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Middle East crisis live: Iranian missiles intercepted over Turkey and Qatar as Israel resumes strikes across Tehran and Beirut

Donald Trump has announced that he will hold a news conference at 5.30pm ET today from the ballroom at Trump National Doral Miami before he heads back to DC from Florida. As the US-Israeli war on Iran enters its second week, the president said in his post on Truth Social that there have been “many important meetings and phone calls taking place today”. We’ll bring you all the key lines here later.

Von der Leyen calls for EU foreign policy to be ‘more realistic and interest-driven’

Europe can “no longer be a custodian for the old-world order” and needs “a more realistic and interest-driven foreign policy”, the head of the European Commission has said. Speaking to an audience of EU ambassadors on Monday, Ursula von der Leyen said the union “will always defend and uphold the rules-based system” but could no longer rely on it to defend European interests and shelter the continent from threats. She added: “We urgently need to reflect on whether our doctrine, our institutions and our decision making – all designed in a postwar world of stability and multilateralism – have kept pace with the speed of change around us. Whether the system that we built – with all of its well-intentioned attempts at consensus and compromise – is more a help or a hindrance to our credibility as a geopolitical actor.” Von der Leyen, a former German defence minister who pledged to lead a “geopolitical” commission when she took office in 2019, has faced criticism in recent days for her handling of the Iran war. A prominent MEP and former French minister, Nathalie Loiseau, last week chided von der Leyen for her telephone diplomacy to Gulf leaders after the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, accusing the commission president of usurping the role of the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas. Notably in the early days of the war, von der Leyen said “a credible transition in Iran” was urgently needed, going further than Kallas. On Monday von der Leyen avoided criticism of the US and Israel for starting the war, saying the debate about whether the conflict was “a war of choice or a war of necessity” was a debate that “partly misses the point”. She said no one would shed tears for a regime that had “slaughtered 17,000 young people”, a reference to the most recent crackdown that some independent experts believe killed many more. She also said Iran had wreaked devastation and destabilisation across the region. She also noted that a regional conflict with “unintended consequences” was unfolding, with spillovers affecting energy, finance, trade, transport and causing the mass displacement of people. In a separate announcement von der Leyen promised EU humanitarian aid for 130,000 people in Lebanon and expressed concern about the impact of the conflict on Israel’s northern neighbour, where half a million people have been made homeless in recent days following Israeli bombing and evacuation orders. Von der Leyen and the European Council president, António Costa, held talks on Monday via video link with leaders and senior ministers from Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates in what Brussels billed as a manifestation of solidarity. In an EU statement after those talks von der Leyen and Costa “expressed openness” to enhance the maritime defensive operations Aspides and Atalanta, which are aimed at protecting waterways and preventing disruption to supply chains in and around the Red Sea. Aspides was set up in 2024 after attacks by Houthi rebels on international shipping. Atalanta was established in 2008 to counter Somali pirates in the Horn of Africa, but its remit has been extended.

Hope and solidarity with those trying to stay alive in Iran | Letters

The poignancy of the anonymous author’s article describing life in Tehran is almost too much to bear (‘Don’t die’: the two words that sum up our lives in Tehran now, 7 March). I would like to say to them and their friends who simply want to stay alive that there are many here among us, in the UK at least, who agree with you. In particular, your words on the oxymoronic dictatorial democratic narrative on the justification for yet another confected, misguided and maniacal war in the Middle East. The Alice Through the Looking Glass prism that the government of the world’s so-called largest democracy uses as its justification for the bombing of your country is sickening. Sickening because that country has stood by while the atrocities they claim to abhor take place elsewhere in the world. One could cite Ukraine, but the US’s active support for Israel militarily and diplomatically in the wholesale destruction of Gaza and its people perfectly underscore your point on the hypocritical, meaningless cliches employed to justify their latest atrocity; no longer are they just complicit, as they were in Gaza, but transparent now in their very own murderous mission. I hope you do stay alive. Desmond Hewitt Marlborough, Wiltshire

Roman Abramovich ready to fight UK government over proceeds from £2.5bn Chelsea sale

The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has stepped up his row with the British government over the £2.5bn proceeds of his sale of Chelsea FC, insisting that the money is his to allocate despite the international sanctions imposed on his assets. The UK and EU imposed sanctions on Abramovich in 2022, freezing his assets in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, citing his ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime. The move triggered a rushed sale of the Premier League club to a consortium led by the US businessman Todd Boehly. However, the £2.5bn raised by the sale has remained locked in a UK bank account since then because of a dispute about how it should be used. Britain wants the money to be ringfenced for use only in Ukraine, in line with a wider European push for Moscow to foot the bill for the devastation caused by its invasion. However, Abramovich has indicated that he wants more flexibility over how the money would be spent. When he announced his intention to sell the club in March 2022, he said the proceeds would be used “for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine”, leaving open the possibility that money could be diverted to Russian recipients. On Monday, Abramovich’s lawyers at Kobre & Kim said the cash was still “wholly owned” by Fordstam Ltd, the vehicle through which the billionaire funded Chelsea, channelling cash from controversial oil deals through a maze of offshore companies. In the letter, sent ahead of a 17 March deadline set by the UK government, the lawyers accused ministers of making “politically charged and highly publicised statements” about the oligarch. They said Abramovich remained fully committed to using the money for charitable purposes, and the government’s restrictions on how it can be spent were to blame for the delay. “The UK government appears to be treating this proposed donation as a form of punitive measure against Mr Abramovich,” the lawyers said in the letter, seen by Reuters. In response to the letter, Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “This money was promised to Ukraine over three years ago. It is time Roman Abramovich does the right thing but if he won’t we will act”. The British government warned Abramovich last year he must release the cash, or he could be taken to court. Keir Starmer said in December “the clock is ticking” over finding a resolution. However, Abramovich’s lawyers said if the government opened formal confiscation proceedings it would be contested in court. “The proposal to donate these proceeds was initiated by Mr Abramovich prior to the imposition of sanctions, and he remains fully committed to ensuring that the funds are used for charitable purposes,” the letter said.

Istanbul’s mayor in court for mass trial decried as politically motivated

A mass trial of 400 people including the jailed mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has opened in Turkey in a sprawling corruption case critics say is a politically motivated attempt to thwart his chances of challenging Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the presidency. İmamoğlu entered the courtroom in Istanbul to cheers and whistles from members of his opposition Republican People’s party (CHP), and there were reports that a group of lawyers chanted: “We want a fair trial.” The first hearing was marked by a heated exchange between the judge and the jailed mayor, after other defendants were chosen to speak first. İmamoğlu repeatedly demanded to address the court but the judge refused, calling his request inappropriate. “You cannot simply get up and come to the podium to request to speak,” the judge reportedly said. The 55-year-old mayor responded that the court should “respect the right of people to defend themselves”. Hundreds of former and current employees of the Istanbul municipality are due to stand trial alongside İmamoğlu over the coming weeks as the trial continues, including more than 106 people already in jail. All stand accused of involvement in an alleged network of corruption and organised crime centred on İmamoğlu’s office. İmamoğlu, the mayor of Turkey’s largest city, was arrested last year during a raid on his home, shortly after announcing his intention to run for president on behalf of the country’s largest opposition party, the CHP. As all protests within a 1km radius of the courtroom have been banned, supporters gathered at a distance, waving images of İmamoğlu and more than a dozen other detained CHP mayors, according to an Agence France-Presse reporter. After his election in 2019, İmamoğlu quickly rose to become Erdoğan’s nemesis, occupying a position the president once held and rising in political stature to challenge him on the national stage. After declaring his intention to run for president, Istanbul University annulled İmamoğlu’s diploma, a requirement to run for Turkey’s highest office. His arrest sent shock waves through Turkish society, sparking nightly mass protests around the municipality building that contained his office where hundreds were detained. The CHP vowed to fight the arrest, holding a symbolic vote to name İmamoğlu as their candidate for president in an election expected to take place next year. Prosecutors produced thousands of pages of indictments claiming that Imamoğlu’s corrupt activities dated back to 2014, years before he was elected mayor in an upset to Erdoğan’s ruling party. Late last year, the former Istanbul prosecutor Akın Gürlek said Imamoğlu’s corrupt network caused 160bn lira (£2.85bn) in losses to the Turkish state over a 10-year period. If convicted on all charges against him, the Istanbul mayor and presidential candidate faces a prison term of more than 1,900 years. The head of the CHP, Özgür Özel, and İmamoğlu’s wife, Dilek, sat together in court as the trial began. “We are nervous and anxious,” Dilek İmamoğlu told reporters before the hearing started, according to Reuters. “We hope that they move to trial without detention.” Observers and rights groups have described the trial as politically motivated, citing the use of secret witnesses as well as a sweeping effort to detain mayors belonging to opposition parties, particularly the CHP, across Turkey. Human Rights Watch said the trial represented “the culmination a 17-month campaign by the Turkish authorities against the main opposition party through criminal investigations, detentions, and other lawsuits targeting İmamoğlu, other elected officials, and the party leadership, pointing to a concerted effort to remove İmamoğlu from politics and discredit his party in ways that undermine democracy”. Since his arrest last year, İmamoğlu has been incarcerated in an infamous high-security prison near Istanbul as charges mounted against him. In addition to the charges concerning his university diploma and corruption, the jailed mayor was indicted on espionage charges last month, accused of leaking voter data to foreign countries. “The trial of mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu follows more than a year of weaponizing the criminal justice system against his party and other CHP elected officials while he sits in jail,” said Benjamin Ward, deputy Europe and central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. HRW noted that the broad investigations ensnaring leading figures within the CHP began after Gürlek was appointed as Istanbul’s public prosecutor. Last month, Gürlek was appointed justice minister in a cabinet reshuffle.

‘Bitter result’ for Friedrich Merz as Greens win in German car heartland

Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) have stumbled into a busy election year with a defeat to the Greens in a key state poll, as his embattled party struggles to fend off a challenge in other pivotal races from the far right. The German chancellor’s conservative CDU had enjoyed a double-digit lead in the south-western car production region of Baden-Württemberg just weeks ago but the Greens and their charismatic candidate Cem Özdemir eked out a half-point-margin win in Sunday’s poll with 30.2%. Merz, who has travelled to Beijing and Washington in the past two weeks to defend German and European interests amid growing global turbulence, called it a “bitter result” and said the onus was on his government to win back voters. “We will now have to make more substantial progress with the necessary reforms so that we in Germany can emerge from this difficult economic situation,” he told reporters on Monday. The surprise Greens triumph is expected to make Özdemir, a former federal cabinet minister and party co-chair, Germany’s first state premier from the large Turkish diaspora community, more than half a century after the first “guest workers” arrived. Özdemir, 60, whose parents moved to Germany in the 1960s, has said he wants to continue the decade-old Greens-CDU coalition government after a hard-fought campaign in the prosperous state of more than 11 million people. He would succeed Germany’s first and so far only Green state leader, Winfried Kretschmann, who is retiring after 15 years in charge. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland party zeroed in on deindustrialisation fears in the state’s automobile heartland, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, and nearly doubled its score from the last election five years ago to almost 19% – its best ever in a western state. That was below the party’s announced target of 20%, and the third-place finish proved something of a disappointment to the AfD, which had hoped to project its impact far beyond its traditional strongholds in the ex-communist east. But the result still underlined its ability to expand beyond immigration as a mobilising issue, to capitalise on economic anxiety and win robust support deep in the wealthy west. Merz’s CDU garnered 29.7%, while its junior coalition partners on the federal level, the Social Democrats, suffered a wipeout with 5.5%. The SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil, who is also Germany’s vice-chancellor and finance minister, spoke of an “utterly bitter night”. Merz, 70, has stumbled in efforts to jumpstart a recovery in Europe’s top economy, a prospect he said on Monday was increasingly under threat by a spike in energy prices from the Iran war. His popularity ratings have also taken a hit from rhetoric often seen as divisive in a country that puts a premium on harmony and consensus in politics. Sunday’s was the first of five state elections this year. The next, on 22 March in neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate, pits the national governing parties against each other. It has been led since 1991 by the Social Democrats, who are running neck-and-neck with Merz’s CDU. In September, there are elections in Berlin and two regions in the east, where the AfD hopes to win its first absolute majority and seat a state premier. The political scientist Albrecht von Lucke called the Baden-Württemberg result a “catastrophe” for Merz’s government. “The defeat has had a devastating effect right at the start of the year,” he told the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, noting that the regional CDU “certainly received no tailwind from Berlin”. “If Rhineland-Palatinate is now also lost … the party will be in a very poor position ahead of the extremely important [eastern] state election in Saxony-Anhalt” where the AfD could win outright. He said Merz’s ruling coalition would struggle if state elections continued to show diminishing support. “This will increase the fear, even panic, in both parties – and their efforts to distinguish themselves from each other,” he said. “This means that we will face even more difficult negotiations [on government policy] at the federal level, which in turn will benefit the AfD.” Özdemir ran a pragmatic, centrist campaign for the Greens, who are polling at just 12% nationally. Analysts said that should serve as a wake-up call to the “Fundi” or hardliner wing of the party, whose influence has grown since it fell out of government in Berlin last year. Climate campaigners pointed to the Greens’ win as proof that support for EVs, as highlighted by Özdemir, over CDU-backed combustion engines could be a vote winner, even in car country.

Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor, as the war enters its 10th day and fresh missile and drone strikes reverberate across the Middle East. After members of the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, Iranian institutions and politicians, from the foreign ministry to lawmakers, issued statements expressing their allegiance. “We will obey the commander-in-chief until the last drop of our blood,” a statement from the defence council said. The move could lead to a further escalation of the war, given Donald Trump had already acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei was the most likely successor and made clear he considered him an “unacceptable” choice. The US president said earlier on Sunday that Iran’s next supreme leader was “not going to last long” if Tehran did not get his approval first. When asked about the appointment during an interview with the Times of Israel published late on Sunday, Trump was reported as saying: “We’ll see what happens.” In the same interview, Trump said a decision on when to end the war would be a “mutual” one, together with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump also asserted that Iran would have destroyed Israel if he and Netanyahu had not been around. “Iran was going to destroy Israel and everything else around it … We’ve worked together. We’ve destroyed a country that wanted to destroy Israel,” he was quoted as saying. The Israeli military said it had launched a wave of strikes on Monday targeting “regime infrastructure” in central Iran, the first such announcement since the appointment of the new supreme leader. The military also announced strikes on the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran and its proxies appeared to have launched attacks, too, with rocket and drone strikes targeting a US diplomatic facility near Baghdad’s international airport that were intercepted by the C-RAM defence system, said police sources. A drone strike targeted a US military base near Erbil airport in Iraqi Kurdistan, security sources said, while Saudi authorities reported intercepting a drone east of its northern al-Jawf region. In Bahrain, the health ministry reported 32 people were wounded overnight by an Iranian drone attack on the island of Sitra. They include a 17-year-old girl who suffered severe head and eye injuries, and a two-month-old baby, according to the ministry. Iranian state media also showed a projectile said to have been launched at Israel bearing the slogan: “At your command, Sayyid Mojtaba,” using an Islamic honorific. The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei was welcomed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are backed by the Iranian regime. “We congratulate the Islamic Republic of Iran, its leadership and people, on the selection of Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution at this important and pivotal juncture,” the group said in a statement on Telegram. Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation marks the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution that Iran’s supreme leadership has passed from father to son. It is a development likely to ignite debate inside Iran about the emergence of a dynastic system in a state founded explicitly to overthrow hereditary rule after the shah. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled for 37 years, was killed in a US-Israeli strike on Tehran on 28 February, on the first day of the war with Iran. Across Iran’s political and security establishment, officials moved swiftly to welcome the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader. Khamenei would lead the country under the current sensitive conditions, the top Iranian security official Ali Larijani said, calling for unity around the new leader. State media reported the leadership of Iran’s armed forces pledged allegiance to him, while the speaker of parliament hailed the decision and described following Khamenei as a “religious and national duty”. The Revolutionary Guards declared they stood ready to follow him, signalling broad backing from the country’s core institutions. Earlier in the day, in a post on X in Farsi, the Israeli military said it would continue pursuing every successor of Ali Khamenei and would pursue every person who sought to appoint a successor for him. For many analysts, Khamenei’s appointment is a symbolic move designed to make the regime still appear strong and determined not to bow to western pressure. The 56-year-old cleric has never held elected office nor formally occupied a senior position within Iran’s government. He has spent much of his life at the centre of power in Iran while remaining largely out of public view. Born in 1969 in the north-eastern city of Mashhad, Khamenei was raised within the political and clerical world that emerged after the 1979 revolution. As a young man he studied theology in the seminaries of Qom and reportedly took part in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war. Unlike many figures in Iran’s leadership, Khamenei never pursued elected office or a prominent government role. Instead, he gradually became an influential presence inside his father’s office, where he was widely seen as part of a small circle managing political access to the supreme leader. Over the years he cultivated close relationships with conservative clerics and elements of the Revolutionary Guards, a connection analysts say strengthened his standing within the system. His name surfaced publicly during the disputed 2009 presidential election, when reformist figures accused him of playing a role in supporting the security crackdown that followed mass protests. But he has never discussed the issue of succession publicly. To his supporters, Khamenei represents continuity with the ideological line established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and maintained by his father. To critics, his rise raises uncomfortable questions about the concentration of power – and the possibility of hereditary leadership in a state founded in revolt against monarchy. Oil prices surged more than 25% on Monday to their highest levels since mid-2022, as major Middle Eastern oil producers cut supply because they cannot safely send shipments through the strait of Hormuz to refiners worldwide. Traffic through the strait was largely closed after Iran attacked at least five ships, with a limited number of tankers transiting, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply.