The Latest: Crude oil hits $100 a barrel as Iran vows to keep fighting after 6,000 US airstrikes

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Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on the war on Thursday, saying Iran should close the Strait of Hormuz and keep attacking its Gulf Arab neighbors as leverage. Khamenei also called on people in Gulf countries to “shut down” U.S. bases, saying promised U.S. protection is “nothing more than a lie.”

An Iranian ambassador said Khamenei was injured in the war’s opening salvo, which the Iranian leader said killed his wife, one of his sisters, his niece and his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

As American and Israeli strikes pound the Islamic Republic and Iran attacks Persian Gulf shipping and energy infrastructure with no sign of an end to the war, oil prices have soared back above $100 a barrel.

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to “finish the job,” even as Iran is “virtually destroyed.” The first week of war cost the United States $11.3 billion, according to the Pentagon. The U.N. refugee agency says up to 3.2 million people in Iran have been displaced, and authorities in Lebanon say 800,000 have been forced from their homes as Israel’s military destroys buildings linked to Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.

Here's the latest:

Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service said some 30 people were hurt in a missile attack on Zarzir, a city around 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Jerusalem near the border with Lebanon. It described most of the wounds as coming from glass broken in the attack.

Hezbollah said early Friday it had fired several rocket salvos toward Israel.

The defense ministry said early Friday that they were headed toward the kingdom’s Eastern Province. It was a larger than usual number of aerial threats for the country.

Sites in Saudi Arabia including the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, oil infrastructure and a military base hosting U.S. troops have been targeted as the Iran war rages on.

The attack targeted Irbil in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, President Emmanuel Macron said Friday on the social platform X.

Macron identified the soldier as Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion of the 7th Battalion of Chasseurs Alpins from Varces.

“To his family, to his brothers in arms, I want to express all the affection and solidarity of the nation,” Macron said. “Several of our soldiers have been wounded. France stands by their side and with their loved ones.”

France said earlier that six soldiers were hurt in a drone attack in Irbil. French troops are in Iraq as part of a multinational counterterrorism mission supporting local forces in their fight against Islamic State militants.

The Trump administration is trying to make up for oil that can’t pass through the Strait of Hormuz because of the Iran war.

The new Treasury Department exemption applies only to Russian oil already at sea.

Last week analysts estimated there were about 125 million barrels loaded on tankers. To put that in perspective, about 20 million barrels of oil per day usually pass through the strait, according to the International Energy Agency.

— Intense airstrikes struck early Friday around Iran’s capital, Tehran, as well as outlying areas. was not immediately clear what had been targeted.

— Bahrain sounded sirens warning of an incoming Iranian attack.

— Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry said it downed 28 drones after they entered the kingdom’s airspace.

— Israel’s military said Iran launched missiles toward Israel.

The refueling plane is part of the operation against Iran and went down in western Iraq, but it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.

A U.S. official who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the developing situation said at least five crew members were aboard.

U.S. Central Command said rescue efforts were underway and a second plane was involved. It also said the crash was not tied to hostile fire or friendly fire.

The KC-135 tankers typically have a crew of three. It was not immediately clear what role the extra crew members were performing aboard the flight.

— Konstantin Toropin

The U.S. Treasury Department announced Thursday that it was taking steps to further ease sanctions on Russian oil as crude prices surge during the Iran war.

The agency said it was granting a license that authorizes the delivery and sale of some sanctioned Russia crude oil and petroleum products for the next month.

Trump signaled this week that he would take further action to ease restrictions on sanctioned oil to help make for the loss of oil flowing to the market because of the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

“So we have sanctions on some countries,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We’re going to take those sanctions off until the strait is up.”

The move follows the administration granting temporary permission for India to buy Russian oil.

The president weighed in on the status of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei after the supreme leader issued his first statement since being appointed.

Asked if he thinks Khamenei is alive, Trump said, “I think he probably is.”

“I think he is damaged, but I think he’s probably alive in some form, you know,” Trump said, speaking to the Brian Kilmeade Show on Fox News Radio. The interview was taped Thursday to air Friday morning.

Khamenei has not appeared in public since the start of the war.

Since starting a war with Iran caused oil and gasoline prices to spike, The president has pivoted from a focus on keeping energy prices low to painting high oil prices as a positive.

The about-face comes as his team has struggled to offer a clear plan for opening up the critical Strait of Hormuz so tankers full of oil and natural gas are no longer stranded.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump said Thursday on his social media site.

It was only last month, in his State of the Union address, that Trump bragged about gas prices at $2.30 a gallon, a figure that has since soared more than 50% to a national average of $3.60 a gallon, according to AAA.

▶ Read more about Trump and gas prices

The soldiers were injured Thursday in the Irbil region of Iraq, the French military said, and were immediately taken to the nearest medical center.

They were engaged in counterterrorism training operations with Iraqi partners at the time, according to the military. No other details were provided.

French troops are in Iraq as part of a multinational counterterrorism mission supporting local forces in their fight against Islamic State militants.

Rescue efforts are underway after a U.S. military refueling plane went down in Iraq, U.S. Central Command said Thursday,

The KC-135 aircraft is part of the operation against Iran, but the crash was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire, the military said.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, said in a statement that two aircraft were involved in the incident. One landed safely, while the other went down in western Iraq.

A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a developing situation, said the other plane involved also was a KC-135 tanker.

— Ben Finley and Konstantin Toropin

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This item has been corrected to show that the U.S. Central Command statement doesn’t say the refueling aircraft belongs to the Air Force.

One attack on the village of Erkay, in the Sidon district, killed nine people, including five children, Lebanon’s health ministry said, adding that seven others were wounded.

An AP photographer who visited the scene found several buildings flattened and widespread destruction. Rescue workers searched through the rubble.

Two other Israeli strikes on separate towns in southern Lebanon killed six more, the ministry said.

Israel’s renewed offensive in Lebanon began March 2 after Hezbollah launched rockets toward northern Israel during the early days of the war triggered by the U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran.

The Defense Department said in a statement that its efforts to reduce civilian harm are “currently undergoing a strategic reassessment to inform its future reorganization.”

AP has reported that outdated intelligence likely led to the United States carrying out a missile strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed over 165 people, many of them children.

The Pentagon did not address media reports and critics who said that the military slashed the size of its mission central to civilian protection and that the emphasis on updating intelligence had come to a near halt.

The statement did acknowledge, however, that a “reorganization” was being conducted and that functions to reduce civilian casualties have been “streamlined” directly into the operations of combatant commands.

“Iran has an inherent right to preserve the peace and security in the Strait of Hormuz, and it is our responsibility,” Amir Saeid Iravani, Tehran’s envoy to the U.N., told reporters Thursday.

His comments come a few hours after Iran’s new supreme leader issued his first statement on the war, saying that the leverage of closing the strategic waterway should be used in the ongoing war with Israel and the U.S.

Iran’s attacks on shipping during the war have effectively closed the strait.

At least 18 instances in which Israel struck checkpoints operated by Iran’s paramilitary Basij forces, mostly in the capital, were documented on Wednesday alone by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, the U.S-based group known as ACLED.

ACLED said the strikes may be aimed at stoking unrest among the security forces, who play a key role in suppressing dissent.

Since the start of the war, ACLED said at least 30% of its recorded U.S. and Israeli strikes have targeted Iran’s system of internal control, including police stations and sites used by intelligence and Revolutionary Guard forces involved in domestic security.

Israel’s prime minister said Thursday that his country was trying to create the conditions for Iranians to rise up against the government. However, hundreds of thousands of people work for the internal security forces across the country, ACLED said.

With no clear end in sight, the war with Iran sent oil prices back to $100 per barrel on Thursday, and stocks sank worldwide.

The S&P 500 fell 1.5% and resumed its sharp swings following a couple days of relative calm. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 739 points, or 1.6%, and the Nasdaq composite lost 1.8%.

The center of action was again the oil market, where the price of a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, climbed 9.2% to settle at $100.46. Worries are worsening that the war could block the production of oil in the Persian Gulf for a long time and cause a debilitating surge of inflation for the global economy.

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At least four of Iran’s nearly 30 historical sites, including palaces and an ancient mosque, have sustained damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes during the war.

The speed and extent of the damage made Iran and Lebanon so concerned that they sent a request this week to the United Nations’ cultural agency, UNESCO, to add more sites to its enhanced protection list.

UNESCO said it shared site coordinates with combatants beforehand to help avoid damage, but warned that modern conflicts increasingly endanger civilians, infrastructure and cultural heritage.

One nonprofit group has pointed to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth saying last week that America’s approach to the war would not include “stupid rules of engagement.”

▶ Read more

Israeli attacks killed one senior scientist involved in developing nuclear weapons and hit several other Irani scientists, the prime minister said as he took questions Thursday from reporters for the first time since this war began.

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This item has been updated to correct that Netanyahu said Israeli attacks killed a top Iranian nuclear scientist, not multiple scientists.

“It is not a serious injury and he is recovering,” Mir Masoud Hosseinian, Iran’s ambassador to Tunisia, told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday.

Iranian officials have released little information about Khamenei's condition, although an Israeli intelligence assessment suggests he was wounded in the war’s opening strikes. He did not appear on television Thursday when his first statement as supreme leader was read by a news anchor.

Hosseinian also denounced the countries hosting U.S. bases in the Gulf and said they had exposed themselves to the conflict.

“We will decide how this war ends,” he said.

At a news conference Thursday night, the Israeli prime minister denounced Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as a “puppet of the Revolutionary Guards” who cannot appear in public.

And he addressed the Iranian people, saying the moment for a “new path of freedom” was approaching and Israel stands with them.

“But at the end of the day, it depends on you. It is in your hands,” he said.

Netanyahu says the U.S.-Israeli strikes against the country are an effort to give Iranians “the space needed to go out to the streets.”

Israel and the U.S. have given conflicting answers about what exactly the war’s objectives are and what the endgame is.

As Netanyahu was speaking, Israel’s military said it had detected a new barrage of missiles launched from Iran toward Israel.

An attack on a base in northern Iraq resulted in no significant injuries to American personnel, a U.S. defense official said Thursday.

The official, who wasn’t authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. personnel are still on duty after Wednesday’s attack.

British military officials said earlier Thursday that several U.S. personnel were injured in drone strikes at a base in Irbil that houses both British and American troops.

The U.K. and U.S. military officials did not specify if the wounded were American troops.

— Ben Finley

Iran’s parliament speaker warned on Thursday that attacks on the Persian Gulf islands on Iran’s southern maritime frontier would provoke a new level of retaliation, underscoring how central they are to the country’s economy and security.

In a social media post, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf said Iran “will abandon all restraint” if the islands come under attack and said Trump will be responsible for “the blood of American soldiers.”

Kharg Island, Qeshm Island, and the tiny islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb carry outsized importance because of their oil facilities and strategic location. “A direct strike would immediately halt the bulk of Iran’s crude exports, likely triggering severe retaliation,” JPMorgan said in an investment note this week.

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Gen. Alexus Grynkewich told lawmakers on a Senate committee that the precious weapons systems have been moved from Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean to protect NATO allies. He also said “we do have a robust set of air defenses in the Middle East.”

The general was pressed on the issue by Sen. Angus King, and independent from Maine, who cited Ukraine’s need for such weapons systems to defend against Russia.

Democratic lawmakers have argued Trump is waging a “war of choice” as munitions for missile defense systems diminish. The Trump administration has repeatedly said American forces have all the weapons they need.

A top Pentagon official addressed concerns Thursday that outdated intelligence likely led to a deadly American missile strike on an Iranian school.

Gen. Alexus Grynkewich spoke at a Senate committee hearing on European operations. But Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, D-N.Y., pressed the head of European Command on the strike and on staffing cuts at a Pentagon office that focuses on reducing civilian casualties.

“We have robust standards that we go through, and look to see and update the imagery, and update our understanding of the target and refresh the intelligence on a recurring basis to determine the chances of civilian harm,” he said.

The Israeli strike that hit in the vicinity of Lebanon’s only public university killed the director of the faculty of sciences Hussein Bazzi and professor Mortada Srour.

The campus is in Hadath, on the outskirts of Beirut’s southern suburbs, which Israel had warned last week should be evacuated. It was not clear whether the campus was directly targeted, but smoke could be seen rising near the building’s courtyard in the aftermath. Israel had no immediate comment.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the bombing, which he said targeted the campus, as a crime and a “violation of international laws and norms that prohibit attacks on educational institutions and civilians.”

Pro-Iranian hackers targeting sites in the Middle East are starting to stretch into the United States, raising risks that American defense contractors, power stations and water plants could be swept into the Iran war’s digital chaos.

Hackers supporting Iran claimed responsibility for a significant cyberattack Wednesday against U.S. medical device company Stryker. They’ve also tried to penetrate cameras in Middle Eastern countries to improve Iran’s missile targeting, and hit data centers in the region, industrial facilities in Israel, a school in Saudi Arabia and an airport in Kuwait.

“Something is going to happen because the gloves are off,” said Kevin Mandia, founder of the cybersecurity companies Mandiant and Armadin.

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Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first statement on the war Thursday — read by a state television news anchor — vowing to avenge not just the killings of his father and other leaders by the U.S. and Israel, but that of every Iranian who has died in this war.

“I assure everyone that we will not refrain from avenging the blood of your martyrs,” his statement said. “The retaliation we have in mind is not limited only to the martyrdom of the great leader of the Revolution; rather, every member of the nation who is martyred by the enemy constitutes a separate case in the file of revenge.”

▶ Read more of Khamenei’s comments

The Iran war threatens some of the world’s most critical oil and gas infrastructure — the pipelines, refineries, and shipping terminals that keep energy flowing from the Persian Gulf region to the global economy.

Strikes by Iranian drones and missiles have disrupted some operations, while the risk of Iranian strikes has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for some 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Oil fields in the region have cut back output as storage fills up.

All that is raising the cost of everything that needs fuel made from crude: flying, cooking, heating homes, running factories, transporting goods, and farming.

▶ Read about the key infrastructure at risk.

Israel’s military said Thursday night it had begun another wave of strikes on Lebanon’s capital, saying it was targeting Hezbollah sites.

It came after Israeli strikes earlier Thursday hit a building in a busy residential and commercial district in central Beirut, close to the prime minister’s office, the U.N. building and foreign embassies.

The U.S. military said Thursday that American forces have now struck more than 6,000 targets since the operation against Iran began Feb. 28, including 30-plus minelaying vessels. It's aiming to prevent Iranian threats from closing oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The war in Iran has ground tanker traffic through the chokepoint to a halt and oil prices have been swinging sharply. The Islamic Republic vowed to prevent "even a single liter' of oil from reaching its enemies and their allies.

The 1920s law is often blamed for making gas more expensive. It requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be moved on U.S.-flagged vessels, and is designed to protect the American shipbuilding sector.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that temporarily waiving the requirement could “ensure vital energy products and agricultural necessities are flowing freely to U.S. ports.” The action has not been finalized, she said.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the U.S.-Israeli military strikes, followed by Iran’s retaliatory attacks, have caused “immense suffering” and pushed the region to a breaking point.

“And as always, the most vulnerable are being hurt first and worst,” Guterres said. “De-escalation and dialogue are the only way out.”

He made the comments in the Turkish capital where he received the country’s peace prize on behalf of global U.N. staff.