Live Updates: Israel Bombards Tehran, Setting Oil Facilities Ablaze

Even as Israel has pummeled Iran with its own sophisticated missiles, setting oil facilities in Tehran ablaze, it still fears Iran’s capacity for fierce retaliation.

In a video statement on Friday night, Mr. Netanyahu said Iran had accelerated production and aimed to manufacture 300 ballistic missiles a month, which would amount to 20,000 missiles within six years. He said each one was like “a bus-full of explosives” primed to land on Israeli cities.

How many missiles has Iran fired, and how many of them hit Israel?

Iran has launched about 200 missiles at Israel since Friday night, in addition to scores of explosive drones, according to the Israeli authorities.

The Israeli military has so far not released data about the number of missiles it has intercepted or how many have evaded its air defenses, saying such details could aid the enemy. But the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Saturday afternoon that 17 sites had been identified where missiles made impact. Some have hit Tel Aviv and its suburbs of Ramat Gan and Rishon LeZion, in central Israel’s coastal plain. On Saturday night, a barrage was aimed at the northern city of Haifa and its surroundings.

Missile strikes on Friday night and Saturday have killed at least seven Israeli civilians and injured more than 200 people, including seven soldiers, according to the authorities.

Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, Israel’s chief military spokesman, said on Saturday that Israel’s air defenses were “among the best in the world” but were “not hermetic.”

What have the Iranians been trying to hit?

Many of the sites struck by Iranian missiles appear to be inside Israeli cities. Israel has accused Iran of intentionally aiming at civilian areas.

It is unclear whether any sensitive military or infrastructure sites have been hit. Officials do not disclose such information, saying it would aid the enemy.

But Israel is a relatively small country — only slightly larger than New Jersey. Most of its population lives in the crowded coastal plain. And the military maintains bases and camps in many populated areas, as well as in more remote parts of the country.

A residential tower block that suffered a direct hit early Saturday is part of a popular entertainment district, filled with cafes and restaurants. It is also close to the main military and government headquarters in Tel Aviv, which was most likely the intended target.

Later on Saturday, missiles were aimed at the port city of Haifa. Israel’s largest oil refinery is in the Haifa Bay area.

How many missiles does Iran have left?

The Israeli military has been striking Iran’s stocks of ballistic missiles and missile launchers, reducing the number it has left to launch at Israel.

Military officials and experts say Iran still has hundreds of missiles — perhaps up to 2,000 — with ranges that can reach Israel. If Iran continues launching missiles at its current rate, it could most likely sustain the pace of fire for a few more days.

How powerful are the missiles hitting Israel?

Mr. Netanyahu said each Iranian missile carried a ton, or 2,000 pounds, of explosives, although military officials and experts say the weight can vary.

Tal Inbar, an Israeli space and missile expert, said Iran’s ballistic missiles carried from 300 to 700 kilograms, or about 660 to 1,540 pounds, of explosives and that the total weight of the warhead could be up to 2,200 pounds.

What has Israel learned about Iran’s missile capabilities?

Mr. Inbar, the space and missiles expert, said that Israel was not surprised by Iran’s missile capabilities, having already been the target of large barrages of similar projectiles in April 2024 and October 2024, when Iran retaliated for Israeli strikes on its territory and interests.

The Houthi militia, an Iran-backed group based in Yemen, has also been firing ballistic missiles at Israel, saying it is acting in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.

But the Houthis tend to fire a single missile in a day, and most of them have been intercepted by Israeli and American air defense systems.

The difference this time, Mr. Inbar said, was the quantity of missiles that Iran fired simultaneously, in an effort to overwhelm air defenses, and the fact that some impact sites have been in densely populated areas, where just the shock waves cause extensive damage.

He said some footage released by the Israeli military on Saturday showed at least one type of missile that Iran had not fired at Israel before. Named the “Shahed Haj Qassem,” it has a range of nearly 1,000 miles.

It is a solid propellant missile that does not need to be refueled before launching, Mr. Inbar said, meaning that it can sit underground for years and become operational within minutes.

“The fire is terrifying, it’s massive; there is a lot of commotion here,” said Mostafa Shams, a resident of the area. “It’s the gasoline depots that are exploding one after another, it’s loud and scary.”

Separately in the city’s south, Shahr Rey, one of the country’s largest oil refineries, was also struck, according to Iranian state news media. Emergency crews were trying to contain the fire, and a resident of Tehran, Reza Salehi, said he could see the flames from miles away.

Israel’s targeting of Iran’s energy facilities, a crucial source of export cash for the country as well as of domestic energy, represented a significant escalation in its military campaign against Tehran.

Earlier on Saturday, Israel had struck two key Iranian energy sites, including a section of the South Pars Gas Field, which is one of the world’s largest and critical to Iran’s energy production.

“We have entered the second phase of the war, which is extremely dangerous and destructive,” Abdollah Babakhani, an expert on Iran’s energy sector based in Germany, said on Saturday.

But the multiple massive explosions targeting energy and fuel targets in and around the capital spread fear among residents.

Israeli warplanes also struck sites in Tehran related to Iran’s nuclear program, including experimental laboratories, according to two Israeli defense officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive operational details.

A woman named Shirin, who lives near the gasoline depot in northern Tehran and asked that only her first name be used out of fear for her safety, said neighbors were frantically calling each other asking what to do. She said the explosion was so loud that her mother fainted. Shirin’s husband was worried about fuel and gasoline shortage following the attack.

“Israel is attacking left and right; it’s not just military targets, this is our livelihood and our lives,” Shirin said in a phone interview from Tehran. She was also angry at the government in Iran, she said, for not providing any guidance or shelter for civilians caught in the crossfire.

Hamid Hosseini, a member of the energy committee of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, said Iran’s municipality had been discussing moving the Shahran fuel depot from the residential area in northern Tehran for years, fearing an attack or an accident could be catastrophic.

The attack on the depot set off massive explosions, according to an official at the oil ministry, who said the depots were exploding one after another and threatened to significantly damage residential neighborhoods in the area.

The depot has about 8 million liters per day of gasoline entering its storage tanks and has a capacity to hold about three full days of fuel needs for Tehran, according to the ministry official.

Israel did not immediately respond to request for comment on the strike.

Mr. Trump confirmed in a post on social media that he had spoken with Mr. Putin, saying that the two men had “talked at length” about the conflict between Israel and Iran but offering no details.

“He feels, as do I, this war in Israel-Iran should end,” Mr. Trump wrote, “to which I explained, his war should also end.” He said the initial purpose of the call was for Mr. Putin “to very nicely wish me a Happy Birthday.”

The call came as Israel and Iran continued to pummel each other with intense airstrikes for a second day. The clash began on Friday when Israel bombarded Iran with dozens of missiles, targeting nuclear sites and wiping out much of the country’s military chain of command. Israel justified the attack as necessary to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Trump has not called for Israel to rein in its assault, and he initially praised the onslaught as “excellent.” U.S. officials have said they are moving warships and other military assets in the Middle East to help protect Israel and American troops in the region. But Mr. Ushakov said Mr. Trump had agreed in the phone call that the situation was “very alarming.”

A round of talks between Washington and Tehran on the future of Iran’s nuclear program had been scheduled to take place in Oman on Sunday, but it was canceled because of the conflict between Israel and Iran, officials said on Saturday. Mr. Trump has urged Iran to resume those talks and make a deal “before there is nothing left.”

During the telephone call, Mr. Putin also confirmed that Moscow was willing to hold another round of direct talks with Ukraine after June 22, as agreed, Mr. Ushakov said.

Russia and Ukraine resumed direct talks in Istanbul in May for the first time in three years at Mr. Trump’s urging. Mr. Putin said an exchange of prisoners, including some who were seriously wounded, as well as the bodies of killed soldiers was taking place, as agreed during the last round of negotiations.

The Israeli government said 17 missile impact sites had been identified across the country after Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel between Friday evening and Saturday morning. The strikes were in retaliation for Israeli attacks earlier in the day. Three civilians in Israel were killed and over 170 wounded, including seven soldiers, the authorities said.

It was not immediately clear whether the damage and deaths had been caused by the missiles themselves or interceptors sent to shoot them down, or falling fragments of both. The Israeli military said both missiles and interceptors had hit areas in Israel but declined to give details.

The damaged high-rise in central Tel Aviv was near a government quarter and the military’s headquarters. Residents who had evacuated from their high-rise complex after it was struck on Friday lined up to speak with a municipal official at a makeshift checkpoint near the impact site. Many appeared shaken.

Amit Tzur-Amrani, 26, said she and her husband were huddled in a fortified room in their apartment on Friday when the air-raid alarms went off after 9 p.m. Then there was a loud blast and smoke poured into their shelter.

“We covered our faces with towels to escape,” she said. “I was afraid I’d die in the shelter.”

Struggling to see in the dark, they ran through a hallway and found their entire floor was wrecked. “You couldn’t recognize anything,” she said. “There’s no more house.”

Like dozens of residents in the area, she will be housed in a hotel until the building can be made habitable again. Because her building was directly hit, Ms. Tzur-Amrani will not be allowed to enter it to retrieve belongings for at least a week, the municipal office said.

People from the Rishon LeZion suburb — and some curious visitors — came out to inspect the damage of a strike that had killed two people in a two-story home, one of hundreds of houses in the dense neighborhood of palm-lined streets, cul-de-sacs and alleys.

Shards of glass and plastic littered the street for at least 100 yards. Cars had shattered windshields, and many houses were missing roof tiles.

The sight was not entirely unfamiliar to residents. Rishon LeZion, like other cities in central and southern Israel, has previously been hit by some of the thousands of rockets launched from Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war there.

“We are already practiced,” said Tzabari Malachi, 65, who lives near the destroyed home. On Saturday, he watched the tumult on the street from his balcony.

Still, he said, the effect of the recent strikes in his neighborhood is different, both materially and emotionally.

Mr. Malachi said he was at home with his wife, sons and two of his small grandchildren when the missile hit, around 5 a.m. on Saturday. The impact shook his house and blew open the door to his fortified room. After a few minutes, he emerged onto the street to see ambulances and bloodied people rushing for help.

“It’s harrowing, beyond explanation,” Mr. Malachi said.

Iran is one of the world’s major energy producers. It has the second-largest gas reserves in the world and fourth-largest crude oil reserves.

Videos posted to social media and verified by The Times showed a large fire burning at the South Pars gas refinery in Iran’s southern Bushehr Province.

The explosions took production lines at both facilities offline, the ministry statement said, even as firefighters and emergency crew had largely contained the blazes.

An Israeli military spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the strikes.

The attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure on the second day of the Israel-Iran conflict represented a widening of the fighting, which began on Friday with Israel launching attacks on Iran’s military and nuclear sites and assassinating its top military chain of command. Iran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles and drones on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Both sides have said the fighting will go on despite international calls for de-escalation.

“We have entered the second phase of the war, which is extremely dangerous and destructive,” said Abdollah Babakhani, an expert on Iran’s energy sector based in Germany. Attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure, he added, “will be a disaster because repairing them will be costly and take time.”

A senior official at the oil ministry said that the ministry had previously placed its staff at refineries and energy fields on full alert and its emergency and fire crews on highest alert, anticipating that Israel might target energy infrastructure. The official said that damages were still being assessed and officials were holding a series of emergency meetings.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said that in light of Israel’s attacks across Iran, the country would launch a fiercer retaliation strike on Israel, Iranian news media reported.

Hamid Hosseini, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce energy committee, said that, in addition to the two attacks on infrastructure sites, Israel had also struck an office building in northern Tehran that belonged to the oil ministry. The building housed an engineering department involved in expanding Iran’s oil and energy fields, Mr. Hosseini said in a telephone interview.

Iran has been battling an acute energy crisis for months because of gas shortages. The country’s power plants and electricity production rely nearly completely on natural gas, and to manage the shortages, the government started scheduling widespread power cuts for residential, commercial and industrial usage.

The government has said the gas shortage is because demand outmatches production and economic sanctions have crippled Iran’s ability to upgrade and invest in its energy infrastructure.

Iranian news media reported that air defenses had been activated in several locations, including Bandar Abbas, Tabriz, Isfahan and Tehran, because of Israeli attacks late on Saturday night. Bandar Abbas is a major shipping port, and Isfahan and Tabriz both have energy refineries and military bases. Residents of Tehran said they could hear loud explosions and air defenses firing nonstop.

Tehran’s governor announced that government employees of Tehran province would work remotely until Wednesday with the exception of military, intelligence, banks, medical centers and municipal services, the state news agency IRNA reported.

It is not clear how far Israel intends to go in attacking Iran’s energy facilities, a crucial source of export cash for the country as well as domestic energy that looks particularly vulnerable.

This is “a warning shot that Israel is willing to hit Iranian energy infrastructure if Israeli civilians are targeted,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm.

Other Iranian installations are at risk, analysts say.

“There is one clear target that would make it very easy if Israel or the United States wanted to impact Iran’s oil exports,” Homayoun Falakshahi, senior analyst for crude oil at Kpler, a research firm, said during a webinar on Friday. “And this is Kharg Island.”

Nearly all of Iran’s oil exports leave from tankers at berths around Kharg Island, a small coral land mass in the northern part of the Persian Gulf off the Iranian coast, potentially making it a target in a protracted war, analysts say.

Iran has been developing another terminal in Jask, a coastal city just outside the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman, but its capacity appears to be limited, Mr. Falakshahi said.

Israel’s energy system also looks exposed, analysts say, which could potentially restrain its attacks.

Were the fighting to escalate to major energy installations across the region, the consequences could be serious not only for Iran and its neighbors but for their customers, especially in Asia, and world markets.

Oil prices have already jumped since the Israeli attack early Friday. Any escalation that might appear to threaten international supplies could send prices soaring.

Iran’s coastline stretches along the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passageway through which tankers and other ships must pass on their way from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Iran has a history of interfering with shipping in the area.

Kpler has estimated that 21 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas, most of it from Qatar, flowed through this gauntlet in 2024. A hefty 14 million barrels of crude oil a day also moves through the strait, according to Kpler’s estimates.

The conflict with Israel comes at a delicate point for Iran’s petroleum industry, which is a crucial pillar for its economy and its ability to fund its nuclear program.

Strikes on the Iranian facilities could potentially negate years of effort to rebuild production from the low levels at the beginning of this decade when President Trump pulled out of a deal reached by President Barack Obama under which Iran agreed to curbs on its nuclear program in return for an easing of sanctions, including on its oil sales.

Oil production in Iran has increased around 75 percent to about 3.4 million barrels a day from depressed 2020 levels, while exports have roughly tripled, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency and Kpler.

FGE, an energy consulting firm, estimates that Iranian energy export revenues, including oil products and electricity, have almost quadrupled since 2020 to $78 billion in 2024.

Even before the Israeli strikes, Iran faced major handicaps. Although it has some of the world’s richest troves of oil and natural gas, it has strained to exploit them largely because of protracted political tensions with the West dating to the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

These frictions have led to sanctions and other restrictions that have kept Western firms from working in Iran for decades.

Lack of capital and expertise has limited development of oil and natural gas fields and access to major investment projects like liquefied natural gas facilities that might have benefited the Iranian industry.

Qatar, whose huge gas fields in the Persian Gulf border Iran’s, has become rich through L.N.G. development with western partners like Shell and Exxon Mobil, which allow the natural gas to be exported to Europe and Asia.

Despite having large natural gas resources, Iran has recently struggled to produce enough fuel to prevent power cuts.

Much of Iran’s petroleum infrastructure, including the refineries that supply products like gasoline to local markets, are old. If these facilities suffered significant damage, Iran “might struggle more than maybe other countries” to find the spare parts and international support to repair them, Mr. Bronze said.

Sanctions also mean that few customers are willing to buy Iranian oil. Nearly all of Iran’s crude exports go to China. The main buyers are small refiners there, known as “teapots” Mr. Falakshahi said, that are able to extract a substantial discount of up to $7 a barrel from the Iranians.

If those refiners were unable to buy Iranian crude, they would need to look elsewhere, potentially tightening global markets.

Even before the current conflict, signs were emerging of pressure on Iranian oil exports. The Trump administration has been tightening sanctions that saw a de facto easing in the Biden administration. Chinese imports dropped substantially in May, according to Kpler’s estimates.

Analysts say Israel’s energy infrastructure could also prove vulnerable.

Already, the Israeli government has as a precaution ordered a production halt at two of the country’s three offshore natural gas platforms, including Leviathan, which is operated by Chevron. Gas fuels most of Israel’s electric power generation. If this stoppage continued, it could also reduce or halt gas exports to Egypt, hurting customers there.

Israel is also heavily dependent on imported oil brought through the port of Ashkelon in the south of the country. “They are also very fragile,” Mr. Falakshahi said of Israel.

The Saudis and the United Arab Emirates have worked in recent years to ease tensions with Iran and head off future incidents like the attack on a Saudi Aramco facility called Abqaiq in 2018 that temporarily knocked out about half of the kingdom’s export capacity. Those attacks were claimed by the Houthi militant group in Yemen, but the United States at the time blamed Iran for them.

Analysts have said it is conceivable that if Iran feels sufficiently threatened, it could target petroleum installations in those countries again.

The question is,” Mr. Bronze said, how would Iran respond “if it feels like its core economic interests, its energy system, have been attacked.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.

“Everyone is speaking about Iran now,” said Khalil al-Halabi, a 71-year-old retired U.N. official living in a partially destroyed home in Gaza City. “Gaza has become a secondary matter.”

Aid distribution sites in Gaza have been shuttered since Friday morning, which was shortly after the initial Israeli attacks on Iran began.

Finding flour, Mr. al-Halabi said, had become a nightmare for his family, with some street vendors selling a 55-pound sack for more than $350 dollars.

More concerning, he said, was that the Israel-Iran conflict could undermine desperately needed efforts to hammer out a cease-fire in Gaza.

Repeated efforts to clinch a deal between Israel and Hamas have failed in recent months, with Israel saying it would end the war only after dismantling Hamas, and Hamas saying it will not surrender.

Sharif al-Buheisi, 56, a resident of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, said he thought the war would continue regardless of the fight between Israel and Iran.

“Israel and Hamas are in agreement about the continuation of the war,” he said. “They both benefit in their own way.”

Still, Mr. al-Buheisi, who was a university administrator before the war, said that any diminished focus on Gaza would have negative consequences for Palestinians. He argued that Israel would now be able to make contentious moves “without a real response from the international community.”

In particular, he said, he worried that the international community would not put enough pressure on Israel to fix the new system for delivering aid to Palestinians, which has had a chaotic, and often deadly, roll out.

Mr. al-Buheisi, who said he has hypertension, said the system was not an option for him because he could not fight through frequently unruly crowds of people to get a box of handout food.

Since the new aid effort began in May, scores of hungry and desperate Palestinians have been killed or wounded on their way to collect parcels of food at aid distribution sites in Gaza, which is operated by American security contractors. Palestinian witnesses say at least some of them were killed by Israeli soldiers who guard the perimeters of these aid sites.

The Israeli military has said that its forces have fired warning shots toward people advancing in what was described as a threatening manner.

Mr. al-Halabi, the former U.N. official, said the world’s shifting attention was a reminder of the helpless situation of Palestinians in Gaza.

“We’re living through misery here,” he said. “But what can we do?”