Iran war updates: Trump mulls Tehran’s ‘annihilation’ as combat roils Yemen

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• US President Donald Trump says he will choose whether to “annihilate” Iran, adding that “anything could happen”.
• The IRGC said it struck a Togo-flagged tanker that attempted an “illegal passage” through the Strait of Hormuz.
• A UN fact-finding mission found “reasonable grounds” to believe the US was behind the February attacks that struck a school in Iran, constituting war crimes.
• The US dismissed the UN report on the school attack in Minab, calling it “nonsense”.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “mission must be completed” in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, during a speech kicking off his party’s election campaign.
• Yemeni government forces attempted to prevent Houthi advances with Saudi air support, near the Kahbub mountains and Taiz.
• The UN World Food Programme said about 125,000 have been displaced by fighting in Yemen.
• The US State Department approved visas for an Iranian delegation to attend the UN General Assembly in New York.
• The Israeli military said it carried out air strikes in Gaza, killing two Hamas commanders in recent days.

The US will ban Iran’s delegation to the UN General Assembly from purchasing wholesale club memberships and luxury goods while visiting New York, the State Department has said.

“The regime’s officials want to go on shopping sprees in New York. Not on our watch. We will not let the Iranian regime’s elites exploit UNGA for a luxury retail splurge paid for by the Iranian people’s suffering,” spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement on X.

Piggott urged New York retailers to be vigilant and not “become complicit in these violations”.

Israel has launched several attacks across southern Lebanon in recent hours, according to the country’s state-run National News Agency.

Four air strikes by Israeli warplanes were reported in al-Qantara and Nabatieh al-Fawqa. Another attack was launched on the Lebanese town of Talloussah.

The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced that the country will deliver approximately 1.3 million litres of fuel to meet humanitarian needs in Gaza, after a deal with the UN.

The deal comes at a time of continued fuel shortages in Gaza, particularly within the medical field. Just yesterday, bus drivers went on strike due to these shortages, which led to a massive reduction in medical staff at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Hasan al-Balaawi, the medical coordinator for Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, told Al Jazeera yesterday that low staff numbers forced the hospital to only handle emergency surgery and intensive care.

Major-General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, says unity among the Iranian people has become a “transformative reality in global power dynamics”.

“The powerful unity of 200 nights of presence, connecting the will of the nation in the field with the strategic guidance of the leadership, is not only a unique historical phenomenon in the international arena,” Safavi said, according to the SNN news agency.

“No new Israeli or American-imposed war can overcome the shield built from the people’s insight and the authority of the Islamic system,” he added.

The Kuwait Hospital says it will suspend most medical services and accept only emergency patients from Sunday because of a lack of fuel.

The hospital, one of the largest in the strip, said it was notified by the World Health Organization that fuel supplies needed to operate the facility would stop.

Surgical operations, maternity care, outpatient clinics, scans, laboratory testing, ambulance services and patient transport are among the services being suspended. General and maternity emergency departments will remain open.

The announcement comes amid worsening power shortages across Gaza’s health system. On Sunday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said several hospital generators had stopped operating due to shortages of fuel, engine oil and spare parts. It warned that the remaining generators were running around the clock and could not power every life-saving department.

Days earlier, staff at Nasser Hospital in the Khan Younis area of Gaza told Reuters that power was being rotated between buildings and that one of the facility’s four generators was already out of service.

The Kuwait Hospital warned that stopping services would deprive thousands of Palestinians of essential care each day.

Four Democratic lawmakers say that they introduced a resolution to stop the US-Saudi Arabia nuclear agreement.

US House representatives Gregory Meeks, Brad Sherman, John Garamendi and Don Beyer said the agreement does not align with nonproliferation standards and presents substantial risks.

“A region already gripped by conflict and escalation does not need another nuclear power. Saudi Arabia’s own statements make that risk explicit,” the lawmakers said in a statement.

The US president sent the proposed agreement to Congress in ⁠August, opening a 90-day window for lawmakers’ review.

The Trump administration says the deal has the ⁠nonproliferation measures required by law.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has welcomed a UN vote in favour of allowing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to address the annual UN General Assembly next week remotely, after the US again denied him a visa to travel to New York.

The resolution received 152 votes in ⁠favour and three votes against, while four countries abstained. It allows Abbas and other high-level Palestinian officials to take part in UN meetings or conferences via video over the next year if they are prevented from travelling ‌to the United States.

“A total of 152 countries voted in favor of the resolution, rejecting the US administration’s decision as a clear violation of the Headquarters Agreement,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a social media post, referring to regulations guiding the international body.

The US State Department said on Wednesday it would deny visas to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and officials with the Palestinian Authority over “failure to reform, contrary to their commitments to the United States, and their ongoing activities that undermine the prospects for peace”.

Israeli settlers have carried out several attacks on Palestinian property in the occupied West Bank, throwing stones at Palestinian-owned vehicles in the town of Asira ash-Shamaliya, near Nablus, and piling up stones to block a road that leads to a Palestinian community near Tubas in the northern Jordan Valley, reports the Wafa news agency.

Israeli settler pogroms are a daily occurrence in the occupied West Bank, according to rights groups and residents. In August alone, Israeli settlers carried out 2,030 attacks against Palestinians or Palestinian-owned land or property, according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian Authority government body.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, has warned that the humanitarian situation in Yemen continues to worsen as hostilities spread.

Dujarric said the UN Human Rights Office verified 55 civilian casualties from 19 incidents in the governorates of Taiz, Hodeidah, Marib and Lahj since the beginning of the month, but said the actual toll was likely to be much higher.

Among them, 16 people were killed, including 10 children, he added, saying that restrictions to access, funding shortages and security incidents involving humanitarian premises were hindering the international response.

The White House has rejected a UN human rights report finding “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed war crimes in two strikes in Iran on February 28, including on a school in the southern city of Minab.

Spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the UN’s Human Rights Council has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades,” according to remarks carried by The Washington Post. Kelly added, “The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime.” The Trump administration has yet to acknowledge any responsibility for the attack on the school or release a Pentagon investigation into the incident.

The report, published Thursday by a UN fact-finding mission, centres on two US air strikes on the first day of the war which killed at least 178 civilians. The attacks include the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, which Iranian media say killed 168 people, mostly children. The UN mission concluded the school “was the intended point of impact”, not collateral damage.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has kicked off his Likud Party’s election campaign by saying he and his party “are the only ones who can guarantee Israel’s security”.

“The mission must be completed; we must bring down the Iranian regime and totally destroy Hezbollah and Hamas,” he said in his speech ahead of the October 27 elections.

Netanyahu went on to list Israeli military operations in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip since 2023, accusing his rivals of wanting to make “territorial concessions” and pointing to the presence of Israeli troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza as evidence that “we take land instead of giving it”.

Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has praised China and Russia for vetoing a US draft resolution at the UN Security Council seeking to reimpose international sanctions on Tehran, saying the move “rejected the political abuse of the Security Council and reaffirmed the rule of law.”

“The unipolar order in which one side extracts concessions through force and coercion has ended,” said Ghalibaf.

Iranian forces have brought down at least two American MQ-1 unmanned aircraft in recent days, according to a CBS News report citing anonymous US officials familiar with the matter.

The US military has fielded two principal MQ-1 variants: the Predator, retired by the air force in 2018 after years of use in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the Gray Eagle, a larger, Predator-derived aircraft still operated by the army including its special operations forces. The type of drones and where they were downed were unclear.

Both are designed for surveillance but can also carry Hellfire missiles. If the downed aircraft were older Predators, the loss of two would equate to roughly $8 million total, CBS reported. Gray Eagles are costlier, running into tens of millions of dollars depending on the type.

At least 24 MQ-9 Reapers have been lost since the war with Iran began, costing roughly $720 million, according to a Congressional Budget Office report released this week.

The report also said an MQ-4C Triton maritime drone was destroyed, an estimated $150 million loss. US Central Command declined to comment to CBS News on Thursday.

The US State Department says it has approved the potential sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in a package that will cost an estimated $24.3bn.

Saudi Arabia had requested the purchase of 48 F-35 aircraft, 49 Pratt & Whitney F135-PW-100 engines, communications equipment, spare parts and ⁠other support items, according to a statement.

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” the State Department said.

The State Department added that the sale of the fighter jets “will not alter the military balance in the region”.

US President Donald Trump designated Saudi Arabia a major non-NATO ally of the United States in November 2025.