WASHINGTON, United States
The US military says it has completed a "heavy wave" of strikes against Iran in retaliation for Tuesday's attempted ballistic missile attacks on American forces.
Centcom said it hit "dozens" of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targets in response to Iran's firing on US bases in Jordan and at ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian state media said the latest strikes had killed three people, including a two-year-old child, on Qeshm island, while other locations were also hit in the south and west of the country.
The latest hostilities come on a week that has seen the conflict expand, with the first publicly announced joint US-Saudi strikes targeting Iranian proxies in Iraq.
When the US and Israel launched military strikes on Iran in February, President Donald Trump said the war would last only a few weeks, but it has gone on for five months with no end in sight.
On Wednesday, news outlet Axios cited an unnamed US official as saying that Trump had met Saudi defence minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, who had conveyed that Saudi Arabia wants to de-escalate tensions.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government said a fire at a port on Wednesday had been caused by a drone attack. Egypt, a US ally, has not previously been directly attacked during the war.
The US-Iran conflict has reignited after several days of relative calm.
For days, both sides halted strikes as talks apparently restarted in hopes of some type of diplomatic solution. Trump called them "very friendly negotiations", though Tehran denied any discussions were happening.
But following the Iranian missile attack on a US base in Jordan on Tuesday, Trump vowed to retaliate, telling reporters at the White House: "We're going to be hitting them very hard because it's our turn to hit them. They know it's coming. They asked us not to do it."
The latest wave of US strikes started at 20:00 ET on Wednesday (01:00 BST on Thursday) and lasted about an hour, with Centcom calling them a "powerful response to yesterday's attempted Iranian attacks on US forces based in the Middle East". All of Iran's missiles were intercepted, Centcom said.
The attack by the US targeted "military command centers, missile and drone facilities, coastal surveillance and defense sites, and maritime capabilities," Centcom wrote once the strikes were complete.
Iranian state media agency Irib reported that the islands of Qeshm and Abadan, both central to the oil industry, were among the areas hit.
"A US attack on a residential home in the Chah Tangu neighbourhood of Qeshm killed three members of a family: the father, the mother, and their 2-year-old child," Fars reported citing the Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences.
Meanwhile, Jordan's armed forces said that air defence systems had successfully shot down five Iranian missiles targeting the Kingdom's territory on Thursday.
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