By Yomna Ehab<\/p>\n
DUBAI, June 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. said it struck Iranian military sites at the weekend and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Monday it had targeted a U.S. base in response, the \u200clatest in a series of exchanges amid negotiations to end the three-month-old war.<\/p>\n
The strikes on Iran’s Gulf coast were \u200cin response to “aggressive Iranian actions that included the shootdown of a U.S. MQ-1 drone that was operating over international waters,” the U.S. Central Command \u200bsaid in a post on X.<\/p>\n
“U.S. fighter aircraft swiftly responded by eliminating Iranian air defences, a ground control station, and two one-way attack drones that posed clear threats to ships transiting regional waters,” CENTCOM said, adding it will continue to protect U.S. assets and interests during the ongoing ceasefire.<\/p>\n
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Monday it had targeted an air base used \u200cby the U.S. for an attack on \u2060southern Iran, without identifying which base.<\/p>\n
Air defences in Kuwait, where a major U.S. base is located, were intercepting missile and drone attacks on Monday as sirens sounded across the country, the \u2060state news agency KUNA reported, without providing further details.<\/p>\n
The U.S. and Iran have sporadically exchanged strikes since their ceasefire took effect in early April as negotiations aimed at a more durable agreement drag on. A similar exchange occurred last Thursday and was described in \u200bsimilar terms \u200bby both sides.<\/p>\n
The war launched by the U.S. and Israel \u200bon February 28 has killed thousands of people, \u200cmainly in Iran and Lebanon, and caused global economic pain by pushing up energy prices due to Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump has said his key aim in the war is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon with its highly enriched uranium. Tehran has consistently denied it has plans to do that.<\/p>\n
Trump is under pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and get U.S. gasoline prices down ahead of the November congressional \u200celections, as voters show increasing frustration over rising prices. At the same \u200btime, he faces a potential backlash from Iran hawks in his own \u200bparty over any concessions to Tehran.<\/p>\n
The two sides \u200bremain at odds on several other issues, such as Tehran’s demands for the lifting of sanctions \u200cand the release of tens of billions of \u200bdollars of Iranian oil revenues \u200bfrozen in foreign banks.<\/p>\n
Israel’s war in Lebanon with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia is another major impediment.<\/p>\n
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he had ordered troops to move further into Lebanon in the battle against the \u200bIranian-backed Hezbollah militant group.<\/p>\n
U.S. Secretary of \u200cState Marco Rubio spoke with both Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Netanyahu on the diplomatic negotiations between \u200bIsrael and Lebanon and has proposed a plan to allow for “gradual de-escalation,” a U.S. official said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bReuters bureaus; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Yomna Ehab DUBAI, June 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. said it struck Iranian military sites at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[1977,34,188,4570,69,2174,37773],"class_list":["post-139753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tehran","tag-air-defences","tag-iran","tag-revolutionary-guards","tag-southern-iran","tag-tehran","tag-u-s-central-command","tag-war-in-lebanon"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116673223333659499","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}