Live Updates: Trump Says He Hasn’t Made Up His Mind on Iran Strikes

Later on Wednesday, the hacking group posted in English, saying that it had transferred and “burned” $90 million from the exchange, meaning that it had moved the assets but was not using them. It accused Nobitex of being a tool of the Iranian regime to work around financial sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations that have designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a branch of the Iranian military, a terrorist group.

The hack comes as Israel and Iran trade attacks in the deadliest confrontation between the two countries in a decades-long shadow war that is now decidedly overt, after a surprise Israeli strike on Iran last week that it said was intended to dismantle Tehran’s nuclear program.

The crypto analytics firm Chainalysis, which tracks the movement of transactions online, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the Predatory Sparrow attack on Nobitex was “the first hack of this scale exclusively for geopolitical purposes.”

According to Elliptic, another company that tracks crypto transactions, at least $90 million worth of digital assets were transferred to “vanity wallets” from Nobitex early on Wednesday. The wallets, each identified by a string of numbers and letters, all had names with an expletive and the word “terrorist”; some contained I.R.G.C., the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the company said.

Based on Elliptic’s analysis, the hackers were able to move the crypto to digital wallets that they created, but they were unable to access the assets in those wallets.

Nobitex confirmed that the assets were inaccessible to the hackers in a post on social media on Wednesday, saying that about $100 million in crypto was transferred to wallets that were used to “burn and destroy user assets.”

“The situation is now under control,” Nobitex said, adding that all external access to its servers had been “completely severed.” Nobitex pushed back on claims it was associated with the Iranian regime, saying it had “always operated as an independent private business.”

Cryptocurrency exchanges have long faced criticism from finance experts and law enforcement authorities, as well as from some U.S. lawmakers, because they do not have many of the same transparency and compliance requirements as traditional financial institutions. Because crypto is anonymous, borderless and moves through intermediaries that operate in regulatory gray spaces, critics have said for years that terrorists use it for fund-raising.

Elliptic, which the authorities have used to track the movement of digital assets online, noted in its post that Nobitex “has been linked to the Revolutionary Guards, and Iranian government figures in the past.” Elliptic also said that open source investigations had identified relatives of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Revolutionary Guards-linked business partners as connected with Nobitex.

Elliptic said it had also identified “the use of Nobitex by sanctioned Revolutionary Guards operatives accused of ransomware operations and targeting critical infrastructure,” including Ahmad Khatibi Aghda, who is on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” list for suspected cybercrimes and Amir Hossein Nickaein Ravari, also on that list, accused of computer crimes. Both have sent bitcoin to Nobitex accounts, according to Elliptic.

Chainalysis said its data showed that Nobitex hosted wallets for entities tied to the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, and wallets that the Israeli authorities have identified as tied to Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

On Wednesday, internet access was interrupted in Iran, compounding Nobitex’s woes. Nobitex said that “the simultaneous occurrence of national internet disruptions and emergency conditions” had slowed its ability to restore user access.

On Tuesday, Predatory Sparrow also claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Bank Sepah, a major Iranian bank. The hackers accused the bank of being associated with the Revolutionary Guards and of financing terrorism using money from the accounts of the Iranian people. The Fars News Agency, an outlet affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, reported a cyberattack on that bank on Tuesday and warned account holders of a disruption to its online and remote services.

Iranians online and on the ground indicated that they were having at least some problems accessing their accounts online or at A.T.M.s.

Predatory Sparrow has previously claimed responsibility for a number of sophisticated attacks against Iranian targets, including IRIB, the state broadcasting company. In 2022, Iranian state-sponsored actors were thought to be responsible for a cyberattack in Albania, associated with Albania’s sheltering of Mujahedeen Khalq, a secretive Iranian dissident group, and a logo stamped on confidential Albanian documents leaked by the attackers featured an eagle preying on the logo of Predatory Sparrow inside a Star of David.

Mr. Takht-Ravanchi also said that Israel’s surprise attack on Iran last Friday, which came just before a new round of nuclear negotiations with the United States was set to take place, was a “betrayal” of Iran’s trust. Now that Iran’s cities have come under Israeli bombardment, he said, Tehran will negotiate with no one.

“Although we have always promoted diplomacy, we cannot negotiate under threats,” Mr. Takht-Ravanchi said. “We cannot negotiate while our people are under bombardment every day. We are not begging for anything, we are just defending ourselves.”

Mr. Takht-Ravanchi suggested that the Iranian government was prepared to weather a long fight, as it did when attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist-ruled government in the 1980s, when the still-new Islamic Republic was internationally isolated.

“We have an experience of eight years of war against Saddam’s aggression back in the ’80s, and now we are defending ourselves against the Israeli regime, which is being helped by Americans,” he said. “All the world was behind Saddam at that time, and we were the ones who resisted.”

Israel has said it does not target Iranian civilians, but hundreds have died in the violence. Every day since the war began, a new face, a new name, a new story of a life that ended violently and abruptly has emerged. The Ministry of Health has not updated casualty numbers since Sunday, when it said at least 224 people had been killed and nearly 2,000 injured, including women and children. Those figures are expected to grow in the coming days.

In interviews with more than 50 residents of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Sanandaj, Amol, Ghazvin, Semnan, Karaj, Neishabour, and Tabriz, doctors, families and friends described the toll of the strikes. The New York Times also reviewed scores of videos, photos and testimonies documenting civilian casualties, injuries and the destruction of residential buildings.

The Israel Defense Forces have said the attacks on Iran are targeted assassinations of military commanders, government officials and nuclear scientists. But missiles and drones have also hit high-rise buildings and multistory apartment complexes where civilians also reside. Dr. Hossein Kermanpour, the spokesman for the Ministry of Health, said 90 percent of casualties were civilians, not military.

In Tehran, the frequency of the Israeli strikes has completely upended daily life. The constant thud of air defense systems, the loud boom of explosions and the wailing sirens of ambulances and fire trucks have replaced the sounds of a metropolis typically buzzing with traffic, street music and the Muslim call to prayer.

Photos and videos show rescue crews rummaging through piles of debris. A father clutches his small baby in a white onesie drenched in blood. A man bleeding from the head leans against a motorcycle as a passerby tends his wound. The body of a small child, covered in gray dust, peeks out from the rubble.

“There’s a lot of focus on the military targets but not much is being said about the many civilian casualties, in fact nothing is being said about them, which are much higher than the targeted killings,” said Jila Baniyagoub, a prominent journalist and women’s rights activist in Tehran.

Four physicians, including the director of a major hospital in Tehran, said that emergency rooms were overwhelmed. The Ministry of Health announced on Monday that all medical staff members around the country were required to remain in their posts because of the acute need.

“This is unlike anything we’ve experienced before,” said Ali, a 43-year-old engineer in Tehran and father of two small children who asked that his last name not be published for fear of retribution from Iranian officials for speaking publicly. He said deaths and casualties were hitting closer to home everyday and that a friend’s sister had been killed when a building collapsed on her after a targeted strike.

Parnia Abbasi, the poet, graduated from college with a degree in English and landed a coveted job at the National Bank of Iran, where her mother had spent her career as a bank clerk until retirement. Her father was a public-school teacher. Ms. Abbasi once spoke at a panel for young poets and told the audience that she looked “at all my life events as stories I could write.”

About six months ago, her parents realized a lifelong dream of purchasing a three-bedroom apartment in the Orkideh Complex, a compound of high-rise apartment buildings on Sattarkhan Street in central Tehran. On Friday morning, the building collapsed after it was hit by an Israeli missile.

The Abbasi family, including Parham, Ms. Abbasi’s younger brother, were killed.

“They had bought this house six or seven months ago under great financial pressure so that the children could have their own rooms. The love between this family was the envy of everyone. They were always together,” said Hassan Kamali, a relative in Tehran.

Tara Hajimiri, 8, loved folk dance and gymnastics. A video of her wearing a red dress as she danced her way into the chair at her dentist’s office went viral on social media. She and 60 residents were killed in a massive strike on an apartment building on Patrice Lumumba Street on Saturday.

Reza, a 59-year-old computer engineer, said that his aunt and uncle, a couple in their 80s, were killed in an airstrike while they were sleeping on Saturday night. The force of the explosion toppled the building, he said.

The man had Parkinson’s disease, said Reza. “It’s so sad that innocent civilians are being impacted by this war. They were loving grandparents.”

The damage to the building was so extensive that rescue workers have not yet retrieved the bodies. The family was informed to consider the couple dead. Reza said the couple’s adult children go to the site every day, waiting for the bodies to be pulled from the rubble.

Saleh Bayrami, a veteran graphic designer for magazines like National Geographic and media companies, was driving home from a meeting on Sunday. He stopped at a red light at Quds Square, near the bustling Tajrish market outside Tehran. An Israeli missile landed on a major sewage pipe in the square, exploded into a ball of fire and killed him, according to colleagues and news reports.

Ava Meshkatian, a colleague who sat next to him at work, wrote a tribute to Mr. Bayrami on her Instagram page, describing him as kind, friendly and always smiling. “We have to write these things for others to read. For others to know, God only knows how devastated I am,” she wrote.

Mehdi Poladvand, a 27-year-old member of a youth equestrian club and a national champion, spent the last day of his life on Friday at a racetrack in Karaj competing in a race.

Iranian news media described him as a rising talent who had won numerous championship titles in provincial competitions and national cups. He was killed along with his parents and sister when their apartment building was struck by an Israeli missile, his friend Arezou Malek, a fellow equestrian, told local Iranian media.

At cemeteries across Iran, somber funeral services are being held daily, sometimes as missiles fly overhead. The coffin of Niloufar Ghalehvand, 32, a Pilates instructor, was covered with the flag of Iran, according to videos shared on social media by the sporting club where she worked. A small crowd wearing black can be seen standing around the coffin.

“We will always remember you,” read a message from the sports club. “No to War.”

They drop their giant 30,000-pound bunker-busters, one after another, blasting a giant hole down to the centrifuge halls that have been in the bull’s-eye of the American military since President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain and France revealed the existence of the plant in the fall of 2009, charging Iran with a great “deception.”

Few potential operations, with the possible exception of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, have been so examined, rehearsed and debated. Technically, the military and geological experts say, it should be doable.

And yet it is full of risks — known unknowns and unknown unknowns, as the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to say in the context of the Iraq War, another rabbit hole of American military action in the Middle East. That is why it has given pause to every American president who has looked at it for the past 16 years.

President Trump on Wednesday emphasized that he had yet to make a decision to drop what in private he calls “the big one.” But gone was the bellicose tone that characterized his public utterances a day earlier. In its place was a note of caution. “I may do it,” he told reporters on the White House’s South Lawn. “I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Meanwhile, the Iranians, after five days of remarkable losses to the Israelis, seemed to be looking for a way out. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a defiant response to Mr. Trump’s call for “unconditional surrender,” but Mr. Trump said there were indications that the Iranians wanted to talk, and reports of an official Iranian plane landing in Oman, where many of the negotiations with Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, had taken place before Israel’s attack.

If Mr. Trump is taking a pause, it may be because the list of things that could go wrong is long, and probably incomplete. There’s the obvious: It’s possible that a B-2 could get shot down, despite Israel’s success of taking out so many of Iran’s air defenses. It’s possible the calculations are wrong, and even America’s biggest conventional bomb can’t get down that deep.

“I’ve been there, it’s half a mile underground,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week, as the Israeli operation began.

But assuming that the operation itself is successful, the largest perils may lie in the aftermath, many experts say, just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many lessons from that ugly era of misbegotten American foreign policy, but the most vital may be that it’s the unknown unknowns that can come back to bite.

Iran has vowed that if attacked by American forces, it would strike back, presumably against the American bases spread around the Middle East and the growing number of assets gathering in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. All are within missile range, assuming Iran has missiles and launchers left after the Israelis are done with their systematic targeting.

Of course, that could start a cycle of escalation: If Americans are killed, or even injured, Mr. Trump will be under pressure to exact revenge.

“Subcontracting the Fordo job would put the United States in Iran’s sights,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Steven N. Simon, a veteran of the National Security Council, wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday. “Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate.”

“Soon enough,” they continued, “the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime’s leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business — a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.”

The reaction could take other forms. Iran is skilled at terrorism, and reacted to the U.S.-Israeli cyber attack on its nuclear program 15 years ago by building a fearsome cyber corps, not as stealthy as China’s or as bold as Russia’s, but capable of considerable damage. And it has plenty of short-range missiles left to attack oil tankers, making transit in the Persian Gulf too risky.

The last thing the White House wants to do is air these risks in public. Democrats are calling for a congressional role, but they have no power to compel it. “Given the potential for escalation, we must be brought into this decision,” Senator Adam B. Schiff of California, one of Mr. Trump’s political rivals, said on CNN on Wednesday. “Bombing Fordo would be an offensive activity.”

And like most offensive activities, there are longer-term perils, beyond the cycle of attack and retaliation.

Already, the message of these past five days, as interpreted by Iranian leaders or others with nuclear skill, may well be that they should have raced for a bomb earlier, and more stealthily. That was what North Korea did, and it has now ended up with 60 or more nuclear weapons, despite years of American diplomacy and sabotage to stop it. It is a big enough arsenal to assure that its adversaries, South Korea and the United States, would think twice about conducting the kind of operation that Israel executed against Iran.

And history suggests that nuclear programs can be bombed, but not eliminated.

“Nuclear weapons can be stopped through force — the Syrian program is a good example,’’ said Gary Samore, who was the Obama administration’s coordinator for weapons of mass destruction when the existence of the Fordo plant was made public. (It was discovered toward the end of the Bush administration.)

And in Iraq, after the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981, to keep Saddam Hussein from getting the fuel for a bomb, the Iraqis “reacted by building a huge, secret program” that went undetected until after the Gulf War in 1991, Mr. Samore said. That was such an embarrassment to American intelligence agencies that more than a decade later they wildly overestimated his ability to do it again, contributing to the second failure — and leading the United States into the Iraq war.

But Mr. Samore added: “I can’t think of a case where air power alone was sufficient to end a program.”

That is an important consideration for Mr. Trump. He must decide in the next few days whether Israel’s attacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility, and its bombing of workshops where new centrifuges are made and laboratories where weapons research may have been taking place, are sufficient to set back the Iranian program.

In short, he must decide whether it is worth the huge risk of direct American involvement for whatever gain would come from destroying Fordo with American pilots, American warplanes and American weapons.

But he also doesn’t want to be accused of missing the chance to set the Iranians back by years. “If this war ends and this Fordo is left intact,” said Mr. Samore, now a professor at Brandeis University, “then it wouldn’t take long to get this going again.”

Mr. Trump has not weighed these questions in public, and it is always hard to know how he is assessing the evidence. He bristled the other day, on Air Force One, when a reporter noted to him that his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified in Congress just a few months ago that Iran had made no decision to produce a bomb, even if its fuel production had surged.

He insisted that there wasn’t much time left — though he cited no evidence to contradict his own intelligence chief.

“Don’t forget, we haven’t been fighting,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office. “We add a certain amount of genius to everything, but we haven’t been fighting at all. Israel’s done a very good job today.”

Then, muddying the waters anew, he turned to his signature phrase: “But we’ll see what happens.”

The Iranian official said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would accept such a meeting to discuss a cease-fire with Israel and Iran’s nuclear program.

Mr. Araghchi said this week that Iran would return to diplomacy if Israel halted its attacks, and that Mr. Trump could force an end to the conflict with one phone call to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Since the 1979 revolution that installed a theocratic government in Iran, no U.S. vice president or president has met with Iranian officials, and even meetings with U.S. cabinet officers have been rare.

Before war with Israel broke out last week, Iran and the United States were in the midst of negotiations, mediated by Oman, and had exchanged written proposals for frameworks of a deal addressing Iran’s nuclear program, though they remained far apart.

On Friday, two days before a scheduled meeting between Mr. Araghchi and Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, Israel began airstrikes in Iran, with the stated intention of destroying its nuclear program and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The talks with the United States in Oman were called off.

Mr. Netanyahu has appealed to Mr. Trump to join the war, and to use powerful weapons Israel does not have to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear sites. Mr. Trump has mused publicly this week about the possibility of bombing Iran, and even of killing Mr. Khamenei. On Wednesday, he said he still had not made up his mind how to proceed, but also said it was not too late for diplomacy.

Mr. Khamenei, in a televised address on Wednesday from a safehouse bunker, dismissed the idea of negotiations and said, “They cannot impose either war or peace on the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

He downplayed the impact of the war, claiming that “ordinary life” goes on in his country. But many Iranians say their lives have been upended, with tens of thousands of people having fled Tehran and many struggling to find safe shelter, food and clean water.

A new diplomatic effort has taken shape in hopes of brokering a cease-fire before the conflict draws in others in the region, or the United States. European, Turkish and Arab foreign ministers and heads of state have been talking with both Iran and the United States.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday. The meeting is scheduled for Friday morning.

It was not immediately clear when evacuation flights and cruise ships arranged by the State Department would depart or how many passengers would be involved. In a post on social media, Mr. Huckabee directed Americans seeking to leave Israel to enroll in the State Department’s Smart Traveler program to receive information.

The announcement was the first from the State Department indicating that the United States would help evacuate its citizens from Israel since the country began a surprise attack on Iran on Friday. Israeli strikes have killed at least 224 people in Iran, according to Iran’s Health Ministry, and retaliatory strikes by Iran have killed at least 24 people in Israel, according to the Israeli government.

The State Department had warned of extreme risk in traveling to Israel and authorized some family members and nonessential personnel to depart. But since Friday, the American Embassy in Jerusalem has had little guidance for people trying to leave. “We have no announcement about assisting private U.S. citizens to depart at this time,” the embassy said in a statement on Tuesday, adding it was aware that third parties were helping to arrange some travel but that it was unable to endorse them.

Several countries have helped evacuate their citizens from Iran in recent days, largely through land routes into neighboring countries. India’s Foreign Ministry said that its embassy had evacuated 110 Indian students from northern Iran on Tuesday, helping them travel by road to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, to await flights to New Delhi. A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Guo Jiakun, said on Wednesday that the Chinese Embassy and consulate in Iran had coordinated the evacuation of nearly 800 Chinese citizens from the country and that around 1,000 others were still to be relocated and evacuated.

The State Department warned U.S. citizens not to travel to Iran in March and does not maintain a diplomatic presence there. President Trump’s travel ban fully barring its citizens from entering the U.S. went into effect on June 9, before the latest conflict began.

Robert Reichelscheimer, an American lawyer who has been visiting Jerusalem with his wife since Thursday, described Mr. Huckabee’s announcement as a long-awaited “acknowledgment that we are here” after what he said had been multiple attempts to reach the U.S. Embassy, as well as senators back home in New York, with no luck.

“I don’t expect them to come and rescue me the next day, while missiles are flying,” he said. “But I do expect the federal government to keep me abreast of what steps are being taken.”

Asad, an engineer from Tehran in his 20s, was outside Tehran when the Israeli attacks began there last week. He sent me a series of messages on Instagram on Tuesday night to describe what he had seen, using only his nickname for security reasons.

“The first thing that caught our eye was a tower in the east of the city — the upper floors had been destroyed,” he said. “That was the first time I saw war so close to me. I could feel the worry brewing in my stomach.”

As the attacks and Iran’s retaliations went on, people began to leave Tehran, filling the streets and lining up for food and fuel. Others, including Asad, who had returned to the city by then, either decided to stay or were unable to leave. People started to get used to the sounds of defense systems and explosions, he said: “Sometimes the blasts are so loud and so close that people rush out of their homes and look up at the sky.”

Most of the time, he said, residents do not receive any emergency alerts about attacks, instead only learning about them from the sound of explosions. Asad said the pervasive feeling of anxiety was mixed with a sense of unity, shown in the way people sometimes raced to help after strikes.

Some people were volunteering to help the Red Crescent with rescue work, he said, adding that he had gone out after a strike in central Tehran. He said he saw a woman in her 70s “in shock” and a man who “had jumped out of the building onto his own car in just an undershirt, terrified.”

Security forces were also increasingly visible on the streets of Tehran, he said, with checkpoints set up around the city. Internet service was “heavily throttled” during Israeli attacks, he said, although calls and texts within Iran were working fine.

Asad said he did not personally know anyone hurt in the attacks so far, although one friend’s windows had been shattered by a blast wave. The danger, he said, “keeps getting closer and closer.”

He also said he was stunned by how Tehran, normally a city of 14 million people, had come to feel “deserted” now that many people have fled and others have chose to remain inside their homes. Most shops are closed, or only open during the day.

“It still feels like a nightmare we haven’t woken up from,” Asad said. “Even though we’re getting used to it, it doesn’t feel real.”

And instead of expressions of solidarity with Iran, they said, they heard warnings about the threat posed to the Middle East by Iran’s nuclear program — and the need to eliminate it.

“Obviously they would prefer a more peaceful way of getting rid of the nuclear weapons, but they all made clear that a nuclear armed Iran is an existential threat to them,” said Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, in a phone interview from the Emirates. “They prefer peaceful ways — but this way is working as well.”

The government of Saudi Arabia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. The Bahraini government responded to questions about the delegation’s remarks by sharing a previously-issued statement in which they condemned the Israeli attack on Iran and called for restraint.

The Emirati government, in a statement to The New York Times, also reiterated its position that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military escalation against Iran.”

“The U.A.E. considers de-escalation an urgent priority and continues to engage with regional and international partners to prevent further instability,” it said.

In 2020, Bahrain and the Emirates established diplomatic ties with Israel for the first time, in what are called the Abraham Accords, and Israeli and American officials have held out hope of normalizing relations with other states in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia. But Bahraini and Emirati ties with Israel have been strained since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

The countries visited by the congressional delegation have long viewed Iran with distrust, but have shifted over the past few years to a policy of courting Iran with diplomacy — viewing it as a more pragmatic way to contain their neighbor.

Publicly, all three countries swiftly condemned the devastating Israeli bombing campaign against Iran that began on Friday and set off the fiercest conflict in their long history of hostility. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities to ward off a threat to Israel, and has raised the possibility of toppling the Iranian government.

The Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, called the Iranian president on Tuesday to express “solidarity with Iran and its people during these challenging times.” Saudi Arabia, long viewed as Iran’s bitter rival, denounced “the blatant Israeli aggressions against the brotherly Islamic Republic of Iran.” Bahrain warned of the attack’s “grave repercussions on regional security and stability.”

But in private this week, the congressmen said, senior officials in each country presented a different perspective, though they also heard criticism of Israel.

“What we heard was a continued sense of optimism for the future,” said Representative Brad Schneider, a Democrat from Illinois and co-chairman of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus. “And a concern and understanding that a nuclear Iran is a threat to that future but that the Abraham Accords are a pathway to secure that future.”

Arab leaders in the region are wary of public alignment with Israel, knowing that among their people, Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories are deeply unpopular.

“We’ve traveled to this region enough times to realize that there’s some Kabuki theater that goes on,” said Representative Jimmy Panetta, Democrat of California. “However the consistent message was basically pointed at Iran and their deep destabilizing forces — not just with their nuclear capabilities but also with their proxies.”

Gulf officials also seemed encouraged that the Israeli attack had shown “that maybe Iran is not nearly as strong as it is reported to be,” said Representative Zach Nunn, Republican of Iowa.

During their meetings in Saudi Arabia, the congressmen discussed the prospect of the kingdom recognizing Israel.

“Where we are today, that is not likely to be the next step going forward,” Mr. Schneider said, adding, “But what we did hear was a progress and commitment to a peaceful future in the region.”

Mr. Panetta, who met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in 2023, shortly before the war in Gaza began, said he had left that meeting “with great optimism and hope” for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But, he said, the war in Gaza had changed the calculus.

“I’ve been back to Saudi Arabia twice since then, and there is obviously another part to the equation,” he said. “That is obviously going to be the Palestinian question, which needs to be addressed.”

The congressional delegation’s trip had been planned months ago. The congressmen decided to go ahead with their visit despite the escalating violence between Israel and Iran.

Israeli warplanes continued to operate at will in Iranian airspace, pummeling targets, and many Israelis were getting their hopes up that the United States would join the bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, long viewed by Israelis as a threat to their future.

The war with Iran is far from over and the outcome is unclear. But with Israel’s initial successes, the sense of unity and national pride represented a sharp turnaround for a country that was deeply traumatized by the deadly, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu, a conservative and a political phoenix, has risen again, seemingly imbued with a renewed confidence and a sense of his historical significance.

“We are getting rid of the evil Iranian empire that threatens our existence,” he said in a television interview on Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 on Tuesday night. “Within five days we’ve turned the tables,” he said, having opened what he called “an aerial expressway to Iran.”

“This is an enormous moment, a moment of pride for the nation of Israel,” he added.

Matan Kahana, a centrist lawmaker in the opposition and a former fighter pilot, said, “There is unity from wall to wall in Israel over the campaign to remove the Iranian nuclear threat.”

“Now people are asking ‘Why didn’t we do it earlier?’” he said, adding that Israelis see this as “a war of no choice” and that so far, Iran is enduring the worst of it.

The newfound unity has not erased older political and social rifts that have plagued Israel, including over exemptions from military service for ultra-Orthodox religious seminary students, the security lapses that enabled the October 2023 attack, and the fate of hostages still held in Gaza.

But some of Mr. Netanyahu’s veteran detractors are reassessing him.

“The decision to go to war was entirely Netanyahu’s,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a leading political columnist, in the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper this week. He noted that Mr. Netanyahu had become known as risk-averse over the years.

“We shouldn’t downplay the importance of the decision,” Mr. Barnea added, comparing it to the kind of decision that Israel’s revered founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, might have made.

“Maybe we misread him; maybe he’s changed,” Mr. Barnea wrote of Mr. Netanyahu.

To be sure, many Israelis are sleep deprived. Air raid sirens have sent millions of people rushing for protected spaces and bomb shelters in the middle of the night day after day. At least two dozen people have been killed so far by Iranian missiles that evaded Israel’s air defenses.

Some people are spending the night in approved underground parking lots and train stations.

Many citizens are anxious. Sales of tranquilizers are up by a third, Israel’s Channel 12 television reported.

And before ordering their coffee, customers can be heard asking shop staff members where the nearest fortified shelter is. Israelis generally get a 10-minute warning for incoming missile fire.

Still, Israeli television pundits brag that whereas residents of Tehran are fleeing their city, tens of thousands of Israelis who were stranded abroad after Israel abruptly closed its airspace on Friday have been clamoring for seats on the special flights arranged to bring them home.

The intensity of the Iranian missile strikes has waned in recent days and the Israeli authorities slightly relaxed restrictions on Wednesday evening, permitting small gatherings and allowing people to go back to work — so long as their workplace provides easy access to a bomb shelter.

Experts expect that if Mr. Trump orders the American military to directly participate in Israel’s bombing campaign, Iran will quickly retaliate against U.S. troops stationed across the Middle East.

“The Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned on Wednesday, according to state news media.

More than 40,000 U.S. active-duty troops and civilians are working for the Pentagon in the Middle East, and billions of dollars in weapons and military equipment are stored there. Over decades, both during and after war, the American military has fortified its defenses in the region, said Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s top official for Middle East policy during the Biden administration.

The United States further strengthened those defenses, she said, after Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel in October 2023, which set off a broader conflict between Israel and Iran’s regional allies.

“In some ways, the U.S. military has absolutely set the theater to respond to Iranian attacks, should the regime choose to turn its missiles or activate its militias against U.S. forces,” Ms. Stroul said on Wednesday.

She added, “The tipping point in whether this expands, is what decisions the United States makes in the coming days, with respect to partnering with Israel in offensive operations.”

Adel Abdel Ghafar, a senior analyst at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs in Doha, Qatar, predicted that American troops stationed in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait would be Iran’s first targets. Nonessential American personnel and family have already been withdrawn from the embassies in those three countries.

Iran’s proxy fighters in neighboring Shiite-majority Iraq and elsewhere pose a formidable ground threat to American military and diplomatic outposts, Mr. Abdel Ghafar said. And it would take only three or four minutes for a ballistic missile fired from Iran to hit bases in Gulf countries housing U.S. troops, he said.

“This gives much less time for air defenses” to intercept incoming missiles, he said, “so it would be disastrous.”

Here is where American troops in the Middle East might be most vulnerable.

Iraq

As many as 2,500 American troops and military contractors are in Iraq, based in the capital, Baghdad, as well as in the northern Kurdish region and in the western desert. The Al Asad desert base, which is controlled by the Iraqi military, was targeted by Shiite forces backed by Iran earlier this week in drone strikes. American forces stationed there shot down the weapons.

The American military has a fraught relationship with the Iraqis, after the eight-year war and the occupation that ended in 2011, but U.S. troops were welcomed back just a few years later to fight Islamic State militants who had seized control of areas in the country’s north and west. In 2020, the Trump administration ordered an airstrike that killed the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, as he arrived in Baghdad to meet with Iraq’s prime minister. The strike escalated tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Bahrain

The headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet are in Manama, Bahrain, and host about 9,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel. Part of its mission is to ensure safe passage for commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s oil supply flows through. Iran has threatened to seed the strait with as many as 6,000 naval mines, a tactic meant to pin American warships in the Persian Gulf. It would also disrupt global oil trade, especially for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which ship a lot of oil through the strait, as well as energy buyers like China and India.

Kuwait

Five bases in Kuwait, where about 13,500 American troops are stationed, have served for decades as an essential staging point for forces, weapons and military equipment on their way to battlefields around the world.

Military ties between Kuwait and the United States have remained strong since the Persian Gulf war of 1991. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States led a coalition to contain Saddam Hussein’s forces in the region and keep him from seizing Saudi Arabia. Within months, U.S. forces had chased Saddam’s troops back into Iraq, liberating Kuwait. American troops have been based in Kuwait ever since.

More than a decade later, in 2003, U.S. and international troops used Kuwait as a launchpad to invade Iraq and oust Saddam.

Qatar

The Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is the largest U.S. military site in the Middle East and is the regional headquarters for the U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the region. About 10,000 troops are stationed there.

The U.S. military has been using Al Udeid since the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it positioned planes there to target the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Two years later, Al Udeid became the main U.S. air operations hub in the region. U.S. commanders used it to coordinate a wide variety of missions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as strikes against ISIS in Syria. The Air Force has deployed a wide variety of aircraft there, from advanced fighters and long-range bombers to drones, transport planes and in-flight refueling tankers.

It also became the central evacuation point for tens of thousands of Afghans and Americans who fled Afghanistan in 2021 when the U.S. military withdrew.

United Arab Emirates

About 3,500 U.S. military personnel are at the Al Dhafra Air Base, outside Abu Dhabi, where the United States has deployed F-22 fighter jets in recent years, including to protect Emirati fuel tankers that were attacked by Iran-linked Houthi fighters in 2022.

The 380th Air Expeditionary Wing of the U.S. Air Force is based at Al Dhafra, from where it has launched combat operations against the Islamic State and the Houthis, and in Afghanistan. It also has been used as an intelligence-gathering and surveillance unit during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for aerial refueling.

Graphic by Daniel Wood.