An attack on Mahallat city in Iran’s Markazi province last night has killed 11 people and injured 15 others, Iran’s ISNA news agency reported on Tuesday, March 31.
Three residential buildings in the city were “directly hit by projectiles,” damaging the units, the report said.
Meanwhile, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said its air defence downed an MQ-9 drone near Isfahan, and described it as belonging to the “aggressor enemy” in reference to the US and Israel.
The semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted the army’s statement as saying the drone was intercepted and destroyed earlier, marking the 146th shot down by Iran.
The MQ-9 Reaper drone is largely used for surveillance and strikes, costing roughly USD 30 million (Rs 28,21,83,000) per unit.
Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway leading our of Persian Gulf through which a fifth of the world’s oil is transported during peacetime, has driven up global oil prices, as have its attacks on Gulf regional energy infrastructure.
In response to growing Gulf Arab anger, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi insisted Tuesday that Tehran is only targeting US forces. Several states have been encouraging Washington to continue the war until Iran’s military capabilities are destroyed.
“Our operations are aimed at enemy aggressors who have no respect for Arabs or Iranians, nor can provide any security,” Araghchi wrote on X. “High time to eject US forces.”
Despite these words, attacks on civilian targets continued as an Iranian drone hit a Kuwaiti oil tanker in Dubai waters, sparking a blaze that was later put out, the Dubai Media Office said.
Authorities extinguished a fire and all 24 crew members were reported safe, the media office said.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center, which is run by the British military, reported the strike, saying the vessel was 31 nautical miles (57 kilometres) northwest of Dubai.
An unknown projectile struck the tanker on the starboard side, causing a fire on the vessel. No environmental impact was reported, the center said.
Four people in Dubai were also wounded when debris from an intercepted drone fell into a residential area.
Air raid sirens sounded in Bahrain, while Saudi Arabia’s Defence Ministry said it had intercepted three ballistic missiles launched toward Riyadh, and falling debris from a drone intercepted southeast of the capital caused minor damage to six homes.
Sirens were also heard in Jerusalem and loud explosions were heard not long after Israel’s military warned of an incoming missile barrage from Iran.
India’s real GDP growth for the next fiscal could erode by around 1 percentage point, while retail inflation could rise by about 1.5 percentage points from their baseline estimates if the Middle East conflict persists through the next fiscal, an EY report said.
The EY Economy Watch report said that several sectors, including employment-intensive sectors like textiles, paints, chemicals, fertilizers, cement and tires, could be directly impacted. Any reduction in employment or incomes in these sectors may further dampen aggregate demand. As a result, both supply and demand conditions may be adversely affected by global oil market disturbances.
It said the Indian economy, which imports nearly 90 per cent of its crude oil requirements, is also highly dependent on imports of natural gas and fertilizers, and is particularly vulnerable to such external shocks, with the adverse effects likely to cascade across multiple sectors through strong forward and backward linkages with crude oil and energy.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society said its team members have initiated rescue operations in Tehran and the northwestern city of Zanjan after US-Israeli strikes.
The group said in a statement on X that aid workers rescued injured citizens and transferred them to a hospital in Tehran. Continued efforts were being made to search and rescue the injured at the scene in Zanjan’s Husseiniya Azam.
A video shared on social media shows multiple residential buildings reduced to rubble by a strike, while a bulldozer clears the mountain of debris from a nearby road.
Fars news agency stated the golden dome and minaret of the Azam Husseiniya were struck in Zanjan due to the attack.
Iran held a funeral on Tuesday for Rear Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s navy.
An Israeli airstrike killed Tangsiri last week, with Tehran only acknowledging his death on Monday.
It showed his casket on a flatbed truck driving through the streets of Bandar Abbas, a crucial port city on the Strait of Hormuz that has seen repeated US airstrikes during the war.
A video of a massive explosion shared by US President Donald Trump appears to be of a major strike conducted outside the central Iranian city of Isfahan.
The video shared by Trump without comment early Tuesday includes fiery explosions lighting up the night sky.
The Baluch advocacy group HalVash shared the same video and others from the ground outside of Isfahan. The videos show massive fireballs and secondary explosions common with ammunition igniting in a blaze.
Fire-tracking satellites from NASA suggest the explosions happened near Mount Soffeh, an area believed to have military positions.
Iran has not formally acknowledged the attack.
Isfahan is home to one of three uranium enrichment sites bombed by the US in the 12-day conflict between Iran and Israel in June. A portion of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is believed to be entombed there, something the US has suggested it could seize with ground forces.
The Israeli military announced an “urgent warning” to the people living in southern Lebanon around the Zahrani River.
The military spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, in a post on X, told residents to move to the north of the river immediately, adding that remaining there may “endanger your lives and that of your families.”
“Hezbollah’s terrorist activities are forcing the Israel Defence Forces to act against it forcefully in that area, and it does not intend to harm you,” Adraee said.
He said, “out of concern for your safety,” the military is issuing an urgent call to evacuate homes.
“To ensure your safety, we urge you to move immediately to the area north of the Zahrani River,” Adraee said.
Donald Trump is repeating every foreign and domestic policy mistake the US made over the last five decades, said Richard Stengel, a former senior official in the US State Department.
However, the president is doing it with a “gracelessness, cluelessness, and corruption that has no precedent,” he added.
Stengel served as the Secretary of State under the Obama administration and as an editor of Time Magazine. He had previously said Trump has “no fidelity to the truth” and that the President has been acting as a “one-man negotiator-in-chief” doing a “real-estate deal” instead of diplomacy.
Two more members of the Iranian exile group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq were hanged on Tuesday in Iran, state media reported.
The two men were identified as Babak Alipour and Pouya Ghobadi.
Amnesty International has said Tehran’s Revolutionary Court convicted the men on charges of armed rebellion against the state “following a grossly unfair trial in October 2024” after they were subjected to torture.
Two other MEK members had been hanged on Monday over the same case.
A satellite image taken just before the 12-day war in June between Iran and Israel suggests Tehran transferred a truckload of highly enriched uranium to its nuclear facility at Isfahan.
The image from an Airbus Defence and Space Pleiades Neo satellite shows a truck loaded with 18 blue containers going into a tunnel at the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre on June 9, 2025.
The war began on June 13. The United States bombed the Isfahan facility along with two other nuclear sites on June 22.
François Diaz-Maurin, an analyst with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, wrote that the truck likely carried 18 secured containers of as much as 534 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent purity. That’s a short, technical step to weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent.
“This calculation suggests that Iran could have transferred all of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to Isfahan via the truck seen in the satellite image,” Diaz-Maurin wrote in his analysis.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security also suggested the vehicle was transferring the highly enriched uranium. The French newspaper Le Monde first reported on the images.
(With inputs from agencies)
