The violence engulfing the Middle East spilled into every corner of the region over the weekend, with Palestinians killed by settlers in the West Bank, an Israeli airstrike claiming lives in Gaza, and simultaneous military operations in Iran, the Gulf, and Lebanon — all as global oil prices soared above $100 per barrel.
In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike killed at least two Palestinians, the deadliest incident in the territory since the wider conflict began. In the occupied West Bank, three Palestinians were killed by settlers, bringing the number killed in recent days to six. In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed four in a Beirut hotel blast and 12 more in attacks on the country’s south, with the health ministry reporting at least 394 deaths and roughly 300,000 displaced.
Israeli strikes on oil storage facilities near Tehran killed four Iranian workers and left the capital shrouded in smoke. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened to push global oil to $200 per barrel and struck Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, killing two Saudi civilians and damaging Bahrain’s desalination plant.
A US service member died from wounds sustained in an Iranian attack in Saudi Arabia, the seventh American killed in the conflict. Reports of Russian intelligence support for Iranian targeting operations added geopolitical complexity, while Iran’s clerical body appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader in a historic first.
Washington pledged not to target Iranian oil infrastructure and predicted short-term supply disruptions. But with every corner of the region simultaneously on fire, and oil above $100 showing no sign of retreating, the Middle East had entered a period of violence whose full extent and duration remained impossible to predict.