Tehran said on Friday it had shot down an F-15 warplane and US media reported United States special forces had rescued one of its two crew members, with the other still missing.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s military also said it downed a US A-10 ground attack aircraft in the Gulf, with US media saying the pilot of that plane was rescued.<\/p>\n
The local Mehr news agency on Saturday quoted the deputy governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, Fattah Mohammadi, as saying the search for the missing pilot involved \u201cpresence of popular forces and tribesmen alongside military forces and is still ongoing\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added that \u201clast night, people fired at enemy helicopters with rifles and did not allow them to land\u201d.<\/p>\n
Images posted on social media and verified by AFPTV showed Iranian police firing at a US helicopter in southwestern Iran as US forces searched for the airman.<\/p>\n
Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran\u2019s parliament, mocked the Trump administration, saying the \u201cwar they started has now been downgraded from \u2018regime change\u2019 to \u2018Hey! Can anyone find our pilots?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Retired US Brigadier General Houston Cantwell, who has 400 hours of combat flight experience, said a pilot\u2019s training would likely kick in before he or she parachuted to the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy priority would be, first of all, concealment, because I don\u2019t want to be captured,\u201d he told AFP.<\/p>\n
Bushehr nuclear plant<\/p>\n
A strike near Iran\u2019s Bushehr nuclear plant on Saturday killed a guard and led Russia, which partly constructed the facility and helps operate it, to announce it was evacuating 198 workers.<\/p>\n
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that continued attacks on the plant on the southern coast could eventually lead to radioactive fallout that would \u201cend life in GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] capitals, not Tehran\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bushehr is considerably closer to Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar than it is to the Iranian capital.<\/p>\n
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote on X that no increase in radiation levels had been reported at the site, but nonetheless voiced \u201cdeep concern\u201d at what he said was the fourth such strike in recent weeks.<\/p>\n
\u201cNPP [nuclear power plant] sites or nearby areas must never be attacked,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
There were also more strikes on Tehran, where an AFP journalist saw a thick haze of grey smoke covering the skyline.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis war wasn\u2019t for freedom… we just ended up trapped with something even more savage,\u201d 31-year-old Faezeh told AFP via messenger app from Tehran.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey bomb randomly, there\u2019s no sign of any specific target these recent days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maryam, a 35-year-old from Khansar in Isfahan province said Iranians are divided between those hoping for an end to their government and those more fearful of economic disaster.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m honestly really scared about our future,\u201d she told AFP. \u201cThings are a disaster right now. Mass layoffs, widespread shutdowns … everything feels overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strikes by all sides have increasingly targeted economic and industrial sites, raising fears of wider disruption to global energy supplies.<\/p>\n
US-Israeli strikes on Saturday hit a petrochemicals hub, a cement plant and a trade terminal on the Iran-Iraq border, where one person was reported killed.<\/p>\n
Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks on Israel and US allies in the Gulf.<\/p>\n
Shrapnel from intercepted drones injured four people in Bahrain on Saturday, and two buildings in Dubai were hit by debris, including one housing the US cloud computing firm Oracle, authorities said.<\/p>\n
On their Sepah News website, Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards also said they had targeted a commercial vessel, the MSC Ishyka, \u201cowned by the Israeli regime and flying the flag of a third country\u201d at the Khalifa Bin Salman port in Bahrain.<\/p>\n
Beirut explosions<\/p>\n
On another front, the Israeli military said on Friday (local time) it had struck more than 3500 targets across Lebanon in the month since the latest round of fighting with Iran-backed Hezbollah began.<\/p>\n
Lebanese state media reported that Israel destroyed a bridge in the Bekaa region, and local media said a second bridge was also hit, after Israel said it would strike them.<\/p>\n
An AFP journalist heard two loud explosions in Beirut early Saturday and saw smoke billowing from one of them.<\/p>\n
A hospital in the coastal Lebanese city of Tyre was damaged by Israeli strikes on nearby buildings that wounded 11 people, the health ministry said.<\/p>\n
The Israeli military later issued an urgent evacuation warning to residents of the city before more planned strikes.<\/p>\n
Tens of thousands of people have left Tyre, but around 20,000 remain, including 15,000 displaced from surrounding villages.<\/p>\n
– Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tehran said on Friday it had shot down an F-15 warplane and US media reported United States special…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[191358,5263,806,45688,3468,2178,1872,28164,43007,42,11676,11551,16609,1452,101,43,603,4885,2572,312,4485,45534,40,38,41,39,2179],"class_list":{"0":"post-363900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-48hour","9":"tag-all","10":"tag-as","11":"tag-deadline","12":"tag-deal","13":"tag-donald","14":"tag-face","15":"tag-fears","16":"tag-fuels","17":"tag-headlines","18":"tag-hell","19":"tag-hours","20":"tag-iran","21":"tag-issues","22":"tag-left","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-nuclear","25":"tag-plant","26":"tag-president","27":"tag-says","28":"tag-strike","29":"tag-tehran","30":"tag-top-news","31":"tag-top-stories","32":"tag-topnews","33":"tag-topstories","34":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}