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Middle East crisis live: Israel says it has launched ‘extensive strikes’ on Iran as Trump says US ‘not ready’ to make a deal to end war

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) confirmed on Sunday that the 2026 Finalissima, a highly anticipated clash between South American champions Argentina and European champions Spain, has been cancelled due to the war. Originally set for March 27 at Doha’s Lusail Stadium in Qatar, the site of Argentina’s 2022 World Cup victory, the match was called off because of the escalating war in the Middle East. While UEFA proposed alternative European venues like the Santiago Bernabéu, the Argentinian Football Association (AFA) rejected the move to Spain, and both sides failed to reach an agreement on a neutral site. The war has caused a wave of cancellations and uncertainty across the sporting world. The Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix, scheduled for April, have been officially removed from the 2026 calendar on safety grounds. Trump has also suggested it would not be “appropriate” for Iran’s national team to compete in the upcoming tournament for “their own life and safety.”

Jürgen Habermas obituary

The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences. He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps. “All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system,” he later wrote. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans’ “collectively realised inhumanity” constituted what he described as “that first rupture, which still gapes”. His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture. Their student would follow suit. Adorno and Horkheimer had returned from American exile after the war to re-establish the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, and were developing an interdisciplinary way of thinking called critical theory. Adorno, in particular, whose assistant Habermas became in 1956, mused on whether “one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”. Habermas, perhaps because he was young and perhaps because he was not Jewish, went beyond his teacher’s guilt and despair. Where Adorno had developed a philosophical anti-method called negative dialectics, Habermas sought, like the titans of German philosophy – Kant, Hegel and Marx – to develop system and method. He did so in order to work out how, as he once wrote, “citizens could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process”. He took from Adorno the need to create a “new categorical imperative that Hitler has imposed on mankind: namely, to order their thought and actions such that Auschwitz never reoccurs”. As social theorist, legal theorist, social critic and philosopher, he advocated a new direction for German thought after the Nazi period. Born in Düsseldorf, Jürgen grew up in Gummersbach, to the east of Cologne. When the second world war ended he had two years of rearguard action against the allied advance behind him. He thus became part of the so-called “Flakhelfer-Generation” (anti-aircraft generation) of postwar intellectuals such as the novelist Günter Grass and sociologists Ralf Dahrendorf and Niklas Luhmann, intellectuals who had, as teenagers, helped to defend Hitler. In 1946, he enrolled at the University of Bonn, later also studying philosophy at Göttingen and Zurich. He was hardly a radical: indeed, he spent four years between 1949 and 1953 studying the philosopher and one-time Nazi party member Martin Heidegger. But Habermas challenged Heidegger in 1953 to explain what he meant in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics by the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. Heidegger never replied, confirming for Habermas that German philosophy had failed in its moment of reckoning. Heidegger’s silence seemed to him symptomatic of the repressive, silencing anti-discourse prevalent in the new Federal Republic. Just as Heidegger refused to acknowledge his support for the Nazis, so Konrad Adenauer’s government, mired in anti-communist jeremiads against its East German neighbour, refused to acknowledge or definitively break with Germany’s recent past. By the time Habermas was appointed Adorno’s assistant at the institute in 1956, he had already obtained his PhD on the idealist philosopher Friedrich von Schelling. At Frankfurt he was exposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s project of unmasking the so-called “positivist illusion” in natural and social sciences, whereby a theory is a correct mirroring of facts. Instead, following Hegel and Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer insisted that facts and theories are part of an unfolding historical process. However, Adorno and Horkheimer’s so-called Dialectic of Enlightenment turned Hegel on its head: much influenced by the German sociologist Max Weber, they argued that the process of Enlightenment, which involved extending control over human beings, was not a historical progress to freedom and absolute knowledge but an extension of domination of power over people, an unwitting march that had led to the death camps. Habermas shared in some of his teachers’ diagnosis. But he was unwilling to concede that the Enlightenment itself was caught in a bad dialectic that sabotaged human striving for emancipation. He argued in his habilitation thesis – the postdoctoral work required for a professorship – that there was another form of rationality, geared to understanding rather than means-and-ends success, that was not the cause of but the possible solution to our ills. Horkheimer demanded changes to this thesis, and this, plus Habermas’s growing worries over his teachers’ contempt for modern culture, led him to quit Frankfurt in 1961 to finish his thesis at Marburg University, under the Marxist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth. The following year he became professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University and his habilitation thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Investigation of a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), was published. “By the ‘public sphere’, we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed,” wrote Habermas. “Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express their opinions – about matters of general interest.” In the revivification of the public sphere, the role of intellectuals such as Habermas was key – they must guide debate towards a rational consensus, rather than allowing media manipulators to stifle freedom of expression. Habermas argued that rationally achieved consensus, which Adorno’s negative dialectics implacably refused, was possible for human flourishing post Auschwitz. The barriers preventing the exercise of reason could be identified and reduced. Adorno lured Habermas back to Frankfurt in 1964, when he took over Horkheimer’s job as professor of philosophy and sociology. However, his developing philosophy was derided as politically tame by the student radicals of the late 1960s. In June 1967, he shared a platform in Hanover with the student leaders Rudi Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl to discuss The University and Democracy: Conditions and Organisation of Resistance. Habermas spoke in support of the student radicals’ programme, but not their means. He rounded on Dutschke for pursuing revolution by “any means necessary”, arguing: “In my opinion, he has presented a voluntarist ideology which was called utopian socialism in 1848, but which in today’s context ... has to be called left fascism.” Reason, Habermas maintained, was crucial to clear communication and such communication was a bulwark against fascism. Violence could have no role in that. The Enlightenment, Habermas concluded, continued to have “a sound core”. But in accepting the Enlightenment legacy Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals but by postmodernist thinkers. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, said: “After the massacres we have experienced, no one can believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.” Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defended those values against postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Postmodernism was never Habermas’s bag. It, like Dutschke’s politics, seemed to him to flirt with nihilism and so reminded him of the Nazi era. Emblematically, after leaving Frankfurt in 1971 to become co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Research Into Conditions of Living in a Scientific and Technological World, in Starnberg, a small lakeside town near Munich, he and his wife, Ute Wesselhoeft, whom he married in 1955, built a house inspired by the Bauhaus architect Adolf Loos. There they raised three children in a house filled with light and books. The Habermases kept that home even after, in 1983, he returned to teach at Frankfurt. Its austere optimism suited him. At the Max Planck Institute, Habermas developed the thoughts that would lead to his magnum opus, the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981). It was in part a retort to his now dead teachers Adorno and Horkheimer in that it argued for the emancipatory power of communicative reason against instrumental reason. He worried that citizens were becoming disenfranchised in the modern system. Against this gloomy diagnosis, he pitted a hopeful “ideal speech situation” in which citizens are able to raise moral and political concerns and defend them by rationality alone. Habermas wrote voluminously in disciplines including social theory, aesthetics, epistemology, sociology, communication studies, psychology and theology. Moreover, he commented in German papers on controversial issues of the day such as European integration, and engaged in public dialogues with figures as various as Derrida and Pope Benedict XVI. Typical of his taste for public interventions was his involvement in the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) which raged for four years from 1986. The German historian Ernst Nolte had recently argued that “Auschwitz ... was above all a reaction born out of the annihilating occurrences of the Russian Revolution ... the so-called annihilation of the Jews during the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original.” Nolte argued that the Gulag Archipelago came before Auschwitz and inferred from this that Germany “reasonably” turned to nazism in the face of Bolshevik threat. Four decades after the fall of Hitler, Habermas sensed that Nolte and other rightwing historians were trying to exonerate their nation. In a series of articles attacking this attempt “to make Auschwitz unexceptional”, he wrote of “the obligation incumbent upon us to keep alive ... the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands”. Eminent philosopher critics such as Richard Rorty and Slavoj Žižek have argued that the intellectual bulwarks that Habermas built against fascism were inadequate. They contended that the public sphere as a place of purely rational debate never existed, and that his cherished notion of communicative action was a utopian dream. Against such criticisms, Habermas – utopian modernist living in a postmodern dystopia, most engaged of European public intellectuals – retorted in an interview: “If there is any small remnant of utopia that I’ve preserved, then it is surely the idea that democracy is capable of hacking through the Gordian knot of otherwise insoluble problems. I’m not saying we’re going to succeed in this; we don’t even know whether success is possible. But because we don’t know, we still have to try.” Habermas kept trying and remained a public intellectual, always engaged about what his work had achieved. In 2015, for instance, the Guardian asked him about his fellow sociologist Wolfgang Streeck’s view that the Habermasian ideal of a united Europe was at the root of the Greek debt crisis, and that the European Union would not save democracy but abolish it. Habermas agreed. He argued that the united democratic Europe he dreamed of was being perverted by EU institutions such as the council and commission as well as the European Central Bank, “in other words, the very institutions that are either insufficiently legitimated to take such decisions or lack any democratic basis … this technocratic hollowing out of democracy is the result of a neoliberal pattern of market-deregulation policies”. But even as the EU looked to him increasingly like a technocratic cabal, Habermas held firm to his vision of a European-wide democratic community, not least, one might well think, as the best bulwark against the rise of populist movements that so painfully echoed the nazism of his youth – even as Brexit was being plotted: “I do not see how a return to nation states that have to be run like big corporations in a global market can counter the tendency towards de-democratisation and growing inequality – something that we also see in Great Britain, by the way.” In 2023, Habermas was drawn into the question of whether Israel was perpetrating genocide in Gaza following the 7 October Hamas terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians. On 13 November that year, Habermas put his name to a statement called Principles of Solidarity, arguing that Israel’s military retaliation following the 7 October attacks was “justified” and that “Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era”. “Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population ... the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions,” said the statement, which was also signed by the political scientist Rainer Forst, the lawyer Klaus Günther and the peace researcher Nicole Deitelhoff. In response, on 22 November, several leading figures influenced by the Frankfurt School published an open letter, appearing in the Guardian, effectively arguing against its most prominent living member. The principle of “never again”, a central tenet of Germany’s political identity since the horrors of the Nazi-led Holocaust of Europe’s Jewish population, must also mean staying alert to the possibility that what was unfolding in Gaza could amount to genocide. Habermas carried on writing well into his 10th decade. Last year saw the publication of the last part of his three-volume Also a History of Philosophy, in which he explored how figures such as Kant, Hume, Marx, Kierkegaard and Peirce spurred the central themes of his philosophical enterprise – his pragmatist theory of meaning, his communicative theories of subjectivity and sociality, and his discursive theory of normativity. His final book of conversations with colleagues, Things Needed to Get Better, appeared in English last November. It was both rebuke to his more defeatist teachers and to the manifold follies of our age. “I view the attempt to make the world even the tiniest bit better,” he said, “or even just to be part of the effort to stave off the constant threats of regression that we face, as an utterly admirable motive.” Ute died last year. He is survived by his children Tilmann and Judith. Another daughter, Rebekka, died in 2023. • Friedrich Ernst Jürgen Habermas, philosopher and social theorist, born 18 June 1929; died 14 March 2026

Cory Booker calls both parties ‘feckless’ for ceding war powers to Trump

Democratic US senator Cory Booker has criticized both his own political party as well as its Republican counterpart for being “feckless” in ceding congressional war powers to Donald Trump, saying that their decision could embolden the president to unilaterally attack Cuba, North Korea and other countries. “I’m going to be one of those Democrats [who] say I think both parties have been feckless in allowing the growth of the power of the presidency,” Booker said on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. The New Jersey senator said nothing Barack Obama did while in the White House – or that even Trump did before his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden – was “in any way related to what we’re seeing right now”. Booker’s comments alluded to US military strikes Trump has ordered in Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran since Christmas. He called the war that the US and Israel started in Iran on 28 February – when a missile strike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – “the biggest military engagement of our country since the war in Afghanistan”. Meanwhile, during that stretch, Trump has also renewed threats to seize Greenland for the US by military force if necessary. Booker’s fellow Democrats in the US House put forth a measure calling for a stop to US military action in Iran. But without support from members of Trump’s Republican party, the measure failed, and the military campaign in Iran has continued. One day prior, the US Senate rejected a war powers resolution in a 47-53 vote that largely followed party lines. Booker pointed to how the spiraling conflict has not only roiled regional stability but oil markets as well. The strait of Hormuz, a waterway crucial to world trade, has been closed for two weeks as of Sunday. “Literally, you see with what’s going on in the strait of Hormuz right now as the biggest gumming up of the oil markets we have ever seen,” Booker said to CNN. “The consequences strategically for us moving so many assets in the region means that we’re endangering the assets we have necessarily and potentially in other areas.” Booker alluded to the deaths of 13 US military members amid reported as of Sunday amid the Iran conflict, saying: “This is a massive military undertaking, costing American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars and tragically costing 13 lives.” He recognized that previous presidents had strayed from limits on their power to engage in war but maintained Trump’s Iran campaign had exceeded that precedent. “At this magnitude, at this cost, why is Congress just laying down and doing nothing?” Booker said. “Because, if we allow this to happen, then we give Trump the permission to say, ‘OK, finished with Venezuela, I went to Iran, now I’m going to go to Cuba, now I’m going to go to North Korea.’ “It is outrageous and never conceived of that we could have this level of a military engagement without the people’s house, Congress, doing something about it.”

War on Iran may provoke a terrorist attack in US – and that may be the point

For decades, the US and its allies have painted Iran as the world’s biggest sponsor of state terrorism – invoking its Islamic rulers’ supposed revolutionary fanaticism and determined support for militant proxies. Now a long-standing but mainly latent threat is coalescing, with the war waged on the country by the US and Israel, to raise the risk of an attack on American soil to levels unseen since the murderous al-Qaida assaults of 11 September 2001, experts say. In an election year, opponents of Donald Trump are warning that such an event could rebound to his advantage – providing him with a pretext to crack down on critics by declaring a state of emergency or even cancelling November’s congressional midterm elections. Two attacks on Thursday alone illustrated the heightened dangers. One person was killed and two others wounded when a gunman yelling “Allahu Akbar” opened fire in a classroom at Old Dominion University in Virginia. The shooter was later identified as a former national guardsman who had previously admitted trying to provide material support to the Islamic State. In Michigan, a Lebanese-born US citizen rammed a truck into the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, before being shot dead by security guards. The attacker, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, had lost two brothers and a niece and nephew in an Israeli raid on Lebanon this month. This week’s events followed a deadly attack on 1 March in which a man wearing clothes with an Iranian flag design and bearing the words “property of Allah” shot two people dead and wounded 14 in a bar in Austin, Texas, before he was fatally shot by police. While there is no direct evidence linking the incidents directly to Iran, analysts say an “asymmetric” attack ordered or inspired by Tehran in response to the US-Israeli military action is a real and present danger. At the same time, instability at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security has left the US underprepared. Matthew Levitt, a counter-terrorism specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said threats from Tehran were escalating even before the current campaign began on 28 February – as Iran sought revenge for last June’s 12-day war, which saw US strikes badly damage its nuclear facilities, while Israel killed a spate of senior commanders. US authorities are believed to have discovered and stopped 17 Iranian-inspired plots in the past five years. Some of these had a “Keystone cops” quality, Levitt said, but that did not lessen the threat level. “The fact that many of the plots do not seem particularly capable doesn’t mean that they won’t ultimately succeed,” argued Levitt, the author of a detailed study, entitled Tehran’s Homeland Option. “We need to get it right every time, they need to get it right once.” Iran is likely to “pull out all the stops” not only to raise the costs of the war to the US and preserve the Islamic regime, but also to avenge the killing of its most powerful figure, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died in an Israeli strike on the war’s opening day. “Once the war ends, the threat is maybe not as immediately acute, but it’ll hang over us,” Levitt said. “There’ll be a tail to this because from the Iranian perspective, all kinds of lines have been crossed. They will want to exact a cost to try and raise a level of deterrence so that people think two and three times before initiating another round.” The clerical regime is already believed to have plotted to kill Trump and two senior officials from his first administration – Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and the ex-national security adviser, John Bolton – in revenge for the US assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds force in January 2020. A Pakistani national, Asif Merchant, was convicted in a court in New York on 6 March of plotting to murder US officials, including Trump, at the direction of the Revolutionary Guards. Last week, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council and one of the regime’s most powerful surviving figures, appeared to renew the threat against Trump, telling him: “Watch out for yourself – lest you be eliminated!” The comment followed Trump’s threat to intensify strikes on Iran if it blocked the strait of Hormuz, something it now claims to have done. Reports in recent days suggest that Iran may have tried to activate “sleeper cells” in the US. On the day the war started, a Farsi-speaking man was heard on short-wave radio reading out what was believed to be a cipher code, a time-honored method used by spy agencies such as the CIA and KGB to contact undercover agents. Analysts have expressed skepticism about the “sleeper” agent threat, although one man, Ali Kourani, a naturalized US citizen originally from Lebanon, described himself as such to investigators after being accused of plotting to strike targets in New York for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that is widely seen as Iran’s proxy. “When the FBI asked him, under what circumstances would he expect to be called upon to act on the pre-operational surveillance he’d done all over New York City and elsewhere, he said definitely if the United States was ever in direct conflict with Iran,” said Levitt, who testified in the case. Kourani received a 40-year jail sentence. “He also talked about if the United States was involved in assassinating senior Hezbollah or Iranian leaders, and these are all in the rear-view mirror at this point.” Threats are also likely to take the shape of criminal surrogates – which Iran tried to use in an unsuccessful plot to murder a US-based Iranian journalist, Masih Alinejad, and in the attempts against Bolton and Pompeo – and Iranian-inspired lone actors. John Donohue, a former assistant head of intelligence in the New York police department and a fellow at Rutgers University, said the existential threat posed to the Iranian regime by US and Israeli attacks might drive it to deploy long term assets it has paid to have in place in the US. “The long-term investment of the Iranian regime in building its capabilities externally can’t be underestimated,” said Donohue, who recalled Iranian operatives being arrested for scouting landmarks in New York for possible attacks. “If you look at the history of the attempts of the Iranian regime against American interests, you don’t see small, limited types of events. They’re looking for mass-casualty incidents. “They tend to be very deliberative and strategic in how they do things. [But] now, with great concern over the survivability of the regime, does that cause them to be less strategic? Does that cause them to be more reflexive and ad hoc? That’s the real question.” Observers question the readiness of the FBI and homeland security department to meet a stepped-up Iranian threat. Fledgling agents at the FBI’s training academy have been re-deployed as uniformed police officers in Washington DC on instructions of the bureau’s director, Kash Patel, Donohue said. Meanwhile, vital homeland security surveillance functions have been temporarily mothballed thanks to a partial DHS shutdown after Democrats refused to continue funding the department unless reforms were made to how Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operate. “Readiness is a huge issue,” said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a group studying global security. “[The administration] have diverted resources away from counter-terrorism and toward immigration enforcement. We’ve shifted longtime terrorism experts to other portfolios, like China, Russia, emerging tech. This is ramping up at the same time that we’re the least prepared to deal with it.” It is also happening at a time when Trump is desperately seeking to avoid a Republican defeat in November’s congressional midterms, with a series of polls showing sinking approval ratings and low support for the Iran offensive. Writing on Substack, the historian Timothy Snyder warned that a terrorist attack could work in Trump’s favor and might even explain his reasoning for launching the military action. “A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States,” Snyder wrote. “This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming congressional elections. “Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely.” The argument was bolstered by Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, a group of retired national security officers concerned about the US’s authoritarian drift under Trump. “We’ve used our technological and economic advantage to kill thousands of Iranians and religious leaders, including the [chief] ayatollah [Khamenei]. We’ve destroyed whatever capability of both defense and deterrence that they would have through what we would consider appropriate military means, and we’ve left them with nothing else,” he said. “Of course there’s going to be retaliation – it’s a rational response on their part. It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in. He has spent a year trying to convince Americans that we are facing a terrible domestic threat. “Suddenly this unprecedented and unprovoked attack on another country – probably in violation of the constitution and international law – is going to create the very conditions that he unsuccessfully tried to convince us would justify extraordinary powers of the presidency.”

Israel claims brother of Michigan synagogue attacker was Hezbollah commander

Israel’s military claimed on Sunday that the brother of the recent Michigan synagogue attacker was a Hezbollah commander responsible for managing weapons in a unit that has launched “hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians”. In a statement posted on X, the IDF claimed that Ibrahim Mohamad Ghazali – brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali – was a Hezbollah commander within a specialized branch of the Badr unit. Ibrahim Ghazali “was eliminated in an [Israeli air force] strike on a Hezbollah military structure last week”, the IDF’s post said. Ayman Ghazali shot himself to death when security at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, confronted him after his attack there on Thursday. Separately, a Hezbollah official reportedly confirmed to the New York Times that Ayman Ghazali’s attack on Temple Israel, one of the largest in the country, was revenge for the loss of four family members during an Israeli military strike in Lebanon on 5 March. But that official neither confirmed nor denied the IDF’s claim that Ibrahim Ghazali was a Hezbollah fighter. According to Imam Hassan Qazwini of the Islamic Institute of America, Ayman Ghazali attended a memorial for his slain family members at the mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, on 8 March. Those family members – beside Ibrahim – included his two children as well as another brother. Ayman Ghazali, a naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon, on Thursday then drove his Ford F-150 truck into Temple Israel on West Bloomfield’s Walnut Lake, which had taken steps to strengthen security in response to previous attacks at places of worship as well as antisemitic incidents. An armed private security guard shot back at the Ayman Ghazali after the attacker opened fire through his windshield in a hallway inside the building. The car’s engine caught fire, igniting “several jugs” of gasoline and fireworks in its bed, according to authorities. A security guard was injured in the gunfire exchange, and Ayman Ghazali ultimately shot himself to death, the FBI’s Detroit field office said. None of 103 children and nearly 50 teachers, clergy and staff members inside the building were injured. The IDF has described the target of the 5 March strike in the eastern town of Mashgharah as a Hezbollah “military structure”, where it said weapons were stored and operatives of the militant group were “present”. Lebanese officials have said the airstrike hit a three-story building and that Ibrahim Ghazali’s wife was seriously wounded. Fighting between Israeli and Hezbollah forces has escalated since the US and Israel began war in Iran on 28 February, when Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a missile strike. Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel on 2 March, triggering Israeli airstrikes that Lebanon’s health ministry estimates have killed about 800 people. The attack in Michigan has heightened concerns about revenge actions within the US stemming from the turmoil in the Middle East. After Thursday’s attack, US senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan credited heightened security measures for preventing the deaths of temple members. “If they had not done their job almost perfectly we would be talking about an immense tragedy here today with children gone,” Slotkin, a Democrat, said. Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Michigan governor, added: “These heroes threw themselves in harm’s way, engaging a suspect.” On Sunday, Democratic US House member Adam Smith of Washington state told ABC’s This Week that the potential for politically motivated lone wolf attacks on United States soil had been “exacerbated” by the conflict in the Middle East. “We’d be wrong to say it sparked it,” Smith said, alluding to prior terrorist attacks in the US. But “we need to be prepared for those.” Smith, the top Democrat on the House armed services committee, added: “This war and this conflict is without question spreading right now.”

France votes in local elections seen as crucial indicator for presidential poll

France has begun voting in the first round of municipal elections, seen as crucial a test of the political temperature before next year’s presidential election. The vote for mayors and councillors in 35,000 villages, towns and cities across France is focused on local issues including security, housing and refuse collection and is very different from national elections. But the two-round vote held on consecutive Sundays — particularly the ballot in large towns and cities — will be scrutinised for what it can reveal about party strategy and alliances in France’s increasingly fragmented political landscape before the 2027 presidential race. Emmanuel Macron’s two terms in office end next year and there is uncertainty about which candidates will run for the presidency of the EU’s second largest economy. Two years after Macron called a snap election in 2024, parliament remains divided, with no absolute majority, split between the left, far right and centrists. The far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN) is seen as a key contender in the presidential race, but has traditionally struggled to establish itself at the local level, and lost councillors in the last municipal elections in 2020. Voter turn-out at 5pm on Sunday stood at 48.9%, higher than the same point in the 2020 local elections, when the Covid pandemic caused many voters to stay home, but lower than previous municipal elections in 2014. The RN is seeking to hold on to the biggest city it runs: Perpignan, with a population of 121,000, close to the Spanish border. It hopes to win another city, with targets including Toulon on the south coast and Nîmes in the south-east. A big RN win in a large city would allow the party to claim that it is building momentum. It is the main opposition challenger in Marseille, France’s second biggest city, run by a leftwing coalition since 2020. In Nice, France’s fifth biggest city, Éric Ciotti – who quit as leader of the traditional right’s party, Les Républicains (LR), to join forces with the RN in 2024 – is hoping to win the city from his bitter rival and one-time rightwing ally, Christian Estrosi. How the RN fares in some cities will depend on whether parties on the left form a kind of alliance or agreement to block the far right between the first and second rounds. Historically, France’s major cities have been governed either by centre-left groupings, including the Socialists, or Les Républicains. Green-led coalitions won significant cities in the last municipal elections in 2020, including Lyon, but are under pressure as they try to hold on to their gains. The party of the radical leftwinger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise (LFI), is also seeking to gain a foothold at a local level before the presidential race. It is aiming to have more councillors, particularly in the greater Paris area, and is targeting mayoral posts in towns such as Roubaix in the north. There will be a close eye on any kind of alliance formed between the two rounds to hold back rival groups in certain towns or cities. Any local deal that brings the traditional right and the far right closer, breaking down a historical division between the two, is being carefully watched. It also remains to be seen whether leftwing coalitions led by Socialists can form deals with Mélenchon’s LFI to hold back potential RN gains, for example in Marseille. François Kraus, the head of political studies at the IFOP polling institute, said that the municipal vote should not be seen as a “primary for the presidential election”, but would nonetheless reveal key trends and dynamics. “These municipal elections will no doubt provide a useful barometer of the political climate,” he said. A key focus will be the battle to be mayor of Paris. The right’s Rachida Dati, who served as culture minister under Macron, as well as justice minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, is seeking to take Paris from the left, which has been in power for 25 years. Dati was the first woman of north African and Muslim heritage to hold a major French government post and has redefined political celebrity in France. She is one of the best-known candidates running in the municipal elections. In September, Dati will go on trial in Paris for alleged corruption and abuse of power. She was accused of lobbying for the Renault-Nissan carmaking group when she sat in the European parliament. She has denied all wrongdoing. Emmanuel Grégoire, a deputy mayor and Paris Socialist MP, is heading a leftwing coalition in what will be a close-run race, with five candidates potentially making it through to the final round. Also being closely watched is the northern port city of Le Havre, where the former prime minister Édouard Philippe has staked his presidential ambitions for 2027, suggesting that if he does not win the city he has run since 2014, his candidacy for the presidential race would be in question. Many mayoral candidates have distanced themselves from political parties, reflecting voters’ exasperation with politics and the deadlock in parliament. A large number of mayors, particularly in villages, are standing as independents.

Trump’s call for allied deployment to strait of Hormuz meets muted response

Countries including the UK, Japan, China and South Korea have said they are still considering their options but without making commitments after the US president, Donald Trump, urged them to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to secure the vital shipping route. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz strait, will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the strait open and safe”. In a later post, Trump extended his call to all “the countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to send naval support. The effective closure of the strait of Hormuz by Tehran, in retaliation for airstrikes by the US and Israel, has proved catastrophic for global energy and trade flows, causing the largest oil supply disruption in history and soaring global oil prices. However, the international response to Trump’s call for the dispatch of warships has so far proved vague and reluctant, with countries unwilling to commit to a military response that could prove treacherous for their navies. Tehran has said any oil tanker heading for the US, Israel or its allies is a legitimate target in the war and will be “immediately destroyed”. Sixteen tankers have been attacked in the strait of Hormuz since the war started at the end of February and Iran has threatened to lay explosive mines in the waterway. So far, the US has not sent its own navy ships to escort tankers through the strait. A statement by the UK Ministry of Defence said it was in discussions with allies over “a range of options to ensure the security of shipping in the region”. Speaking on the BBC, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said the UK had been in discussion with the US and other allies on how to keep the strait open and were considering sending mine-hunting drones. “Any options that can help to get the strait reopened are being looked at,” said Miliband. A senior Japanese politician told the news channel NHK TV that Japan would not rule out sending warships to the region to secure the shipping lane but said the threshold for doing so was “very high”. Takayuki Kobayashi, the chair of the ruling Liberal Democratic party’s policy research council, said: “From a legal standpoint, the possibility cannot be ruled out, but given that the dispute is continuing, this is something we should judge cautiously.” South Korea, heavily dependent on energy flows through the strait, said it had taken note of Trump’s comments but would communicate closely with the US and review the situation before making any decisions on how to help secure the shipping route. “Our government is closely monitoring developments related to the Middle East situation,” said South Korea’s foreign ministry in a statement, adding that they were “exploring various measures from multiple angles to protect our citizens and secure the safety of energy transport routes”. France had already made its position clear before Trump’s comments. Speaking on Thursday, the French defence minister, Catherine Vautrin, said France would not be sending warships to the strait of Hormuz while the conflict continued to escalate. “I’m very clear and firm on this topic; at this point, there is no question of sending any vessels to the strait of Hormuz,” said Vautrin. She said that France maintained a “purely defensive position” and there were no current plans to move the French navy’s flagship vessel, the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, out of the eastern Mediterranean. Speaking in Cyprus last week, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had said that France and its allies were preparing a “purely defensive” mission to escort vessels through the strait of Hormuz, but only once the “most intense phase” of the US-Israeli war on Iran had ended. Macron described it as a “purely escort mission” with involvement by both European and non-European countries. According to the Financial Times, EU foreign affairs ministers are also considering widening the scope of the EU’s Aspides naval mission, which provides protection to ships in Yemen from attacks by Houthi rebels, to extend to the strait of Hormuz. At present, the Aspides naval mission consists of three ships, from France, Italy and Greece. Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, on Sunday said he was sceptical about a potential widening of the operation, telling German broadcaster ARD the EU mission was “not effective […] And that is why I am very sceptical that extending Aspides to the strait of Hormuz would provide greater security.” China’s response made no mention of military intervention. As an ally of Iran that is also highly dependent on crude oil imports from the strait, China is reportedly in talks with the Iranian regime about allowing oil tankers to pass through from the Gulf, but no definitive outcome has been agreed. The Chinese embassy in Washington said at the weekend in a statement given to CNN that Beijing would work to strengthen “communication with relevant parties” in the Middle East and “play a constructive role for deescalation and restoration of peace”. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, told NBC on Sunday that he had been “in dialogue” with some of the countries, without naming them, and said he expected China would be “a constructive partner” in reopening the strait, through which one-fifth of global oil exports normally pass.

‘Bit of treachery’: US attack on IRIS Dena undermines Indian security ties

The distress call came in to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue coordination centre just after 5am. The ship in trouble, they determined, was well within Sri Lanka’s obligation for rescue, being just over 19 nautical miles off the coast of the southern city of Galle. The navy swiftly mobilised and, by 6am, the first search and rescue boat was on its way, another soon close behind. It was hard to see through the thick morning mist but officers onboard kept their eyes peeled for a ship in the distance. Instead they found a spooling slick of oil on the sea’s surface. Dozens of survivors held on to life rafts and bodies bobbed in the waves, but the vessel was nowhere to be seen. IRIS Dena, an Iranian warship on its way to a friendly port call in Sri Lanka, already sat on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. It had taken under three minutes for Dena to sink after it was struck by the world’s most powerful torpedo, a Mark 48, launched by the US navy nuclear-powered submarine USS Charlotte lurking silently nearby. At least 84 people onboard were killed – their bodies were repatriated to Iran this week – in an attack that brought the US war on Iran to the Indian Ocean. The ship was more than 3,000km (1,864 miles) away from the Gulf and not on an active mission when it was hit by the US submarine, leading to comparisons to the sinking of the Belgrano, an Argentine ship controversially attacked by a British submarine in a defining moment of the Falklands war in 1982. Dena had been invited to the region by India, to take part in the pomp and splendour of an international fleet review in the eastern port of Visakhapatnam. A routine event for the navies of the world to show off their ships and share training exercises, Iran was one of more than 70 countries that participated over the 10 days, alongside the US, Australia and Russia. Three days later, the US and Israel began bombing Iran. The attack on the warship left senior military figures and analysts in the region stunned, provoking fears that Donald Trump’s Middle East war will have wider ramifications for the geopolitically sensitive Indian Ocean region. Iran called the attack an “atrocity” but the Trump administration was insistent that Dena was a fair target. In a press conference, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, did not disguise his glee as he said Dena had thought it was safe until it died a “quiet death”. That same week, Trump boasted of the strategy by the US military to strike, rather than capture, about 50 Iranian ships in the conflict. “They like sinking them better,” said the US president, chuckling. India’s former chief of naval staff, Adm Arun Prakash, said the attack on Dena was legal as it took place in international water but was nonetheless “shocking” on multiple fronts. “The US navy could have sunk this ship anywhere on the way back to the Persian Gulf,” said Prakash. “We are supposed to be friends and partners of the USA. To bring the war to right to our doorstep was a perverse act.” The ethics of targeting a ship that had about 130 people onboard, was in the region as a guest of India and posed no immediate threat to the US, “leaves a very bad taste in my mouth”, he added. “It’s a bit of treachery of the US to attend a peaceful function side-by-side with Iranian navy, where there’s a lot of camaraderie, and then the moment the Iranian ship pops out of harbour, it’s sunk,” he said. “They could have delayed this action to spare India this embarrassment.” While the Iranians claim the ship was unarmed, Indian and Sri Lankan navy officials say this was highly unlikely. “None of our warships have ever left port without its ammunition outfit,” said Prakash. R Adm Sarath Weerasekara, the former chief of staff of the Sri Lankan navy, agreed: “All the warships must carry their designated weapons. Whenever they go out into international waters, they will be on full alert.” But armed or not, he said the targeting of Dena showed a worrying disregard by the Trump administration of post-second world war conventions and agreements, particularly on the ethics of warfare. A similar debate has raged over whether the US had a responsibility to pick up survivors after the attack. Weerasekara was among three senior navy officials who told the Guardian it was standard practice to help to save survivors of such attacks, though he acknowledged this was more difficult for a nuclear submarine that operates in stealth. “It’s very clear, the US was supposed to pick up those survivors and they should have. That’s the Geneva convention,” said one retired Indian navy three-star admiral. The Sri Lankan government has insisted it acted with “humanity” in its response to the incident, as the small island nation has sought to avoid being caught up in the wider politics of the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. However, questions have been raised over the delay by Colombo in giving the Iranian ship permission to dock, which left it a sitting target in the Indian Ocean. After the international fleet review, officials say Iran had requested permission from Sri Lanka to make a friendly port call on the way home. It had three ships in its flotilla; IRIS Dena, a support ship IRIS Bushehr and a landing ship, IRIS Lavan. The Lavan was later granted permission to dock in India instead, after it experienced technical difficulties en route. Though a port call was standard procedure in the past, the US war on Iran made this a highly precarious geopolitical situation for Sri Lanka. Even as Dena and Bushehr set sail for Sri Lanka, the official permissions for it to come to Sri Lanka’s shore had still not been granted by the government. It was still not approved by 3 March, as Dena reached the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s territorial waters. According to Weerasekara, the ship was left waiting for more than 11 hours, a delay that would prove deadly by the morning of 4 March. “We did not take any prompt action,” said Weerasekara. “We could have saved those lives also. This has been discussed in the security council and yet no action has been taken.” In the aftermath of the attack, Sri Lanka agreed to allow Bushehr to dock late on 4 March, amid fears it too would be hit. The attack has raised particularly difficult questions for India over the presence of a US submarine operating so close to its territory without any knowledge, and that no heads up was given for the attack, despite the close defence ties between Delhi and Washington. Over recent years, India has sought to project itself as the superpower and great defender of the Indian Ocean, amid efforts by China to get a greater foothold over one of the world’s most geopolitically important seas. Yet Weerasekara was frank that this incident had undermined these efforts. “India is a defence partner of America so it is a shame that they don’t know that a US submarine is at its backdoor,” he said. Sushant Singh, a former Indian army officer and defence analyst, described the incident as a “humiliation” for the Indian government of the prime minister, Narendra Modi. “This sends a signal to the larger region that India is not that influential in the Indian Ocean region, not even close to its own shores,” he said. “It shows the Trump administration doesn’t take India seriously at all.” The retired Indian V Adm Shekhar Sinha had been particularly shaken by the demise of Dena. Sinha attended the international fleet review in Visakhapatnam, saw Iran’s cadets line up proudly on Dena and had exchanged a conversation of niceties with the Iranian naval commander, who had said how much he was enjoying being in India. “All’s fair in love and war,” said Sinha. “But it’s very upsetting to think that a week later, many of them were dead.” He too said the incident had troubling implications for India and the security of the Indian Ocean. “It’s clear we need to relook at Indian Ocean security and underwater surveillance,” he said. “If an American submarine is floating in the Indian Ocean so close by and we did not know, then we better buck up.”