“What’s happening now confirms some of the worst fears of what this Board of Peace would be about.”
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In the early hours of Saturday, Donald Trump and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, bombed Iran in what has been described as an “assassination campaign” of Iran’s top military leaders as well as the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Almost 150 people were killed after a missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran, according to state media, with the death toll still unclear.
Israel has said at least nine people were killed after an Iranian missile hit a residential neighbourhood in the city of Beit Shemesh.
The US and Israeli attack on Iran continued to cause severe disruption to flights throughout the Middle East and beyond on Sunday.
In response to the death of Iran’s supreme leader, celebration and mourning broke out across the country. In the squares of Tehran, crowds gathered to mourn Khamenei, chanting and holding placards with his image. But videos shared widely on social media also showed people celebrating, dancing, honking car horns and setting off fireworks as news of his death broke. Iranians across the world also reacted, with many celebrating, in an extraordinary public response to the end of nearly four decades of the top cleric’s rule.
In a pre-recorded video after the first bombs had fallen, Trump said the US had begun ‘major combat operations’ in Iran, warning that there may be US casualties. He said his objective was “to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”, and appealed to Iranian people to rise up against the government.
But this was not about supporting protesting Iranians or immediate threats, says the Guardian’s Julian Borger. The attack, launched barely 10 days after Trump hosted the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, which was supposedly going to resolve global conflict, and just months after the capture and deposing of Venezuelan president, shows Trump’s attempt to rewrite the rules of international law “as one where he alone makes the rules”, argues Borger.
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