Iran fires missiles at U.S. base in Qatar

Iran on Monday launched a military attack on an American base in Qatar, the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East, in retaliation for U.S. strikes on three critical nuclear sites.

Qatar said that its air defenses had intercepted the missiles and condemned the Iranian attack.

The strike stoked fears that the conflict with Iran could intensify, drawing in the United States further and expanding it across the region. The base, Al Udeid, serves as the forward headquarters for the U.S. Central Command, and was considered a prime potential target for Iranian retaliation after the U.S. strikes over the weekend.

Three Iranian officials said that Iran had given advance notice that attacks were coming, as a way to minimize casualties. The officials said Iran needed to be seen striking back at the United States, but in a way that allowed all sides an exit ramp. They described it as a similar strategy to one used in 2020, when Iran gave a heads-up before firing ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq after the assassination of its top general.

An Israeli official said that there was an early warning given by Iran about the attack, though the person did not say through which channel or to which country. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

Earlier in the day, the United States and Britain braced for an attack in Qatar, warning their citizens there to shelter in place. Qatar later announced that it had closed its airspace, and the United Arab Emirates did the same after the attack. The airspace closures disrupted flights into and out of Doha and Dubai, two major hubs of international air travel.

The escalation came as Israel launched wide-ranging strikes on Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Monday and promised more “in the coming days,” pressing on with its bombing campaign a day after the United States attacked three Iranian nuclear sites.

The new Israeli barrage, which a military spokesperson said targeted a paramilitary headquarters, a notorious prison and access routes to the Fordo nuclear enrichment site that the U.S. military bombarded, came as Iran fired salvos of missiles that sent Israelis to huddle in shelters.

The strikes took place amid calls from world leaders for de-escalation, and as President Donald Trump’s decision to join Israel’s campaign against Iran raised fears that the war would intensify.

Iran’s attack on Al Udeid came after its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with a key ally, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the Russian leader called the U.S. strikes “absolutely unprovoked aggression,” he stopped short of offering concrete support for Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in a televised address Sunday night, said that his country was “very, very close” to realizing its objectives in the conflict but did not say when its bombing campaign would end. On Monday, an Israeli military spokesperson issued a new warning to residents of Tehran and said that the army “will continue attacking military targets in the Tehran region in the coming days.”

Though Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “totally obliterated” by the U.S. bombings, the actual state of the program seemed far more murky, with senior officials conceding they did not know the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

Here’s what else to know:

— Possible response: Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and Iran’s attacks Monday, dimmed hopes for a negotiated solution to end the fighting. While U.S. officials say that Iran has depleted its stockpile of medium-range missiles, the country still has an ample supply of other weapons, including rockets and drones, some of which would — if employed — give U.S. forces in the region only minutes of warning before an attack.

— Economic impact: U.S. oil prices fell more than 4%, below $71 a barrel, after Iran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar. Before the attack, investors appeared cautiously optimistic on Monday about the potential economic fallout from the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.

— Calls for peace: After European foreign ministers met to discuss Iran, the European Union’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said that “the concerns of retaliation and this war escalating are huge.” The International Atomic Energy Agency held an emergency meeting in Vienna, where the head of the agency, Rafael Grossi, warned that “violence and destruction could reach unimaginable levels” if Iran, Israel and the United States do not find a path to diplomacy.

— The strikes: Pentagon officials described a tightly choreographed operation that included B-2 bombers carrying 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and submarine-fired Tomahawk cruise missiles hitting a trio of sites in less than a half-hour. A senior U.S. official acknowledged that the attack on Fordo had not destroyed the heavily fortified site, but it had been severely damaged.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.