Middle East crises, reiterated it “supports all diplomatic efforts,” and has maintained open channels across the conflict’s fault lines.
As of Tuesday evening, Israel said it had conducted a “large wave” of strikes across Iran, Tehran’s parliamentary speaker said there were “no negotiations,” Brent crude was trading above $100 a barrel, and the White House had not formally announced any meeting.