Vatican City - Israel and the United States launched a series of air strikes against Iran early this morning, hitting multiple areas of the country and several cities, including the capital Tehran. The Iranian response followed almost immediately, with missiles fired towards Israel and at a number of US military bases in the Gulf.
Declared aim: beyond the nuclear dossier
The political signal marking this new phase lies in the stated purpose of the operation. The objective set out by Donald Trump, and echoed by the Israeli government, goes beyond simple pressure over Iran’s nuclear programme: it is framed explicitly in terms of regime change, by striking the country’s command structure and military capabilities - particularly its missile forces - and by weakening its regional reach through allied groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Khamenei question and the lack of confirmation
In the hours after the strikes, attention has focused on the fate of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s foremost religious and political authority. His compound in Tehran was destroyed in the bombardment, but it remains unclear where he was at the time of the attacks, or whether he has been killed or wounded. Several Israeli sources are increasingly suggesting that Khamenei has been killed, but a definitive confirmation is still missing.
Retaliation and a widening front in the Gulf
On the military front, the Iranian retaliation has rapidly expanded the theatre. Beyond missile launches towards Israel - with air-raid sirens, a state of emergency, and the closure of airspace -there are reports of attacks aimed at major US installations in the region: Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, and the US Fifth Fleet base in Bahrain. Other missiles were fired towards a base in the United Arab Emirates: they were intercepted, but falling debris caused one fatality. In Bahrain, evacuations have meanwhile begun in areas surrounding the base.
Arab reactions and diplomatic rifts across the region
The widening of strikes to Arab-majority countries triggered an immediate diplomatic backlash. Qatar and Kuwaitdenounced a breach of their sovereignty, reserving the right to respond; the United Arab Emirates warned of “serious consequences” if further attacks follow; Saudi Arabia expressed solidarity with the countries hit, within a regional landscape where Riyadh remains Iran’s principal rival.
Over the course of the day, another report emerged that is likely to intensify both political and international pressure. An air strike hit the Shajareye Tayabeh girls’ school in Minab, in the southern province of Hormozgan. According to Iran’s state news agency IRNA, the school was open at the time and at least 57 schoolgirls were killed; dozens more are reported injured, with some still trapped under rubble. Tehran blames Israel, but at this stage it is not possible to establish with certainty whether responsibility lies with Israel or the United States.
Air traffic disruption: closures and suspensions
The impact of the crisis is already spilling beyond the immediate war zone in practical terms, starting with aviation. At least six countries have closed their airspace - including Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates - and numerous airlines have suspended or rerouted services across the Middle East. Operations have also been suspended at Dubai’s two main airports - Dubai International and Dubai World Central - raising the prospect of knock-on effects for global air traffic.
The most sensitive economic fault line remains energy. As retaliation, Iran could attempt to disrupt or block transit through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime corridor through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes. Even the prospect of a closure is among the most destabilising scenarios, with the potential to jolt markets and supply chains rapidly.
Slower communications and growing domestic information opacity
Inside Iran, the information environment is becoming increasingly opaque. Internet access and mobile communicationshave slowed sharply - near-total outages are reported across wide areas of the country. It remains unclear whether this reflects damage to infrastructure or a deliberate shutdown ordered by the regime, as has happened during previous crises and episodes of internal unrest.
Diplomatically, the strikes come as indirect or mediated talks between Washington and Tehran were under way. The most recent meetings took place in Geneva, focused primarily on US demands to curb Iran’s nuclear programme; further talks had been expected, but the night of the bombardment has rewritten the landscape. Oman’s foreign ministerurged the United States not to be drawn deeper into the conflict, calling it “not their war”.
The battle of narratives: names, symbols, messages
In this context, the communications dimension is integral to the operation itself. The names assigned are “Epic Fury” for the United States and “Lion’s Roar” for Israel. Choosing highly evocative - often overtly propagandistic - labels is standard practice: last summer’s US strikes were branded “Midnight Hammer”, while the Israeli strikes that preceded them were described as “Rising Lion”.
The recurring lion motif is often read as a biblical allusion, where a prophet likens Israel’s strength to that of a lion. At the same time, the lion also recalls Iran’s pre-1979 flag, which featured a lion with a sword set before a sun - an emblem now frequently used by Iran’s opposition and by Reza Pahlavi.
Pope Leo’s words and concern for a world coming apart
It is unsettling to see the Bible invoked to justify acts of war. It is troubling that, in the public telling of conflicts, labels such as “defensive operation” - and even more so “pre-emptive operation” - circulate so casually. Words set the moral frame before the facts and can end up making “necessary” what remains, on any human and legal reading, devastating. Pope Leo XIV has addressed this forcefully, insisting on a peace that is “disarmed and disarming”, and warning against a drift in which language loses contact with reality and becomes a weapon “to deceive or strike”, while rediscovering the meaning of words becomes one of the urgencies of our time. When semantics turn elastic, principles become negotiable. The exception then becomes the rule, normalising the idea that one can “make war to achieve peace”, and treating the use of force as if it were a technical step rather than a historical trauma.
This is not about absolving the regime of Ali Hosseini Khamenei: its conduct - internal repression, destabilisation, and violations of human dignity - must be condemned and brought to an end. The question that imposes itself, and that the Pope in effect forces us to ask, is about the criterion: how does the condemnation of a regime square with every state’s right not to be invaded, with the protection of sovereignty, and with the framework of international law that, after the Second World War, sought to place a barrier against the notion that borders can be redrawn “for higher reasons”?
In his address to diplomats, Leo XIV spoke openly about the crisis of multilateralism and the replacement of dialogue with a “diplomacy of force”, recalling that respect for humanitarian law cannot hinge on military or strategic interests. If each actor claims the power to decide when a threat justifies pre-emptive action, the category of self-defence expands until it becomes a permanent pass. The measure then ceases to be justice and becomes power, with a straightforward consequence: the rules of coexistence are rewritten by the strongest, for the strongest. The same fracture appeared, a few months ago, in the Venezuela-Maduro file, when political judgements of “good” and “evil” risked overrunning the perimeter of shared guarantees. One may criticise, isolate, sanction, pursue responsibility, support mediation and democratic pathways; but if legitimacy is assessed by individual states that appoint themselves as judges and enforcers, the outcome is a massacre waiting to happen - because the order breaks, and every conflict becomes exportable “in the name of security”.
In this context, the Pope’s voice is more concrete than it may seem. In his Lenten message, he calls for fasting even “from words that strike and wound”, urging people to disarm language and weigh their words. Applied to international politics, that means rejecting the distortion that turns an act of force into an act of virtue. It means calling things by their name, without rhetorical anaesthetics. Because once reality becomes “debatable”, other people’s lives become debatable too - and peace, which for Leo XIV is presence, journey, and responsibility, is reduced to a partisan slogan used to justify actions that remain immoral precisely because they try to erase, with a formula, the dignity of the other and the integrity of shared rules.
Fr. E.R.
Silere non possum