Into Seventh Day as Israel Strikes Beirut and Iran Targets Bahrain
The ongoing war in the Middle East has entered its seventh day, marked by intensified military actions that have drawn in additional countries and expanded beyond the initial battlegrounds.
The conflict began last Saturday when joint United States and Israeli forces launched strikes on Iran, resulting in the death of the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was 86 years old. In response, Iran launched a series of missile attacks targeting Israel and several American military installations across Gulf nations.
The hostilities have since broadened significantly. On Wednesday, the U.S. Navy sank the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka’s southern coast using a torpedo. This marked the first instance since World War II of the United States employing a torpedo to sink an enemy vessel. Sri Lankan authorities recovered the bodies of 87 sailors from the incident, with reports indicating approximately 80 fatalities. The ship had been returning from naval exercises in India.
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Israeli forces have declared the start of a “next phase” in their operations. They conducted airstrikes on Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where they eliminated Zaid Ali Jumaa, Hezbollah’s artillery commander in southern Lebanon. Jumaa was accused by the Israel Defense Forces of overseeing the launch of thousands of rockets, missiles, and drones from Lebanon toward Israel, as well as leading a 2015 anti-tank missile attack in Mount Dov that killed an Israeli Defense Forces officer and soldier.
Lebanon became embroiled in the conflict on Monday when Iran-backed Hezbollah initiated attacks on Israel in retaliation for Khamenei’s killing.
Iran has extended its retaliatory strikes to Gulf states. In Bahrain’s capital, Manama, Iranian missiles hit a hotel and two residential buildings, according to Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior. An earlier report mistakenly cited two hotels and one residential structure; authorities corrected the details via social media platform X. The strike caused a fire in one residential building, which civil defense teams quickly brought under control, with no reported casualties. This followed an Iranian missile attack the previous day on Bahrain’s primary state-owned oil refinery, which also ignited a blaze.
These developments underscore the rapid widening of the conflict, now involving direct strikes across multiple nations and naval domains far from the core Middle East theater.