Visualizing the US-Israeli war with Iran and retaliation in maps and charts
By Lou Robinson, Renée Rigdon, Rosa de Acosta, Janie Boschma, Matt Stiles, Soph Warnes, Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa, Henrik Pettersson, Gillian Roberts, Annette Choi, Amy O’Kruk, CNN
(CNN) — War in the Middle East is accelerating after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, and Tehran retaliated with strikes against several of its neighbors, including US-allied Gulf states. Israel and Hezbollah are also trading blows as the conflict widens.
CNN is tracking the US-Israeli strikes across Iran, and Tehran’s retaliatory attacks on US military bases and consulates, Israel and other targets across the region.
US and Israeli military air strikes killed numerous members of the Iranian leadership, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
The US-Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,200 people in Iran and more than 120 in Lebanon, according to each country’s state media.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday: “We are just getting started,” noting that the president says to expect “larger waves” of military action.
Iran’s future leader
Khamenei’s death plunged the Middle East into uncertainty. Senior Iranian officials are getting ready to reveal a new supreme leader, according to state media.
Israel warned that any new leader would be “an unequivocal target for elimination.”
A look at some of the damage across the region
Hegseth said the Trump administration is investigating a strike that, according to Iranian state media, killed more than 100 people at a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran.
Iran’s top official said Tehran “will not negotiate” with the United States, as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Wednesday that the US will start striking “progressively deeper” into Iran.
Trump acknowledged there could be more US casualties as the conflict escalates. At least six US service members were killed in Kuwait in a direct hit on a makeshift operations center at the civilian port of Shuaiba on Sunday morning local time, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.
The conflict has damaged air hubs, rocked densely populated areas and disrupted oil shipments.
Shipping disruptions persist in critical waterway amid strikes
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the US Navy will begin escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as military assets in the region are able to direct their attention away from Iran’s retaliatory strikes on neighboring countries.
Iran controls the north side of the strait, a narrow waterway that is the main shipping route for crude from oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to the rest of the world.
About one-fifth of daily global production typically flowed through the strait before the current conflict, according to the US Energy Information Administration, which calls the channel a “critical oil chokepoint.”
Oil prices have surged this week, hiking gas prices when Americans are already struggling with affordability.
The AAA national average for regular gasoline has surged to the highest average gas price of either of Trump’s two terms in the White House.
Flight disruptions
Nearly 14,000 flights scheduled to depart from large airports in 10 countries have been canceled since the conflict began, data from Flightradar24 shows. A wide corridor of Middle East airspace has remained empty, though some area airports’ departing flights are slowly starting to tick up.
Internet access disrupted across Iran
The people of Iran have been in a near-total internet blackout since the air strikes started. Internet shutdowns have previously been a go-to tactic for the regime, with a previous period of inactivity recorded in January during anti-government protests.
—CNN’s Jake Tapper, Christian Edwards, Karina Tsui, Tim Lister, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Lauren Kent, Billy Stockwell, John Towfighi, Sophie Tanno and Adam Pourahmadi contributed to this report.
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This story has been updated with additional developments.
