Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed after Israel and the US launched a “massive” and ongoing attack against Iran’s leadership and military.

US President Donald Trump has urged Iranian forces to lay down their arms, and for Iran’s people to rise up against its government.

Iran has responded by firing ballistic missiles and drones at US assets and allies across the region, targeting Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

On Sunday, Israel said it had launched fresh attacks on “the heart of Tehran”, as Iranian attacks across the region also continued.

Here’s what we know.

Why have the US and Israel attacked Iran?

Trump has said the aim of the operation is to “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon”.

“We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated,” he said in an eight-minute video posted on Truth Social on Saturday morning.

He also warned Iran’s armed forces to lay down their weapons in return for “complete immunity”, or “face certain death”.

He then urged Iranian people to prepare to overthrow the clerical establishment: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

The massive military operation – which the US has dubbed Operation Epic Fury – comes after weeks of threats from Trump that he would order military action if Iran did not agree to a new deal over its nuclear programme.

Iran has repeatedly said its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.

The US military Central Command said they wanted to “dismantle the Iranian regime’s security apparatus, prioritising locations that posed an imminent threat”.

Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel and the US had launched the “operation to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.

What’s the latest in Iran?

Explosions have been reported in vast parts of the country since Saturday morning, with 24 of Iran’s 31 provinces being hit, according to a spokesman for the Iranian Red Crescent who was quoted by local media.

Videos circulating on social media show explosions and plumes of black smoke in multiple areas across the country, including the capital, Tehran.

Explosions were also heard in Karaj, Isfahan and Qom in the centre of the country, and Kermanshah in the west.

Locations reportedly targeted include Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) facilities, air defence capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said about 200 fighter jets had taken part in an “extensive attack against the missile array and the defence systems” in western and central Iran.

The jets simultaneously dropped hundreds of munitions on about 500 targets, it added.

On Saturday evening, Netanyahu said in a televised address that “we destroyed the compound of the tyrant Khamenei in the heart of Tehran”.

Trump later wrote on Truth Social: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead.”

His death was confirmed in a statement from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, which was read out by several state broadcast channels on Sunday morning local time.

The office of President Masoud Pezeshkian in the capital was also reportedly targeted in the first wave of strikes. Iranian state TV said the president was “safe” and he later put out a statement.

Iran is also experiencing a near-total internet blackout, meaning getting reliable and up-to-date information out of the country is difficult.

Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation has said its airspace is closed until further notice.

More than 200 people have been killed and more than 700 injured across the country, according to the Red Crescent on Saturday.

At least 148 people have died in an explosion at a school in southern Iran, according to a local prosecutor.

Meanwhile, around 40 Iranian officials were killed in the strikes, according to an intelligence source and a military source cited by CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The IDF has named seven senior Iranian defence officials as among those killed, including Iran’s Defence Council secretary Ali Shamkhani, Defence Minister Brig Gen Aziz Nasirzadeh and IRGC commander Gen Mohammad Pakpour.

The IRGC has since named a new commander in chief, Ahmad Vahidi.

How has Iran responded?

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused Israel and the US of launching a war that was “wholly unprovoked, illegal, and illegitimate”.

“Our powerful armed forces are prepared for this day and will teach the aggressors the lesson they deserve,” he wrote on X.

Iran has used ballistic missiles and drones to launch wide-scale attacks on US allies and assets across the Gulf, after its supreme leader was killed in the ongoing US-Israel air offensive launched on Saturday morning.

Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait – all home to US military bases – said they had intercepted missiles fired towards them, but falling debris appeared to have caused widespread damage.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency cited the IRGC as saying its forces had responded to the strikes by hitting multiple sites in Israel as well as five major US military facilities in the region – Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, Al Dhafra airbase in the UAE, the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait, and Muwaffaq Salti airbase in Jordan.

The IRGC also said a US combat support vessel had come under “severe blows” from missiles, and that a US FP-132 radar system in Qatar had been “completely destroyed”.

The EU naval mission in the region, EUNAVFOR ASPIDES, meanwhile said that the IRGC had sent radio messages to vessels warning that “no ship is allowed to pass the Strait of Hormuz” in the Gulf, through which about 20% of global oil and gas shipments pass.

Centcom said that its forces had “successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks”.

It added that no US casualties or combat-related injuries had been reported and that damage to US installations in the region was “minimal and has not impacted operations”.

In Israel, local media reported that Iran launched about 150 ballistic missiles towards Israel, mostly in small salvos, as well as dozens of attack drones.

Air defence systems intercepted a number of the missiles, while others struck open areas, they added.

The IDF said two Israelis have been killed and 456 injured in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

How might Khamenei’s successor be chosen?

On Sunday, Alireza Arafi was named interim supreme leader.

The formal selection of a new Supreme Leader does not happen by direct vote but by a body of 88 senior clerics known as the Assembly of Experts.

They are elected by direct vote every eight years.

Under the Iranian Constitution, these clerics must select the new Supreme Leader as soon as possible, but this may prove difficult for safety reasons while the country is under attack.

Is it safe to travel to the region?

Thousands of flights have been grounded to and from the region, in one of the most serious disruptions to global travel since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Of about 4,218 flights scheduled to land in the region on Saturday, 966 were cancelled, according to data by aviation analytics company Cirium.

It said that 716 flights out of 4,329 Sunday’s scheduled flights have already been cancelled.

Wizz Air has suspended flights until 7 March in Israel, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, Amman in Jordan, and in Saudi Arabia until Tuesday.

British Airways has cancelled flights to Tel Aviv and Bahrain until Wednesday.

In a statement, Swiss International Air Lines said: “Swiss and the Lufthansa Group airlines will suspend flights to Tel Aviv, Beirut [in Lebanon], Amman, Erbil [in Iraq], and Tehran until 7 March.”

Kuwait’s aviation authority said it was halting all flights to Iran until further notice, according to state media.

Emirates has temporarily suspended its operations to and from Dubai. Lufthansa, Air India, Virgin Atlantic and Turkish Airlines have also announced cancellations.

Some countries in the region – including Iraq and Jordan – have also closed their airspace. The UAE said it has “partially and temporarily” closed its airspace as a precaution, state media reported.

A world on edge as Trump bombs Iran and triggers war in the Middle East. There was no need for this

They never learn. Once again, a bellicose US president has unleashed overwhelming military firepower to force a sovereign nation to its knees. Once again, blatant lies and exaggerated claims are being propagated to justify the attack. Duplicitous American diplomacy became a fig leaf for premeditated aggression. The cautionary advice of allies was spurned. The UN, international law and public opinion were ignored. Democratic consent is lacking. And once again, there are few defined goals by which to gauge success, and no long-term plan.

Now, as in the past, the predictable result of today’s renewed, expanded and apparently open-ended US-Israeli aggression against Iran will be instant, spreading chaos. Civilians will be killed, children orphaned, families torn apart. Regional turmoil and international oil-price panic will follow the Iranian retaliation that has already begun, and which may be backed by Tehran’s Hezbollah and Houthi allies. New hatreds will be seeded, terrorist vendettas sown. The west’s foes will rejoice. And almost nothing of enduring value will be achieved. That was the bitter outcome of the failed US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, it’s Tehran’s turn to reap the whirlwind.

How dismaying – how unforgivable! – that those past lessons have not been learned. How incredible that an elected 21st-century American president still believes it’s effective and permissible, let alone moral, to dictate to the world from the barrel of a gun. By what conceivable right does the US behave in this way?

While there are certain differences, the similarities between Donald Trump’s siege of Iran and George W Bush’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq are striking. Both crises fit a wider pattern of ultimately unsuccessful, costly US interventionism dating back to Vietnam – and the 1953 CIA-led Iran coup. Trump promised to avoid foreign adventures. Surprise! He lied. Anyone who believes he has radically changed the way the US engages with the world should review this sordid saga of post-1945 imperial hubris. In this, he’s no different from his predecessors.

Trump is unusual in that his self interest is so evident. Though he said today that he wants “freedom” for the Iranian people, and for Iran to be a place that’s “safe”, he’s no Woodrow Wilson, who justified plunging the US into the first world war in 1917 by saying “the world must be made safe for democracy”. (It transpired Wilson meant democracy in Europe, not in the colonial empires of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.) After attacking Venezuela in January, Trump baldly admitted he just wanted the oil. Yet in other respects, what’s happening now feels very familiar.

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Like Bush, Trump manufactured a crisis, founded on falsehood, and effectively cornered himself. He is hostage to self-imposed expectations, having confounded his own false claim to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities last year. Like Bush and his accomplice, Tony Blair, Trump deliberately inflates the threat. His unsubstantiated State of the Union claim that Tehran’s ballistic missiles could “soon” reach US territory recalls notoriously false US and UK claims about Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction. Israel’s claim to have mounted “pre-emptive” strikes is misleading, too. There is zero clear evidence Iran was about to attack. On the contrary, it was desperately hoping to preserve the peace after last June’s damaging US-Israeli onslaught.

Speaking on Truth Social, Trump claimed Iran has repeatedly failed to renounce nuclear weapons. Not true. The regime, from the supreme leader down, has repeatedly done that over 20 years. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said again last week that Iran “will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon”. There is claim and counter claim, but the fact is that, neither the US, UN inspectors nor Israel’s ultra-hostile leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have provided proof that Iran plans or wants to build nukes.

Prior to the attack, Trump refused to define his aims despite Arab and European allies’ fears of regional conflagration. Now his stated demands border on delusional. He says he is seeking to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear facilities (again), destroy its ballistic missiles, destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (or accept its unconditional surrender in return for “total immunity”), and somehow also destroy Iran’s allied proxy forces in the region.

Trump is also openly encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government, having previously declared that regime change is “the best thing that could happen” and promised “help is on its way”. But he doesn’t say how that change can be achieved without deploying ground troops, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, occupying the country for years, and fighting open-ended insurgencies – and no such US deployment is on offer. When George HW Bush made a similar appeal to Iraqis following the 1991 Gulf war, a mass slaughter of the Shia Muslim population ensued, carried out by Saddam’s undefeated regime.

“This will be probably your only chance for generations,” Trump said as he called for a national insurrection. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.” Yet there are good, sensible reasons why no previous president has done something so reckless in Iran. And it’s certainly no “gift”. It’s an irresponsible invitation to anarchy and mayhem. It could trigger the fracturing of the Iranian state into its many ethnic and religious components and a catastrophic civil war drawing in regional states. If so, that’s on Trump. That’s the height of foolishness.

“Trump poses an exponentially greater danger to Americans and the world – not because he is a historical anomaly but rather because he reflects the worst impulses from the American past,” warned Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, in a recent essay. Trump typified the entrenched problem of vainglorious American exceptionalism. “What innate confidence in our own special character leads the US government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?” Rhodes wondered. “We are now entering another spasm of aggression cast as necessity.”

For the second time, Trump has offered negotiations to Iran while obviously planning an attack. It’s now evident this week’s negotiations in Geneva were a charade. Nor is there any sign Trump and Netanyahu, having set out their maximalist objectives, will break off the attacks soon. To do so would suggest failure. Trump wants to be the president who finally avenges US humiliations during the 1979 Iranian revolution, who brings Iran back into the western fold. He also wants a “win” to impress November’s midterm voters – one that revives his poor approval ratings. As for Iran-obsessed Netanyahu, he wants the impossible: guaranteed security for ever, on Israel’s neo-colonialist terms.

It’s unclear how this dangerous, ill-considered intervention may end. Although “leadership targets” (meaning the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his close associates) are reportedly being attacked, a sudden government collapse remains improbable at this point. It follows that the regime, though wounded and reduced, will continue to pose serious, and possibly greater, domestic and international challenges. Iran cannot be bombed into functioning democracy. The defiance of the west that it represents cannot be talked away in social media posts. As long as Khamenei or designated clerical successors are in charge, vicious repression and regional troublemaking will persist.

Common ground nevertheless exists, on which peaceful coexistence could be built. Concepts of democratic self-determination, political autonomy, individual rights and adherence to moral principles are anathema to control-freak authoritarians such as Trump and Khamenei. But not to their countries’ peoples. Like a Persian emperor, what “King” Donald really wants from Iranians is capitulation, tribute and homage. He demands a similar fearful fealty from citizens at home.

Despite all the hate-mongering, mutual ignorance and disinformation, the vast majority of Americans and Iranians are on the same side. Their common foe is tyranny. Their leaders are the problem. There is no need for this fight.