targeting a joint military base<\/a> of the United States and the United Kingdom on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia with missiles, dismissing the claim as an \u201cIsraeli false flag\u201d attack.<\/p>\nMinistry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said on Monday the accusations reflected a pattern of \u201cdisinformation\u201d after NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said the alliance could not confirm Israel\u2019s claim that the projectiles used were Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
\u201cThat even the NATO Secretary General (who is infamously pressing Alliance members to appease the U.S. and support their illegal war on Iran) declines to endorse Israel\u2019s most recent disinformation, speaks volumes: the world has grown thoroughly exhausted with these tired and discredited \u2018false flag\u2019 storylines,\u201d Baghaei wrote on X.<\/p>\n
Speaking to CBS News on Sunday, Rutte backed US President Donald Trump\u2019s war on Iran, framing it as necessary and urging public support. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the polling, but I really hope the American people will be with him because he\u2019s doing this to make the whole world safe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Earlier, US media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, said missiles were launched between Thursday night and Friday morning, but they failed to hit the Diego Garcia base.<\/p>\n
But if Iran was confirmed to be behind the attacks, it would mean that it possesses 4,000km-plus (about 2,500-mile) range ballistic missiles able to reach as far as the UK capital, London.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, in an interview with the US broadcaster NBC, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, \u201cWe intentionally limited ourselves to below 2,000km [1,242 miles] of range because we don\u2019t want to be felt as a threat by anybody else in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper slammed \u201creckless Iranian threats\u201d but added that London would not be drawn into a wider conflict in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
British Housing Secretary Steve Reed said on Sunday the UK had no indication that Iran intended to \u2013 or could, even if it wanted to \u2013 reach the country with its missiles.<\/p>\n
The UK-US military airbase is home to nearly 2,500 mostly American personnel and has supported US military operations from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan and strikes on Yemen\u2019s Houthi rebels.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s military chief, Eyal Zamir, claimed that Iran used \u201ca two-stage intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 4,000km\u201d to target the US-UK base.<\/p>\n
Israel, a close US ally, has long said Iran\u2019s missile and nuclear programmes pose a threat and has for decades lobbied the US to intervene militarily. But successive US administrations had resisted the pressure to launch military strikes on Iran. Instead, Washington imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Tehran to deter it from developing nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
As Washington and Tehran were engaged in talks, Israel and the US attacked Iran about three weeks ago, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The attack came despite Oman, the mediator of those talks, saying a deal had been \u201cwithin reach\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Esmaeil Baghaei\u00a0denies the long-range missile attack, which could change the calculus of the war for US allies. Published…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,585,632,50,56,54,55,166618],"class_list":["post-491014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-iran","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-israel-war-on-iran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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