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Trump
demands Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender’ as bombs pound Tehran and Beirut
US
president again calls on Iranian people to overthrow government or face
‘absolutely guaranteed death’
Jason
Burke in Jerusalem
Fri 6 Mar
2026 18.27 GMT
Donald
Trump has said only Iran’s “unconditional surrender” will bring an end to the
joint US-Israeli offensive launched seven days ago, as the two powers’
warplanes carried out some of the heaviest bombardments so far in the
spiralling conflict.
“There
will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” Trump wrote on his
Truth Social platform on Friday, when US strategic bombers were in action over
Iran and intensive Israeli strikes in Lebanon forced more than a million people
to flee their homes.
Israeli
and US officials threatened further escalation as Iran retaliated with more
attacks across a swathe of the Middle East.
Pete
Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said US firepower was “about to surge
dramatically” , while Eyal Zamir, the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff,
said Israel was moving to a new phase of its offensive that would “further
dismantle the regime and its military capabilities”.
Zamir
said in a statement: “We have additional surprises ahead which I do not intend
to disclose.”
Tehran
launched missiles and drones at Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain,
apparently targeting US bases and civilian infrastructure including oil
pipelines.
Other
missiles were launched at Israel, though fewer than in the first days of the
conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they had fired missiles towards Tel
Aviv after an earlier wave of explosions caused a blaze at a residential
building in the city.
The
Revolutionary Guards said Iranian forces had also targeted a military airbase
and a radar site in Israel, and promised new initiatives and weapons would soon
be deployed to confront Israeli and US aggression, without giving details.
Witnesses
described the latest airstrikes in Iran as particularly intense, shaking homes
in the capital, Tehran. Others reported explosions around the Iranian city of
Kermanshah in an area that is home to missile bases. Internet coverage in Iran
has been reduced to about 1%, according to the monitor group NetBlocks,
limiting the availability of information about the impact of the war on
ordinary Iranians.
In
Lebanon, where there has been renewed fighting between Israel and the
Iranian-backed Islamist militant movement Hezbollah, huge numbers were on the
move after the Israeli army issued its largest, most sweeping displacement
orders to date and hit Beirut with multiple attacks.
Hundreds
of thousands were already fleeing Israeli strikes in the south of the country
and the Bekaa valley.
The
Israeli army issued a warning on Thursday evening, urging residents of Dahiyeh,
a stronghold of Hezbollah in southern Beirut that is also home to more than
600,000 people, to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately”. By
Friday, the usually vibrant area was a ghost town, the throngs of people
replaced by rubble and fires from Israeli strikes.
Hashem
Osseiran, a Red Cross spokesperson for the Middle East, described scenes of
panic and confusion. “Many people have fled, some on foot, with nothing but the
clothes on their backs and no clear sense of where to go,” he said.
Hezbollah
has continued fighting in south Lebanon, announcing volleys of rockets aimed at
northern Israel and targeting Israeli forces. Five Israeli soldiers were badly
wounded by anti-tank fire on Friday as they were deployed near the border with
Lebanon in northern Israel, the IDF said.
The
Lebanese health ministry said the death toll in the country stood at 217 since
the resurgence of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which fired
missiles into Israel in the opening days of the war. A further 798 people have
been injured.
Military
officials say Israel’s strikes in Beirut are targeting residential buildings
used by Hezbollah as headquarters and for the storage of drones, while in Iran,
Israel is targeting command bunkers, missile launch sites and other military
infrastructure.
Adm Brad
Cooper, the head of US Central Command, said on Friday morning that B-2 stealth
bombers dropped dozens of 2,000lb “penetrator” bombs on deeply buried ballistic
missile launchers inside Iran. A large Iranian naval vessel used as a launch
platform for drones was also hit, and possibly sunk.
The
biggest single loss of civilian life reported so far in the conflict came in an
apparent airstrike on an Iranian girls’ school on Saturday, which killed more
than 100 students. Military investigators in the US believe it is likely US
forces were responsible but have not yet reached a final conclusion, Reuters
reported.
The war
has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran and about a dozen in Israel, according
to officials in those countries. Six US troops have been killed. Oil supplies
have been disrupted, tens of thousands of flights have been cancelled, and
international stock markets have been rocked.
Before
posting his comments about Iran’s unconditional surrender, Trump said on Friday
that regime change was the objective of the joint US-Israeli offensive, which
began with a surprise attack that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme
leader.
In brief
remarks at the White House, Trump again urged the Iranian people to “help take
back your country”, promising the US would grant them “immunity”.
“So
you’ll be perfectly safe with total immunity,” Trump said, without giving any
details about what that meant. “Or you’ll face absolutely guaranteed death.”
Analysts
have said that defections of senior officers from the army or the Revolutionary
Guards would suggest the radical clerical regime’s grip on Iran was weakening.
There is no evidence of this so far, however.
Iranian
state television reported on Friday that a leadership council had started
discussing how to convene the country’s assembly of experts, which will select
the new supreme leader.
In
Tehran, worshippers gathered for the first Friday prayers since the start of
the war. Iranian media showed crowds of men and women dressed in black, some
carrying Iranian flags, streaming to an open space outside the Imam Khomeini
Mosalla grand mosque in the capital.
In the
background of one video, a man speaking through a loudspeaker mourned Khamenei.
“We bear witness that he was the embodiment of piety and guardianship in our
time,” he said as some worshippers seated on prayer rugs wept.
In an
interview with the news website Axios, Trump said he should be involved in
choosing Iran’s new leader and spoke dismissively of Khamenei’s son Mojtaba
Khamenei, who is a frontrunner to replace his father, calling him “a
lightweight”. “We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,”
Trump said.
Recent
waves of Israeli strikes appear to have been focused on Iran’s western border
with Iraq, possibly preparing for an incursion by fighters from Iranian Kurdish
opposition groups based in northern Iraq.
Qatar and
Saudi Arabia both said they had intercepted Iranian attacks targeting US bases
in their countries. In Bahrain, officials said Iranian strikes targeted two
hotels and a residential building. In Kuwait, where the six US soldiers were
killed on Sunday, the army said air defences were activated when missile and
drone attacks breached its airspace.
The
British ambassador to Bahrain said on Friday the UK would help defend the
country with its fighter jets. On Thursday the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer,
said he was sending four more Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters to Qatar after
requests from allies for further support.
Volker
Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said “the world urgently needs
to see steps to contain and extinguish this blaze”, but that “instead we are
only seeing more inflammatory, bellicose rhetoric, more bombings, more
destruction, killings and escalation, that fuels it further”.
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