Sat-Forum.Net

Two bombs heard in western Tehran
Several missiles have struck University Street and the Jomhouri area in Tehran, Fars news agency reported.

Our correspondent who is in western Tehran heard two bombs explode.

Iran shuts down airspace until further notice
Majid Akhavan, spokesperson for Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, has announced in an interview with the Mehr News Agency that “the entire country’s airspace has been closed until further notice”.

Cellphone communications have been disrupted across several areas of Iran’s capital Tehran. No calls are possible at present.

There’s a chance internet might be disrupted soon as well.

Israel forced Trump’s hand against Iran
Mehran Kamrava, director of the Iranian studies unit at the Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies and professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, says that while he did not think that the US would attack Iran, Israel has been “quite vocal about its intentions to sabotage US-Iran negotiations”.

“As it did last June, it appears to have launched an attack designed to derail the negotiations between Iran and the US,” Kamrava told Al Jazeera.

“I think [US President] Donald Trump had pushed himself into a corner from which he couldn’t back out. The so-called armada, the massive military build – up, the constant green lights to Israel over the last year and a half, and so I think in many ways, yet again, what we see is the Israelis forced Donald Trump’s hand and he couldn’t really say no to them at this juncture,” Kamrava explained.

Photos: Smoke rises over Tehran

The Israeli army has declared a state of emergency and asked citizens to stay close to shelters.

We understand that this is a campaign that Israel has launched in line with its stated policy that Iran poses a threat to Israel’s safety.

At the moment, details are scant but a strike on Iran would certainly not be happening without US approval.

Several rounds of negotiations, of course, have taken place [to avoid a conflict], the last of which was just two days ago.

Then, the Omani foreign minister, who was the chief negotiator in those indirect talks between the US and Iran, went to Washington and spoke with the US Vice President JD Vance, just in the past 12 hours, hoping that his efforts could avert a confrontation.

But now we know that the confrontation started from the Israeli front.

Let me just update our viewers that Israeli airspace has been closed.

Israeli security sources are now saying that Israel and the United States have assessed in the past 24 hours that there was no path for negotiations.

US launches joint strikes with Israel on Iran, US official tells Al Jazeera
A US official has told Al Jazeera that the attacks on Iran were carried out as a joint military operation by the US and Israel.

Trump claims Iran attacks aim ‘to defend the American people’
US President Donald Trump says the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran aim at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”.

“Short time ago, US military began major combat operation in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating threats from the Iranian regime,” he said.