Israel carried out strikes against Iran on Thursday evening, according to multiple reports.
The strikes came one day after news broke that the U.S. was evacuating nonessential personnel from its Iraqi embassy along with family members of military personnel at multiple bases in the Gulf.
The State Department also ordered embassies within striking distance of Iran “to convene emergency action committees (EACs) and send cables back to Washington about measures to mitigate risks,” The Washington Post reported ahead of the strikes.
The U.S. has been engaged in ongoing negotiation with Iran over its nuclear program. President Donald Trump repeatedly said in recent weeks that Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, and following reports of a deal that would allow for some uranium enrichment to continue in Iran, Trump said any deal with Iran will ban all enrichment. But Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said there would be no deal if Iran was not allowed to continue enrichment.
Iran has been enriching uranium far beyond levels needed for civilian use.
While Iran is likely to respond to the preemptive strike from Israel, war is not necessarily imminent, according to Heritage Foundation national security experts Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway.
A broader conflict in the region in response to a strike is a “legitimate concern,” Coates and Greenway wrote in a recent report, but “it is by no means the inevitable outcome of an action targeted at Iran’s nuclear facilities. In fact, history indicates that limited strikes on rogue nuclear programs do not result in war: in 1981 and 2007, for example, Israel executed successful targeted strikes on both Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear programs without igniting regional conflicts.”
This is a breaking news story and it may be updated.