Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed Australian \u201cmilitary assets\u201d have been sent to the Middle East amid an operation to rescue stranded travellers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government is deploying six crisis response teams to the region and we have already deployed military assets as part of contingency planning earlier this week,\u201d Albanese told parliament on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thank those Australians who are going into a dangerous situation in order to help their fellow Australians caught up in this conflict to get home safely.\u201d<\/p>\n
SBS News reports that two military planes were sent \u2014 a Royal Australian Air Force C-17A Globemaster heavy transport aircraft and KC-30A Multi-Role Tanker Transport.<\/p>\n
It comes as Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to confirm or deny whether two Australian sailors were on a US submarine that torpedoed an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Nine News is reporting that two Australians were on board the submarine that carried out the attack on Iran\u2019s frigate, IRIS Dena.<\/p>\n
Wong was questioned in parliament by Greens senator David Shoebridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US submarine operations are a matter for the United States,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor operational and security reasons, we do not disclose specific information regarding Australian personnel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran has vowed revenge for the attack, which killed more than 80 sailors.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s foreign minister said the US would \u201cbitterly regret\u201d the precedent it had set by sinking a ship in international waters without warning.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, the US-Israeli campaign against Iran has entered its sixth day with even more intensive \u200cbombing.<\/p>\n
Chaos erupted in Lebanon\u2019s capital Beirut after Israel ordered a mass evacuation, urging civilians to \u201csave your lives\u201d and flee.<\/p>\n
The warning encompassed a large area in southern Beirut, reportedly home to anywhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people and a stronghold of Hezbollah.<\/p>\n
The Israeli military said it launched targeted attacks in Lebanon at the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group and a \u201clarge-scale wave of strikes against infrastructure\u201d in Iran\u2019s capital, without elaborating.<\/p>\n
Iran was also accused of launching a drone attack that hit Azerbaijan\u2019s airport.<\/p>\n
Azerbaijan said four Iranian drones \u200cflew across its border and injured four people in the Nakhchivan exclave, raising concern about further spillover of the conflict \u200cin the Middle East.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not tolerate this unprovoked act of terror and aggression against Azerbaijan. Our armed forces have been instructed to prepare and implement appropriate retaliatory measures,\u201d Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev told a meeting of his Security Council.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are ready to demonstrate our strength against any hostile force \u2013 and they should not forget this in Iran,\u201d \u200che said.<\/p>\n
Iranian Deputy Foreign \u200cMinister Kazem Gharibabadi \u2060denied his country had targeted Nakhchivan.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do not attack our neighbouring countries,\u201d he told Azerbaijani \u200boutlet AnewZ.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a religious leader called for \u201cTrump\u2019s blood\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi Amoli said the country was \u201con the verge of a great test\u201d and called on state television for \u201cthe shedding of Zionist blood, the shedding of Trump\u2019s blood\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cFight the oppressive America, his blood is on my shoulders,\u201d he said in a rare call for violence from an ayatollah, one of the highest ranks within the clergy of Shiite Islam.<\/p>\n
The US and Israel launched the war on Saturday, targeting Iran\u2019s leadership, missile arsenal and nuclear program while suggesting that toppling the government is a goal.<\/p>\n
But the exact aims and timelines have repeatedly shifted, signalling an open-ended conflict.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump praised the US military on Wednesday (local time) for \u201cdoing very well on the war front, to put it mildly\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fellow Republicans in the US Senate stood with Trump on Iran as they voted down a resolution seeking to halt the war.<\/p>\n
The conflict has already killed more than 1000 people in Iran, more than 70 in Lebanon and about a dozen in Israel, according to officials in those countries.<\/p>\n
It has disrupted the supply of the world\u2019s oil and gas, snarled international shipping and stranded hundreds of thousands of travellers in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Neighbouring countries braced for potential dangers on Thursday, a day after Iran\u2019s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened \u201cthe complete destruction of the region\u2019s military and economic infrastructure\u201d.<\/p>\n
Qatar\u2019s Interior Ministry said authorities were evacuating residents near the US Embassy in Doha as a temporary precaution, without providing further details.<\/p>\n
Fighter jets could be heard overhead in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai.<\/p>\n
And a new attack off the coast of Kuwait appeared to expand the area where commercial shipping was in danger.<\/p>\n
An explosion rocked the area early on Thursday, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre run by the British military.<\/p>\n
It said a tanker apparently came under attack, but the agency did not offer a cause. Iran, in the past, has attacked ships by attaching limpet mines to them.<\/p>\n
Prior attacks since fighting began on Saturday have happened in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which about a fifth of the world\u2019s oil is shipped.<\/p>\n
Oil prices have soared as Iranian attacks have disrupted traffic through the strait, and global stock markets have been hammered over worries that the spike in oil prices may grind down the world economy.<\/p>\n
-with AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed Australian \u201cmilitary assets\u201d have been sent to the Middle East amid an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-521267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}