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Article: Air travel remains disrupted across the Middle East.

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Summary: Israel intensified its military campaign against Hezbollah, launching heavy airstrikes on Beirut's Dahiya district and prompting thousands to flee. In a widening regional conflict, Iran retaliated with missile and drone launches toward Tel Aviv, while Israeli strikes also reportedly hit targets in Tehran. The conflict, which began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran the prior week, has escalated to involve attacks across multiple fronts.

Main Topics Covered: 1. Israeli airstrikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah. 2. Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks on Israel. 3. The regional escalation of the conflict, including strikes in Iran and the Persian Gulf.

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https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03/06/world/iran-war-trump-israel-lebanon/air-travel-is-still-disrupted-across-the-middle-east

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NYT > World News

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2026-03-06 12:33

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2026-03-06 10:00

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2026-03-06 10:01

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Tel Aviv/Beirut2:59 p.m. March 6
Tehran4:29 p.m. March 6
Live Updates: Israel Pummels Beirut, Intensifying Strikes on Hezbollah
Thousands fled the heaviest Israeli attacks on Lebanon’s capital since a 2024 war with the Iran-backed militia. Israel also said it was hitting Tehran, while its air defenses battled new missile launches from Iran.
- Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
- Khalil Ashawi/Reuters
- By Reuters
- By Social Media, Via Reuters
- Mahmoud Illean/Associated Press
- Mahmoud Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Mahmoud Zayyat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
- Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
- Associated Press
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Reuters
- Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
- Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
- Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
- Reuters
The Israeli military pounded Beirut with airstrikes on Friday morning and issued more evacuation warnings in southern Lebanon as it intensified its campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants.
Lebanon was fast becoming the most heated front in the metastasizing regional conflict that began with U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran a week ago. With smoke plumes rising from new strikes in and around Beirut, the capital, the Israeli military warned more villagers in the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah bastion in the south, to move north, indicating airstrikes were imminent.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps also launched a wave of drones and missiles at targets in Tel Aviv on Friday, according to a statement from the force reported by IRNA, the country’s state news agency. Air-raid sirens went off in the city, and the Israeli military said that it had detected missile launches from Iran, though there were no immediate reports of major damage.
The Israeli strikes in Dahiya, a densely populated commercial and residential area of Beirut that is a stronghold of Hezbollah, were the most intense since a cease-fire in late 2024. At least three buildings collapsed, and thousands of people who live in the area were displaced to other parts of the capital.
As Friday dawned after a night of ferocious airstrikes, some displaced residents of Dahiya huddled under roundabouts or in empty parking lots of downtown Beirut, or slept inside cars parked along a seaside promenade. Some said they had left home with only thin mattresses or a few utensils, fleeing while the television was still on or as they prepared meals to break their Ramadan fast.
Tehran, the Iranian capital, was also hit by heavy airstrikes overnight. Dozens of residents told The New York Times in text messages that more than a dozen large explosions had shaken the central and eastern parts of the city. Iran’s state television also said that the intense airstrikes in the capital targeted the compound of the slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an area near the presidential palace and the National Security Council. Mr. Khamenei was killed in an airstrike last Saturday, and his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is considered the leading candidate to succeed him.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned on Thursday that the conflict could become a “quagmire for whomever chooses to pursue it.” U.S. and Israeli officials offered a different assessment, saying their ongoing campaign had greatly degraded Tehran’s military capabilities.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Gulf nations: As Iran’s retaliatory strikes hit U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry said on Friday that it had intercepted and destroyed three ballistic missiles launched toward Prince Sultan Air Base, a military complex south of the capital, Riyadh. Qatar’s foreign ministry said Iran had carried out an attack on buildings in neighboring Bahrain, where members of the Qatari Navy were present, but said no injuries had been reported. Iran did not comment on either statement.
Trump’s role: President Trump said in interviews published Thursday that he should have a role in choosing Iran’s new leader, and that Mr. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, was an “unacceptable” choice.
Europe’s response: European leaders, several of whom disapproved of the initial U.S.-Israeli assault, have stepped up their deployment of military assets in the Middle East, moves they said aimed to protect their citizens and their interests, as well as crucial shipping routes, and not to support the bombing of Iran.
Oil and the economy: Stocks were lower in Europe early Friday at the end of a tumultuous week for markets, as a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the conflict set off fears of resurgent inflation. As a senior official in Qatar warned in a Financial Times interview of lengthy disruptions to energy production, the Trump administration said it would grant a temporary waiver to Indian refiners to buy sanctioned Russian oil in a bid to stabilize energy markets.
Evacuations: The State Department is battling accusations from diplomats and travelers who say the Trump administration endangered U.S. citizens by beginning a war without adequate plans for helping Americans leave the Middle East. The State Department began evacuating Americans from the region by charter flight on Wednesday. Read more ›
Death toll: At least 787 people have been killed in Iran since the start of the U.S.-Israeli attacks, according to the Red Crescent Society, Iran’s main humanitarian relief organization, including at least 175 who died in the bombing of a girls’ elementary school. At least 123 people in Lebanon have been killed, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Several airlines in the Middle East restored flights on a limited basis Friday but air travel across the region remained severely disrupted, as fallout from the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran kept airspaces closed.
Over 20,000 flights to or from the Middle East have been canceled since Saturday, seriously disrupting global aviation. The region accounts for about 5.5 percent of all flights worldwide, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm.
Here is what to know about passenger flights in the region on Friday:
United Arab Emirates: Etihad Airways, a major airline based in Abu Dhabi, announced that it would organize a limited flight schedule from its hub to several “key destinations,” including New York City. Emirates, the other major carrier based in the Emirates, resumed some flights from its Dubai hub on Monday. Traffic at Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest, remains far below its normal capacity, according to Flightradar24, a flight tracking website.
Qatar: Qatar Airways, another major carrier in the region, said its operations remained on pause, with the country’s airspace closed to civilian air traffic.
Saudi Arabia: Saudia said that flights to and from regional destinations like Amman, Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Bahrain were still canceled. Several airports across the kingdom appeared to be operating at diminished capacity, according to Flightradar24.
Airspaces in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait remained closed as of late Thursday, according to Flightradar24.
Israel: El Al, the country’s flag carrier, resumed a limited number of flights to bring back Israelis who were stranded abroad. But not all has gone smoothly. A flight from Geneva circled in midair for about half an hour Thursday night before landing at Ben Gurion Airport while air-raid sirens sounded in the area warning of imminent strikes, according to a spokeswoman for the airline. Israel’s transportation minister said on Friday that FlyDubai, an Emirates-based budget carrier, would operate several flights to return Israelis stranded there.
Major developments — March 5
Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, said in a post on social media that some countries had begun what he called “mediation efforts,” without elaborating on who was involved in those efforts. He said that Iran was committed to “lasting peace in the region” but that mediation should “address those who underestimated the Iranian people and ignited this conflict,” likely referring to the United States and Israel.
Prime Minister Nawaf Salam of Lebanon said Friday that the country was being “dragged further into an abyss” and had been drawn into a conflict that “we did not seek and did not choose.” Although he did not name the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, it attacked Israel earlier this week, and the Israeli military responded by bombarding Lebanon. Salam warned of a looming humanitarian disaster as hundreds of thousands flee under Israeli evacuation orders in Beirut and southern Lebanon.
European stock indexes were in the red early Friday at the end of a tumultuous week for markets, as a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict set off fears of resurgent inflation.
The Stoxx Europe 600 index has fallen by nearly 5 percent this week, the steepest weekly decline since last April when President Trump announced sweeping tariffs. The S&P 500 was also set to open about 0.3 percent lower when trading begins on Friday in New York, according to futures markets.
Oil and gas prices were rising further after Qatar’s energy minister warned of lengthy disruptions to energy production as the conflict roiled Persian Gulf nations. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose by 2 percent on Friday to $87 a barrel. The price has risen nearly 20 percent this week. European natural gas prices have surged by 60 percent this week.
Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi of Qatar, a major exporter of liquefied natural gas, told the Financial Times that even if fighting stopped immediately, it would take the country “weeks to months” to resume normal deliveries.
The increase in energy prices raised expectations of higher inflation. One of the clearest signs of those concerns is in the government bond market, where prices are falling. That pushes bond yields higher, reflecting investor expectations that interest rates might need to rise. Traders are now betting that the European Central Bank will likely raise interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point by the end of the year to combat higher prices.
Qatar’s foreign ministry said Iran had carried out an attack on buildings in neighboring Bahrain, where members of the Qatari Navy were present. It said no injuries were recorded among the members of the Qatari navy, who were participating in a joint operations center associated with the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Iran did not immediately comment on the statement.
Avichay Adraee, an Arabic language spokesman for the Israeli military, ordered on Friday several villages in the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah bastion in Lebanon, to evacuate to the north. On Thursday, the Israeli military ordered three other villages in the Bekaa Valley to evacuate.
Four men were arrested in Britain on Friday on suspicion of helping Iran’s intelligence service by spying on locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area.
One Iranian and three dual British-Iranian nationals were arrested shortly after 1 a.m. in areas north of the capital as part of a preplanned operation, counterterrorism police said.
The men were detained on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service. “The country to which the investigation relates is Iran,” the police said in a statement.
Six other men who were not targeted in the operation were detained in the Harrow area on suspicion of trying to assist one of the men who was being arrested.
“Today’s arrests are part of a long-running investigation and part of our ongoing work to disrupt malign activity where we suspect it,” Cmdr. Helen Flanagan, the head of counterterrorism policing in London, said in the statement.
“We understand the public may be concerned, in particular the Jewish community, and as always, I would ask them to remain vigilant and if they see or hear anything that concerns them, then to contact us.”
The four men arrested on suspicion of assisting Iranian intelligence included a 40-year-old and a 55-year-old arrested at addresses in the Barnet area, police said. Searches continued at those locations and another address in the area. The other two were a 52-year-old arrested in Watford, northwest of London, and a 22-year-old arrested in Harrow. Both locations were being searched, as was a location in the Wembley district.
Six other men were arrested at one location in Harrow on suspicion of assisting an offender.
Despite the outbreak of war in the Middle East, there has been no change to Britain’s national terror threat level, which stood at “substantial” — meaning an attack was probable. (There are two higher levels — “severe” and “critical.”)
On Sunday, the British defense secretary, John Healey, highlighted the increased risk of indiscriminate retaliatory attacks by Iran and its proxies, adding that the domestic threat assessment was under review and that vigilance in Britain was high.
Britain’s intelligence services have previously named Iran among the three countries posing the greatest threat to the country, alongside Russia and China.
Iranian reporters and broadcasters based in Britain have suffered physical attacks, threats and surveillance. In October Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, the domestic security service, said his organization had “tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in just the one year.”
Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, told a news conference last year that Iran had been “relying on criminal proxies” — a network of groups and individuals paid for their services — to target people in Britain.
“Iran really does continue to project a very real physical threat to individuals in this country,” he said. “We know that they are continuing to try and sow violence on the streets of the United Kingdom.”
The U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, called Friday for restraint, de-escalation and a return to negotiations to contain the fighting in the Middle East. “It’s uncontrollable, it’s chaos, it’s disarray, disorder and the world absolutely cannot afford it,” he said urging government leaders to defend international law and the U.N. charter. In particular, he pointed to Israel’s mass displacement orders affecting hundreds of thousands of people in southern Lebanon and called for an investigation into the deadly strike on a school in southern Iran.
Live news agency video captured smoke plumes rising from several strikes in the Beirut area on Friday morning . The Israeli military said it was launching a new wave of strikes in the Beirut area, targeting infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not just the supreme leader of Iran but also a widely respected religious figure among followers of Shiite Islam. In Pakistan and India, both home to millions of Shiites, there was an outpouring of anger and grief after he was killed during U.S.-Israeli strikes on Saturday.
Thousands took to the streets in India and Pakistan, many chanting slogans against the United States and Israel. Some demonstrations spilled into violence in Pakistan, where the authorities say at least 25 people were killed during unrest on Sunday.
Mr. Khamenei, who died at 86, was considered the leader of all Shiites, not just Iran, said Nawab Masood Abdullah, a Shiite community leader in the city of Lucknow in India. “His status is similar to what the Pope means to Christians,” he added.
For more than three decades as Iran’s supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei cultivated the image of a resistance leader who united people opposed to the United States and Israel. For Shiites outside Iran, experts said, Mr. Khamenei symbolized the power of the world’s biggest Shiite country.
That influence extended to Shiite communities in India and Pakistan. In India, estimates of the Shiite population vary, but some experts and community leaders have put it at above 40 million. Many Shiites live in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region with cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.
“Iran may be far away, but for many Shiites the bond is spiritual,” said Areeba Zahra, a college student in northern Kashmir. “When something happens there, people here feel it too.”
Many schools across the region have been closed this week as officials try to prevent further unrest.
On Monday, protests in Kashmir over Mr. Khamenei’s death escalated into clashes with police.
Mr. Khamenei’s killing set off a wave of protests in Pakistan, too, where Shiites are estimated to be around 15 percent of the population, or around 35 million people. Sunni Muslims are the majority in Pakistan.
On Sunday, thousands of people took to the streets across Pakistan to protest against the U.S.-Israeli strikes. In some places, there were deadly clashes with security forces. The unrest prompted the authorities in Pakistan to impose temporary curfews in some areas.
In Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, 10 people died after protesters tried to storm the heavily guarded U.S. consulate, a police surgeon at the city’s main hospital told The New York Times.
“When Iran is attacked, we feel our faith, our identity and our very existence are being targeted,” said Asghar Jaffer, a Shiite student activist who joined the demonstrations in Karachi on Sunday.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979 that brought clerical rule to Iran, the country’s leaders have sought influence among Shiites in other countries like Pakistan and Lebanon, often to counter the influence that its longtime regional rival, Saudi Arabia, has among many Sunni Muslims in those countries. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have been accused of recruiting Pakistani Shiites for proxy warfare in other countries, including Syria.
Shiite Muslims have for decades been frequent targets of deadly attacks by Sunni militant groups.
For Pakistan’s Shiites faced with this threat, “Iran was turned into a symbol of power, strength, and dignity that they could rely on,” said Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, a professor of Islam in South Asia at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Pakistan has long sought to balance its relationships with Saudi Arabia, a close ally, and Iran, with which it shares a long border, because it does not want to take positions that might inflame sectarian tensions at home. So far, Pakistan’s government has condemned both the attacks on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory strikes on targets in Gulf countries.
The mood was far from neutral at the protests in Pakistan on Sunday.
“Khamenei’s assassination feels like an assault on the spiritual and political voice of the Shiite community worldwide,” said Azhar Naqvi, a banker who joined a protest in Islamabad, the capital
Around him, demonstrators chanted a line heard often at anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests: “Death to America, death to Israel.”
Four people were arrested by counter-terrorism police in London on suspicion of aiding Iran’s foreign intelligence service, the Metropolitan Police said on Friday. The investigation relates to suspected surveillance of locations and individuals linked to the Jewish community in the London area, the police said.
Iran’s state television said the intense airstrikes and bombing campaign on Tehran early this morning had also targeted the compound of the slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, an area near other seats of power, including the presidential palace and National Security Council. Ayatollah Khamenei was killed last Saturday, and his son Mojtaba Khamenei, is considered the leading candidate to succeed him.
The widening conflict in the Persian Gulf has not yet had a big impact on Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that makes Apple’s iPhones and Nvidia’s A.I. servers., its chairman, Young Liu, said. But if the fighting continues for long, everyone will feel the effects of higher oil prices and raw materials, he warned. Foxconn has reported record revenues driven by global demand for artificial intelligence. “War is something no one wants to see,” Mr. Liu said.
The Israeli military said it had completed a “large scale” wave of airstrikes in Dahiya, the densely populated area of southern Beirut that is a stronghold of Hezbollah. The strikes targeted 10 high-rise buildings used by the militant group, as well as several of its command centers, the military said.
Three Australian personnel were on board the U.S. submarine that sank an Iranian warship, Australia’s prime minister confirmed on Friday, prompting concerns that the country’s close military cooperation with the United States could draw it into the broadening conflict in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said the Australians did not participate in “any offensive action against Iran.” They were required to act in accordance with Australian law and policy despite being embedded with the U.S. military, Mr. Albanese said in an interview with Sky News.
Asked whether he was “comfortable” with the way the Iranian destroyer was sunk near Sri Lanka in terms of international law, Mr. Albanese said that was a question for the United States. Mr. Albanese was among the first U.S. allies to offer full public support of the attack on Iran.
The Australian submariners were aboard the U.S. vessel as part of the increasing cooperation and integration between the countries’ navies aimed at countering China in the region. Under a pact known as AUKUS, which also involves Britain, Australia is set to receive sensitive nuclear technology and nuclear-powered submarines from the United States in the coming years.
U.S. military officials have said that as a part of the integration, two to three Australian officers would eventually be on board many U.S. attack submarines to be trained.
Australia’s defense department said late last year that one in 10 of the people on U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines is Australian.
Critics of the agreement have warned that the increasingly close ties will embroil Australia in U.S.-led conflicts, a concern that has been heightened with the actions of the second Trump administration. On Friday, David Shoebridge, a senator with the Australian Greens, said the presence of Australian personnel on the U.S. ship involved in the Iran conflict was “an inevitability of AUKUS.”
“We have been dragged into this war without even a decision being made inside the cabinet room,” Mr. Shoebridge, who has long been against the agreement, told reporters in Canberra.
Australia last year severed diplomatic ties with Iran, accusing its military of orchestrating at least two antisemitic attacks against Jewish institutions and businesses in Sydney and Melbourne.
That attack made it clear to Australians that Iran was “prepared to reach across the other side of the world to promote an attack on Australian soil to promote division here in Australia,” Mr. Albanese said in the interview with Sky News on Friday.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Defense said on Friday that it intercepted and destroyed three ballistic missiles launched toward Prince Sultan Air Base, a military complex south of Riyadh. It also said it intercepted a cruise missile east of Al-Kharj governorate and five drones targeting other parts of the country.
Tehran is getting hit by heavy airstirkes tonight. Dozens of residents said in text messages that they heard more than a dozen large explosions in central and eastern areas of the city. A medical clinic, gas station, parking lot and two residential buildings were destroyed after strikes hit several residential neighborhoods, according to state television.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have launched a wave of drones and missiles at targets in Tel Aviv, according to a statement from the force reported on Friday by IRNA, Iran’s state news agency.
Iran has launched thousands of drones across the Persian Gulf in retaliation against the U.S.-Israeli strikes. The U.S. military has said it is targeting Iran’s drone launch sites in response, including a drone carrier that it struck over the weekend.
The Kuwaiti army said Friday morning that its air defenses were responding to missiles and drones that breached Kuwait’s airspace. It did not say where the missiles and drones came from.
There have been more than 10 Israeli airstrikes targeting a minimum of five areas in the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, since about 11 p.m. local time on Thursday. The strikes have continued into the early hours of Friday. Drones continue to hover over Beirut. The southern suburbs have mostly emptied of residents following evacuation warnings earlier in the day that caused panic about an impending bombardment.
Hezbollah is also warning residents of northern Israel who live within three miles of the border to evacuate their homes, echoing Israel’s warnings to people in Lebanon. “Your army’s aggression against Lebanese sovereignty and innocent civilians, its destruction of civilian infrastructure and its forced displacement operation will not go unanswered,” the Lebanese militant group said. It is the first such warning to Israelis from Hezbollah.
Three Australians were on the American submarine that sank an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka, but they were not involved in the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said on Friday. “I can confirm more so, though, that no Australian personnel have participated in any offensive action against Iran,” he told Sky News Australia. Iran has called the sinking of the IRIS Dena, which killed dozens, an “atrocity.”
Indian officials spent six months in agony after President Trump decided last summer to punish the country for buying crude oil from Russia, as they struggled to negotiate around his demand. Mr. Trump exerted pressure by placing sanctions on some Indian refiners and imposing a punishing 50 percent tariff on Indian goods to cut into revenue for what he called Moscow’s “war machine.”
On Thursday, Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, said in a social media post that the Trump administration would grant India a limited, 30-day waiver to buy sanctioned Russian oil currently stranded at sea to keep oil “flowing into the global market.”
In joining Israel to launch a war against Iran, Mr. Trump made it nearly impossible for India to get oil from its alternative suppliers, which are mostly in the Persian Gulf. Supplies from the region were cut off by the fighting, which has escalated since it began on Saturday. That leaves India with few options to feed its growing economy’s need for fuel, 90 percent of it imported. Russia looks like the obvious solution.
Sumit Ritolia, a research analyst at Kpler, which tracks international shipping, had anticipated the reversal and noted that India had not yet quit its Russian supply anyway. It takes nearly a month for tankers loaded in Russia to reach Indian ports; cargoes loaded before the trade deal was announced were still being delivered.
On Friday, Mr. Ritolia wrote that “the waiver effectively acts as a green signal.” Russia doesn’t have enough oil to fully offset the supply stranded in the Gulf, but it now has every reason to keep pumping, and should be able to charge higher prices too.
Rajeev Lala, a director at S&P Global Energy who follows India’s state-owned oil companies, said India’s recent experience buying and refining large quantities of seaborne crude from Russia proved that it could do without buying very much from the Gulf. It is well positioned to pick up where it left off when, in recent months, it started tapering its Russian purchases.
“India is better placed to restart the Russia supply chain, whereas others will need to work harder — if Gulf supplies are to stay shut for long,” Mr. Lala said.
India’s refineries are already rigged to process Russian supplies, and its shipping and insurance agents have their Russian contacts at the ready. It could ramp up imports of Russian oil.
It was just four weeks ago that India and the United States settled their trade war. In the bargain, India agreed to quit buying oil from Russia, according to the official American account.
That meant that Indian buyers would forgo the discounts that had saved billions of dollars since the start of the war in Ukraine. They had been buying Russian crude on the cheap, refining it and selling those products on to Europe, which has sharply curtailed its trade with Russia.
Barely a week later, the Supreme Court invalidated the tariffs that Mr. Trump had used to force India into that deal. There are other ways that the Trump administration can compel India to buy less Russian oil, for instance by threatening penalties on companies that buy from its biggest oil firms, or by finding some new legal basis for tariffs.
There are not many other places for India to turn for oil right now. Its main suppliers used to be Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait and Oman were expected to make up much of the balance. But the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway on Iran’s southern border that carries much of the Gulf’s energy exports, is all but closed by a barrage of drones and missile fire.
Russian oil, by contrast, sails to India by several routes. From Russia’s western ports, oil can be shipped through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to reach India’s west coast. Some has been shipped from the Russian Far East, too, though that may be diverted to buyers in East Asia who are also seeking alternatives to Persian Gulf supplies.
Shipments from Russia are slower to reach India than tankers from the Gulf, which take less than a week. But a large amount of Russian oil is sitting in tankers on the open sea — Mr. Ritolia of Kpler estimated more than 30 million barrels are idling around the Indian Ocean, enough to fulfill six days of India’s total demand, with more on the way.
Mr. Lala of S&P Global Energy noted that in recent years India’s oil companies had become comfortable simply buying crude, without investing in exploration or drilling projects of their own, in the Gulf or elsewhere. “The idea was, ‘Keep calm, and keep on buying,’” he said. But with supplies being pinched in Russia and the Gulf, that may need to change.
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington.
The State Department is battling accusations from diplomats and travelers who say the Trump administration endangered U.S. citizens in the Middle East by beginning a war against Iran without adequate plans for helping Americans leave the region.
The State Department began evacuating Americans from the region by charter flight on Wednesday and says it has communicated with thousands of U.S. citizens. But veteran diplomats and exasperated travelers said it had done too little, too slowly to help people stranded by flight cancellations and airspace closures in the region.
Since the United States and Israel began attacking on Saturday, Iran has fired volleys of drones and missiles at its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Several countries in the region have closed their airspace and shut down airports as a result.
Until midweek, the State Department had mainly provided stranded travelers with basic information about security conditions and commercial travel options via a telephone hotline and text messages. Before Wednesday, desperate people calling the hotline got an automated message that said the U.S. government could not help get them out of the region.
Later, the department chartered some buses to drive Americans from countries with no air travel to ones where they could catch flights. It is unclear how many such buses have been chartered.
In a statement on Thursday, Dylan Johnson, a State Department spokesman, said that “charter flight and ground transportation operations are underway and will continue to ramp up with additional flights and ground transports taking place today.”
The department said on Wednesday that its first charter flight had left the region for the United States. But the statement did not say how many more flights might be underway or in the works.
Many veteran diplomats faulted the State Department not only for its response after the attacks in Iran began, but also for its actions beforehand.
The department did not issue official alerts ahead of the strikes advising Americans that the risk of travel in the region had increased. Given that U.S. forces had been amassing over the winter and President Trump was warning of a possible attack, such notices would not have threatened any military element of surprise, diplomats said.
“This war started at a time of our choosing,” said Yael Lempert, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Jordan in the Biden administration. “It should have come as no surprise that airspace would close, and commercial flight options would be curtailed.”
Ms. Lempert, who helped organize the evacuation of Americans from Libya in 2011, noted that the Iranian strikes against U.S. partner countries were a predictable contingency and that airspace in the region had closed in previous instances of conflict with Iran over the past two years.
“It’s stunning there were no orders for authorized departure for nonessential U.S. government employees and family members in almost all the affected diplomatic missions in the region — nor public recommendations to American citizens to depart — until days into the war,” added Ms. Lempert, now a vice president at the Middle East Institute.
A State Department official, who discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity, said that pre-emptively raising travel alerts to their highest levels would be counterproductive, leading commercial airlines to cancel flights.
Department officials also firmly defended their other actions in response to the crisis, saying on Thursday morning that a round-the-clock task force had assisted more than 10,000 Americans abroad and that nearly 20,000 Americans had returned safely to the United States from the Middle East since the conflict began. Thousands more Americans have left the region for other destinations, officials said.
But critics called the numbers hollow. The count of Americans who received “assistance,” for instance, included people who were given information such as “security guidance” that some found lacking. And the 20,000 who have returned to the United States include those who found their way home without any government help.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a retired career diplomat who served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Biden administration, posted on social media that she was “shocked” by the department’s “failure to support Americans abroad.”
The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents Foreign Service officers worldwide, released a scathing statement on Wednesday highlighting the mass layoffs, budget cuts and early retirements since Mr. Trump took office last January.
“This crisis exposes real gaps in America’s diplomatic readiness,” the union said, adding that the department’s “capacity has been weakened by the loss of experienced personnel with critical regional, crisis management, consular, and language expertise, including specialists in Farsi and Arabic — skills that are indispensable in moments like this.”
The group also noted that Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all currently lack a Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador. It said that staff reductions under Secretary of State Marco Rubio “have left many of these embassies and the offices that support them critically understaffed.”
Some current and former diplomats expressed particular concern about a message sent by the leader of the department’s bureau of consular affairs, whose stated mission is “to protect the lives and serve the interests of American citizens” abroad during emergencies and disasters. The bureau has been led since late December by Mora Namdar, a career lawyer with roughly one year of State Department experience, most of it as an acting official in the department’s Middle East bureau.
Some Americans in the region reported feeling a sense of panic on Monday after Ms. Namdar posted on social media imploring U.S. citizens “to DEPART NOW” from 14 countries in the region “due to serious safety risks.” The message said that travelers should use “available commercial transportation,” even though commercial flights from many of those countries had already become scarce or nonexistent.
Mr. Trump and many of his top officials fiercely criticized the Biden administration for what they called a failure to plan for the orderly evacuation of American citizens and Afghan allies as Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Biden officials blamed staffing problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the Afghan government’s unexpectedly swift collapse.
Jan Fluitt-Dupuy, a retiree from Washington State who was stranded in Abu Dhabi along with her husband, Eddie Dupuy, said the State Department had for days given them “totally useless advice,” including that they should leave by commercial means when the region’s airspace was closed.
After days of calling the State Department hotline and their congressional representatives, the couple said on Thursday that they might have secured a seat on a U.S. government flight home. Still, the timing of any flight remained unclear, and they feared that “an unusually robust barrage of attacks” audible from their hotel room might close the airspace once again, Ms. Fluitt-Dupuy said.
Christine Chung and Gabe Castro-Root contributed reporting.
After sirens sounded in Bahrain early on Friday in the Middle East, the kingdom’s Interior Ministry said that Iranian strikes had targeted two hotels and a residential building in Manama, the capital. The ministry said there was material damage but no loss of life.