Iran on Friday is holding its presidential election to replace President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. But many Iranians say they will stay home instead of heading to the polls. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer is in Tehran to help explain why.
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It was September 1983, and a young senator named Joe Biden had a message for President Ronald Reagan. “I would not support any authorization for troops in Lebanon of any duration absent much more clearly defined goals and a reasonable prospect of attaining those goals,” Biden said, commenting on a proposed congressional war powers resolution.
U.S. Marines had been deployed to Lebanon as part of peacekeeping mission in the wake of an Israeli invasion aimed at destroying Palestinian militias, and Congress was debating whether to continue the mission. A month after Biden’s warning, a truck bomb killed 241 American and 58 French peacekeepers in their barracks, and Reagan pulled out the Americans.
Today, Biden is considering sending U.S. forces back into the fray—not as bystanders but as direct combatants—with far less permission from Congress.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, a parallel border conflict has been raging in the north. The Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Israeli army are shelling into each other’s territory, forcing around 100,000 people on each side of the border out of their homes. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has said that it will continue until an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire is reached in Gaza. Israeli officials are considering a “blitzkrieg” offensive to neuter Hezbollah.
Last year, Biden dissuaded Israel from launching an invasion of Lebanon. He has also dispatched U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, an Israeli army veteran who previously secured an Israeli-Lebanese border agreement, to mediate between the two sides. But while he’s discouraging an Israeli invasion, Biden is also promising to back one up if it happens.
CNN reported on Friday that the Biden administration was offering “assurances” of U.S. military support to Israel if a major war breaks out, “though the US would not deploy American troops to the ground in such a scenario.” Then, on Monday, Politico reported that Biden was contemplating “more direct military support” if Israel comes under “severe duress.”
And that’s a real likelihood. Separately, a U.S. official told CNN last week that Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system “will be overwhelmed” in the event of a full-on missile war, according to U.S. assessments. A week ago, Hezbollah published a video of one of its drones hovering over the Israeli port city of Haifa.
The Politico report “has been my understanding of how Biden specifically would like to react,” says Sam Heller, an American who lives in Lebanon and works as a fellow at Century International, a nonprofit New York–based research institute.
“Israel’s performance since October has really indicated that to sustain this [war], they will require a substantial and continuous input from their American partner, inputs of many kinds,” Heller adds. “It seems U.S. intervention along those lines will also be a real mess and will also invite reprisals against U.S. forces around the region.”
Over the past six months, U.S. forces have already come under attack from Iraqi and Yemeni militias. Publicly and privately, pro-Iran forces from around the region are offering to send troops in defense of Lebanon.
Biden’s support for Israel has been steadily escalating. At the beginning of the war, the Biden administration rush-shipped American weapons to Israel. In November, the U.S. military began sharing targeting intelligence with the Israeli army. In April, after Israel bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, the U.S. military shot down most of the drones and missiles that Iran launched in retaliation.
In May, Biden eventually held up a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, arguing that this type of weapon had harmed too many civilians. “Israel doesn’t need them for Gaza, but it would if the conflict in Lebanon escalates further,” CBS News reported, citing a U.S. official.
Ironically, the Israeli-Lebanese conflict is pitting American taxpayer-funded weapons against American taxpayer-funded weapons. For years, the United States has tried to finance and train Lebanese government forces in order to reduce Hezbollah’s influence. During recent talks, Hochstein proposed that Hezbollah could withdraw from the border and the U.S.-funded Lebanese troops could take its place.
But Israeli forces struck Lebanese government troops at least 34 times between October and December, according to CNN. (The Israeli army denied that these were intentional attacks.) The White House’s National Security Council told CNN that it “do[es] not want to see this conflict spread to Lebanon and we continue to urge the Israelis do all they can to be targeted and avoid civilians, civilian infrastructure, civilian farmland, the [United Nations], and the Lebanese Armed Forces.”
Although Congress has approved aid to both Israel and Lebanon, it did not intend to fund a war between the two countries. Nor did it ever discuss U.S. forces getting involved themselves. The National Security Council and the State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Direct U.S. involvement would “raise significant issues” with the president’s war powers, says Brian Finucane, a former U.S. State Department lawyer and adviser to the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit research organization. “The White House would cite Article II of the Constitution as authority for something like providing air defense to Israel, and may try to skirt the War Powers Resolution, as it did back in April,” he adds.
A younger Biden had a lot to say about that notion.
“I hope what we have learned from our encounters in Southeast Asia is that a foreign policy, absent the consent of the governed, is not likely to last very long,” he commented during the debate over the 1983 resolution, “so it is best to get as many people on board at the outset.”
In the video, a large, red banner unfurled from an ornate building in front of a cheering crowd.
The banner read “Supreme Leader Thanks you American boys and girls!” and featured a picture of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The video was shared June 22 on Instagram with a caption that said, “Controversial Banner of Iranian Supreme Leader Displayed at Brooklyn Museum.”
The caption continued, claiming that a pro-Palestinian group displayed “a large banner featuring the image of the Iranian Supreme Leader outside the Brooklyn Museum in New York.”
A man in the video echoed that claim, saying, “Pro-Palestinian protesters take to the Brooklyn Museum and then they drape the leader of Iran — a big banner — over the museum.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.) We also saw it circulatingon X.
(Screenshot from Instagram.)
Although protesters recently raised banners at the Brooklyn Museum, an art museum with about 1.5 million works of art in its collection, we found no news reports, photos, videos or other evidence that this one was ever hoisted there.
During a May 31 protest, demonstrators displayed the black banner reading, “Free Palestine Divest From Genocide,” from the top of the Brooklyn Museum’s facade. Some protesters also entered the building. Within our Lifetime, one of the New York-based groups that called for the protest, said the activists wanted the museum to disclose and divest from any Israel-related investments.
But videos of the protest were manipulated to add the red Khamenei banner.
A CBS New York news report, for example, said protesters had scaled the building and displayed the black “Free Palestine” banner, but didn’t mention the red Khamenei banner.
We contacted the Brooklyn Museum and received no response before publication. Just after the protest occurred, a museum spokesperson told newsorganizations that displaying banners inside or affixed to the building violated the museum’s policy and security protocol.
Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a journalist with BBC Monitoring, which reports on mass media worldwide, said on X that the video with the Khamenei banner was digitally altered.
“The original video was filmed in May by a photographer at a pro-Palestinian protest,” she wrote in a June 22 post. “The Khamenei banner doesn’t exist in the real video.”
This video of a banner of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hanging from New York’s Brooklyn Museum is digitally altered.
The original video was filmed in May by a photographer at a pro-Palestinian protest. The Khamenei banner doesn’t exist in the real video. pic.twitter.com/xhbtbrqL92
— Ghoncheh Habibiazad | غنچه (@GhonchehAzad) June 22, 2024
Tal Hagin, a research fellow with FakeReporter, an Israeli group that reports on online disinformation, also fact-checked an X post that claimed protesters displayed the red Khamenei banner at the Brooklyn Museum.
We rate claims that a video shows a banner with the Iranian supreme leader flying at Brooklyn Museum False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
For months, the U.S. Navy has operated out of the Red Sea at a pace not seen in decades, as the military responds to Houthi targeting of commercial ships. Norah ’O’Donnell reports.
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Recent documents submitted to a U.S. federal court allege that major British bank Standard Chartered helped finance sanctioned Iranian entities and terrorist groups, and that relevant evidence was ignored by American authorities.
London-basedStandard Chartered, which primarily serves clients in emerging markets, was previously punished with more than a combined $1.7 billion in fines after admitting in 2012 and 2019 to violating sanctions on Iran and other blacklisted countries.
The bank denies it ran transactions for any organizations designated as terrorists.
The latest court filings, provided by former Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) employee turned whistleblower Julian Knight, claim that U.S. officials lied by denying that he provided them with evidence of far greater wrongdoing by the bank. The officials then applied to dismiss his whistleblower case against the bank as “meritless” in 2019 in order to shield it, Knight alleged. He has now asked a U.S. federal court in New York to reinstate the case.
Knight, who led a Standard Chartered transaction services unit between 2009 and 2011, was one of two whistleblowers who gave U.S. investigators confidential bank statements in 2012 and 2013. The statements documenting transactions that he says contained proof of further sanctions breaches, including violations beyond 2007, when the bank said it had stopped any dealings with Iran.
Knight’s court filing alleges that the U.S. government committed a “colossal fraud” against the legal system by denying he had presented “damning evidence” that Standard Chartered “facilitated many billions of dollars in banking transactions for Iran, numerous international terror groups, and the front companies for those groups,” according to a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Some of that evidence, the court filing says, showed that the bank’s clients included front companies for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Palestinian militant group Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Iran-linked entities in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Germany and other countries.
The two whistleblowers alleged that U.S. authorities who investigated Standard Chartered “made false statements to a court in order to have their [Knight’s and his colleague’s] claim for a whistleblower’s reward dismissed” in 2019, the BBC reported.
The authorities in question, including an FBI agent, said that the whistleblowers’ claims “did not lead to the discovery of any new … violations.” The court then dismissed the case as “meritless.” CNBC has contacted the U.S. Department of Justice for comment.
The ICIJ report says Knight’s latest claim alleges that the U.S. government “lied that it had conducted ‘a lengthy, costly, and substantial investigation’ into his claims or it was “fully aware” of the transactions he had provided “and simply lied to conceal them,” adding: “The Government’s own statements support the latter scenario.”
In response to a CNBC request for comment, a Standard Chartered spokesperson described Knight’s court filing as “another attempt to use fabricated claims against the bank, following previous unsuccessful attempts” and said that the “false allegations underpinning it have been thoroughly discredited by the U.S. authorities who undertook a comprehensive investigation into the claims and said they were ‘meritless’ and did not show any violations of U.S. sanctions.”
First, a Trump fake elector in Wisconsin speaks out. Then, an American shares his story of being held in Iran. And, Rich Paul: The 60 Minutes Interview.
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Vienna — Iran has further increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, according to a confidential report on Monday by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the latest in Tehran’s attempts to steadily exert pressure on the international community.
Iran is seeking to have economic sanctions imposed over the country’s controversial nuclear program lifted in exchange for slowing the program down. The program – as all matters of state in Iran – are under the guidance of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and that likely won’t change in the wake of last week’s helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister.
The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency also comes against the backdrop of heightened tensions in the wider Middle East over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Israel and Iran have carried out direct strikes on each other’s territory for the first time last month.
The report, seen by several news agencies, said that as of May 11, Iran has 142.1 kilograms (313.2 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60% – an increase of 20.6 kilograms (45.4 pounds) since the last report by the U.N. watchdog in February. Uranium enriched at 60% purity is just a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.
By IAEA’s definition, around 42 kilograms (92.5 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60% is the amount at which creating one atomic weapon is theoretically possible – if the material is enriched further, to 90%.
Also as of May 11, the report says Iran’s overall stockpile of enriched uranium stands at 6,201.3 kilograms (1,3671.5 pounds), which represents an increase of 675.8 kilograms (1,489.8 pounds) since the IAEA’s previous report.
Iran has maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but the IAEA chief, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has previously warned that Tehran has enough uranium enriched to near-weapons-grade levels to make “several” nuclear bombs if it chose to do so. He has acknowledged the U.N. agency cannot guarantee that none of Iran’s centrifuges may have been peeled away for clandestine enrichment.
Iran’s continuing lack of transparency on its nuclear program
Tensions have grown between Iran and the IAEA since 2018, when then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Since then, Iran has abandoned all limits the deal put on its program and quickly stepped up enrichment.
Under the original nuclear deal, struck in 2015, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium only up to 3.67% purity, maintain a stockpile of about 300 kilograms and use only very basic IR-1 centrifuges – machines that spin uranium gas at high speed for enrichment purposes.
The 2015 deal saw Tehran agree to limit enrichment of uranium to levels necessary for generating nuclear power in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. At the time, U.N. inspectors were tasked with monitoring the program.
Monday’s report also said Tehran hasn’t reconsidered its September 2023 decision to bar IAEA inspectors from further monitoring its nuclear program and added that it expects Iran “to do so in the context of the ongoing consultations between the (IAEA) agency and Iran.”
According to the report, Grossi “deeply regrets” Iran’s decision to bar inspectors – and a reversal of that decision “remains essential to fully allow the agency to conduct its verification activities in Iran effectively.”
The deaths of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian have triggered a pause in the IAEA’s talks with Tehran over improving cooperation, the report acknowledged.
Before the May 19 helicopter crash, Iran had agreed to hold technical negotiations with IAEA on May 20, following a visit by Grossi earlier in the month. But those meetings fell apart due to the crash. Iran then sent a letter on May 21 saying its nuclear team wants to continue discussions in Tehran “on an appropriate date that will be mutually agreed upon,” the report said.
The head of Iran’s atomic energy department, Mohammad Eslami, waves to media at the conclusion of his joint press conference with International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, also seen here, after their meeting in the central city of Isfahan, Iran, on May 7, 2024.
Vahid Salemi / AP
The report also said Iran still hasn’t provided answers to the IAEA’s years-long investigation about the origin and current location of manmade uranium particles found at two locations that Tehran has failed to declare as potential nuclear sites, Varamin and Turquzabad.
It said the IAEA’s request needs to be resolved, or the the agency “will not be able to confirm the correctness an completeness of Iran’s declarations” under a safeguards agreement between Tehran and the nuclear watchdog.
The report also said there was no progress so far in reinstalling more monitoring equipment, including cameras, removed in June 2022. Since then, the only recorded data is that of IAEA cameras installed at a centrifuge workshop in the city of Isfahan in May 2023 – although Iran hasn’t provided the IAEA with access to this data.
The IAEA said that on May 21, IAEA inspectors, after a delay in April, “successfully serviced the cameras at the workshops in Isfahan and the data they had collected since late December 2023 were placed under separate Agency seals and Iranians seals at the locations.”
Iran’s president, Ebraham Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash May 19 during foggy weather. His unexpected death sparked a wave of misinformation online.
Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars, wrote May 20 on X, “I have confirmed that all of the satellite weather data for the day of the Iranian president’s crash has been removed.
Minutes earlier, Jones had reshared a post from another X user showing that data from the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch slider, an online weather tool, was unavailable for May 19, the day Raisi died.
The application, created by Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, shows users global weather data.
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere spokesperson Matt Rogers told PolitiFact that data went offline May 19 while staff were out of the office because of a technical issue related to computer hard drive capacity.
“We had a disk issue where the disk filled up and new data was not posted,” Rogers said in a May 20 email. “All of the imagery we have is now back online, and no data has been removed or deleted.”
Screenshot of Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch weather data from May 19 in Iran.
Jones did not answer a request for comment from PolitiFact.
The tool slider contains a disclaimer saying the product is experimental. “All our products are experimental and aren’t guaranteed to be online in an operational-always-on manner,” Rogers said. “The site is not monitored 24/7 and does suffer from occasional data outages.”
Social media users have previously complained on X and Reddit that the website is slow to update and has data outages.
Jones’s X post received a community note in which users shared a link to Zoom Earth, which also showed weather data from May 19 in Iran.
On Wednesday, members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior national security officials on how they plan to respond to attacks on voting infrastructure and attempts to influence the election using deepfakes, generative AI, and misinformation. While everyone in the room appeared to agree on what the threats are, senators expressed concern about how exactly government agencies would respond.
In a wide-ranging session, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, and FBI executive assistant director Larissa Knapp focused especially on the wide availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools that make it easier for more people to create convincing and deceptive fake videos and audio. Senators pressed them on what they would do if one of those AI-generated fakes went viral in the heat of a presidential election.
“I don’t think I have a clearer understanding of who’s in charge and how we would respond,” said Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida and vice chair of the committee. “I don’t want there to be any gray area.”
Haines pointed to a US government “notification framework” that provides guidance for making public disclosures while considering sensitive intelligence-collection methods used by the US government.
Building off of Rubio’s question, committee chair Mark Warner, a senator from Virginia, praised the response by the Trump administration after Iran-linked actors posed as the Proud Boys in an attempt to intimidate voters. In an unprecedented move at the time, senior law enforcement and intelligence officials publicly attributed the impersonation to Iran-linked actors within days.
Senator Angus King of Maine called the framework “a bureaucratic nightmare” and pushed for faster disclosure of influence efforts.
“What I want to urge is disclosure of sources when you’re aware of it immediately,” King said.
Haines responded that the framework may “sound quite bureaucratic” but that the government has been able to expedite its decisionmaking process to happen in as quickly as two days.
Warner noted that it’s now easier than ever for other countries to attempt to interfere in elections. “The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence—including election influence—have become almost vanishingly small,” Warner said. “The scale and sophistication of these sorts of attacks against our elections can be accelerated several-fold by what are now cutting-edge AI tools.”
He also criticized efforts to downplay the severity of election interference in 2016. “I think there has been some rewriting post-2016 that somehow some of the activities in Russia, or even in 2020 with Iran, that was kind of harmless trolling,” Warner said.
Haines agreed, pointing to Iran as an example of a foreign actor making serious attempts to sow discord among Americans.
Iran is “increasingly aggressive in their efforts seeking to stoke this kind of discord and promote chaos and undermine confidence in the integrity of the process and they use social media platforms, really, to issue threats, [and] to disseminate disinformation,” she said.
And Iran’s not alone; the officials gave an overview of other countries seeking to influence the upcoming presidential election. Haines said that Russia “remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.”
Cecilia Vega (in studio): Lesley Stahl has spent a week on the ground in Israel, where its military is engaged on three fronts — with Hezbollah in the north, with Iran in the east and the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, that has created catastrophic civilian consequences.
Lesley Stahl: We’re at the Erez crossing into Gaza which is open at the moment, though the flow of aid trucks in has slowed to a trickle. This has been a week of high drama in Israel, first off we have the tension – increasing tension — with the United States over the imminent invasion of Rafah and President Biden’s punitive step in holding off the delivery of bombs that could be used in that invasion. There’s been a week of intense diplomacy with CIA Director William Burns here to try and breathe life into the ceasefire for hostages deal.
It’s been a month since Iran’s brutal attack with missiles and drones. But this has been a week of more hostilities. In the north, there’s an intensifying of the not-much-covered battle with Hezbollah. And in the south, Israel is surrounding Rafah.
Israeli tanks inched in. There were huge explosions and exchanges of fire with Hamas. More images of misery, as shortages of food and fuel become dire. Refugees from the north of Gaza who had taken shelter here were being instructed by the Israeli military, the IDF, to move — again.
Omer Tischler: What’s going right now is a very– specific operation being run by the IDF, a very accurate one, on the east part of Rafah.
Brigadier General Omer Tischler is second in command of the Israeli air force.
Lesley Stahl: If what you’re saying is true, how come we’re seeing what looks like indiscriminate bombing?
Omer Tischler: I understand and I feel sorry. But the bottom line is Hamas dragged us into that kind of war.
Brigadier General Omer Tischler is second in command of the Israeli air force.
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: President Biden has been a steadfast ally and supporter of Israel and that support of Israel is hurting him. And now the Biden administration has already stopped sending weapons, 3,000 bombs for Israeli fighter planes.
Omer Tischler: I won’t talk about the specific report. What I’ll talk about is our strong relationship with the United States. I know that we will keep on working together with our partners, with our friends, and with the United States.
Lesley Stahl: In terms of American opinion, things have shifted against Israel because of these images of all the civilians, horrible scenes of devastation. There’s I guess two wars. There’s a war on the ground. And then there’s a war of public opinion. And you’re losing that war.
Omer Tischler: I don’t know about that.
Lesley Stahl: I’m telling you.
Omer Tischler: Maybe you’re right. What we are doing, what we’re trying to do, and just to remind us where it all happened, where it’s– when this all started. It started with a brutal, brutal attack by Hamas killing 1200 people at the seven of October.
Since then, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza according to the U.N. While Israel is engaged with Iran-backed Hamas along Israel’s southern border, another Iran-backed group, Hezbollah, has ramped up its attacks from the north.
Lesley Stahl: We’re in Kiryat Shmona, a city just 15 minutes from the border with Lebanon. Right now Hezbollah is sending drones and rockets into this area. We can hear the booms going off – one after the next. So far, at least two Israeli soldiers have been killed today. And we can also hear the Israeli counterattack. Now, this fight is not as intense as the one in Gaza, but it’s serious enough that Israel evacuated more than 60,000 people – emptying out the entire northern part of the country.
The loss of the north feels to Israelis like a wound, an amputation, a humiliation. We drove up to the border, to the abandoned and partly destroyed small town of Metula. This Hezbollah video shows near daily missile attacks pummeling the town.
Liat Cohen-Raviv is one of a handful of residents still in Metula who spend their days underground in this bunker complex.
Liat Cohen-Raviv: The most safe spot in Metula these days.
She led us into their war room, where they monitor incoming fire from the hillsides of Lebanon, an area also deserted. 90,000 Lebanese were forced to flee.
A handful of people have remained behind in Metula in northern Israel.
60 Minutes
Lesley Stahl: How long does it take for a missile to come over here?
Man (mayor): 8 or 20 seconds.
Lesley Stahl: 8 to 20 seconds?
Man (mayor): Yes
Liat Cohen-Raviv: Another drone coming in. Sorry
Twenty minutes after we got there, reports of a drone overhead carrying explosives.
Liat Cohen-Raviv: Quickly please.
We left the war room and moved to another room.
Lesley Stahl: I keep hearing the noise overhead. I know we’re locked in here. What’s happening?
Liat Cohen-Raviv: So currently we have a suicide drone. You can hear the alerts coming in as we speak. And it’s above us and what’s happening now is that the army is trying to respond to it and to shoot it down.
Lesley Stahl: And those are alerts?
Liat Cohen-Raviv: These are alerts.
Lesley Stahl: To us.
Liat Cohen-Raviv: Yes.
Lesley Stahl: To stay inside.
Liat Cohen-Raviv: Stay inside.
Outside the army was coming to rescue two soldiers who were wounded – and would later die. After we’d been there an hour, a pause in the fighting –
Shachar Bar-On: He wants us to leave one after the other to have the cars just drive right out of here.
Daniel Pritchard: All of our team, come into, come into this.
(Out of shot): Go, go, come!
Lesley Stahl: Go, let’s go.
Lesley Stahl in Metulah
60 Minutes
We drove as fast as we could as the fighting picked up again.
Lesley Stahl: So would you say that you are fighting a multi-front war right now?
Omer Tischler: It is, yes.
General Tischler calls the fight with Hezbollah one part of a 360-degree war with Iran. He gave us a rare tour of Israeli air force headquarters, which they taped for us, with no sound and blurred for security reasons. He showed us where he sat the night of April 13, when Iran blitzed Israel from its own soil for the first time, to retaliate for the assassination in Damascus of a top Iranian general.
Iran launched a massive synchronized attack of some 170 suicide drones, over 30 cruise missiles that fly low and fast like jets, and over 120 ballistic missiles.
The skies across the Middle East lit up as pilots shot down the drones and cruise missiles.
Israel’s advanced “Arrow” system took down ballistic missiles in the outer atmosphere.
Only a handful of all that made it through.
Omer Tischler: ‘Til that night Iran attacks us using its proxies from Yemen, from Iraq, from Syria, from Lebanon. But on that night Iran attack Israel directly.
Lesley Stahl: Do you think that it’s possible that Iran chose to do this because it perceived Israel right now as being weak? You’re arguing with the Americans, all kinds of issues with Gaza.
Omer Tischler: Iran attacked us with all their capabilities and they failed. And Iran knows that we are capable of attacking at any given time.
One reason Iran failed was because a surprising coalition joined forces to help Israel, including several Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar.
Omer Tischler: I’ll say that what happened at that night –on the night was historic. But we didn’t do it on our own. We’ve done it with our partners.
Lesley Stahl: Are you talking about the Saudis and the Jordanians?
Omer Tischler: We’re flying with the U.S., with the Brits, with the French, and I’ll not talk– I don’t think it will be wise to talk about other countries.
Lesley Stahl: But, you know, that is the most interesting part of all this, it’s almost unfathomable to think that these Arab countries would come into the air to defend Israel.
Omer Tischler: What’s clear now is that Iran poses threat to the region. And we should act together against Iran.
Lesley Stahl: But, you know something? The Arab countries are refusing to admit they participated. What do you make of that?
Omer Tischler: We’re not talking. We’re acting. So less words and more actions.
Lesley Stahl: Were you at all surprised that all those Arab countries came into this coalition with Israel, given what’s going on in Gaza?
Tamir Hayman: Given the context of Gaza?
Lesley Stahl: Yeah.
Tamir Hayman: Unbelievable.
Tamir Hayman, head of the Institute for National Security Studies
60 Minutes
Tamir Hayman is former head of Israeli army intelligence, now head of the Institute for National Security Studies.
Lesley Stahl: Well, what did these other countries really do, like Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Jordan?
Tamir Hayman: Well, the main issue is early detection. If you have a network of radars spread all over the Middle East, connected into one central hub, which is maybe American one, you give– you– you spread a network of detection that should give you enough time to be prepared.
Days after the attack, a group of Orthodox men found a ballistic missile in the desert that was successfully shot down by the army. Another one was found floating in the Dead Sea. Both were brought to this army base for forensic analysis.
No one was killed that night; one girl was injured from falling debris.
Lesley Stahl: Oh, so this is the hole. This is where–
But four ballistic missiles did hit the Nevatim air force base. Base Commander Yotam Sigler showed us one point of impact. His base was one of Iran’s main targets because it’s home to Israel’s fleet of stealth F-35s.
Lesley Stahl: Were any of your– F-35s damaged in any way?
Yotam Sigler: No.
Lesley Stahl: But what they did prove– to you, to themselves and to the world, is that they could send a ballistic missile from Iran and hit Israel.
Yotam Sigler: Yeah. It is a big deal.
Lesley Stahl: So if those four had hit, and they had nuclear weapons on them, this must terrify Israel?
Yotam Sigler: Yeah, it terrifies not only Israel but the Middle Ea– the Middle East.
Yotam Sigler
60 Minutes
The U.S. and Israel consider the battle of April 13 a win – but so does Iran.
Lesley Stahl: President Biden issued a public warning to Iran: “Don’t attack, don’t do this” several times and they did, they defied him.
Tamir Hayman: From their eyes it’s a strategic victory. They have stood against a direct threat by the most powerful nation in the world and defied it.
Tamir Hayman is concerned about Israel’s future with the U.S.
Tamir Hayman: We are worried about the internal trends inside Israel and the internal long-term trends inside the United States. What happened right now in the universities in the United States is just acceleration of a phenomena that was well observed I think a year ago. That is that we have a challenge on maintaining the common values which are the basics of those– of the special connection relationship with the United States. We are drifting apart and it’s a strategic threat that we need to address.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tested the “special relationship” this week with a public message for President Biden: that the incursion into Rafah is on with or without the U.S. weapons.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.”
The week here ended with the points of contention even more acute. The U.N. says it could run out of food to distribute to Gaza as soon as today. Here in Tel Aviv, the hostage families continue their vigil as some of their protests have turned into violent clashes with the police.
And CIA Director William Burns left the region, with no progress on the cease-fire for hostages negotiations.
Produced by Shachar Bar-On and Jinsol Jung. Broadcast associate, Aria Een. Edited by Peter M. Berman.
Conflicts in Israel and Ukraine have taken up a lot of the news cycle in the past months and even years. But how has the U.S.’ focus on these international crises affected politics back home? Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, joins CBS News to discuss.
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Here’s a look at the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear power.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspects nuclear and related facilities under safeguard agreements. Most agreements are with countries that have committed to not possessing nuclear weapons. The IAEA is the verification authority to enforce the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
1942 – The world’s first nuclear chain reaction takes place in Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project, a US research program aimed at developing the first nuclear weapons.
July 16, 1945 – The United States conducts its first nuclear weapons test in New Mexico.
October 3, 1952 – The United Kingdom conducts its first nuclear weapons test.
December 8, 1953 – In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asks the world’s major powers to work together in developing peacetime uses of the atom. This is known as the Atoms for Peace program, and 40 countries participate. Also during this speech, Eisenhower proposes the creation of an international agency to monitor the spread of nuclear technology.
June 26, 1954 – In the Soviet Union, the first nuclear power plant is connected to an electricity grid to provide power to residences and businesses in a town near Moscow.
1957 – The IAEA is established to facilitate the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
1950’s – Brazil and Argentina begin research and development of nuclear reactors.
May 18, 1974 – India conducts its first nuclear weapons test.
March 28, 1979 – A partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant occurs in Middletown, Pennsylvania. It is determined that equipment malfunctions, design-related problems and human error led to the accident.
December 19, 2003 – Libya announces that it will dismantle its WMD program, in cooperation with the IAEA as well as the United States and the United Kingdom.
October 7, 2005 – The IAEA and ElBaradei are named the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
December 1, 2009 – Yukiya Amano replaces ElBaradei as director general of the IAEA.
March 11, 2011 – A 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes near the coast of Honshu, Japan, creating a massive tsunami. The tsunami knocks out the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s cooling systems. The cores of three of six reactors are damaged by overheating. Resulting hydrogen explosions blow apart the buildings surrounding two reactors.
May 30, 2011 – Germany announces it will abandon the use of all nuclear power by the year 2022. This repeals a 2010 plan to extend the life of the country’s nuclear reactors.
July 14, 2015 – After 20 months of negotiations, Iran reaches a comprehensive agreement (The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)), with the United States and other countries that is aimed at reining in Iran’s nuclear program. In exchange for limits on its nuclear activities, Iran will get relief from sanctions while being allowed to continue its atomic program for peaceful purposes.
A recent Hebrew University poll found that 74% of Israelis oppose a major retaliatory strike on Iran, following its drone and missile attack, if it would harm Israel security alliances with other allies, including the U.S. Imtiaz Tyab reports.
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SATELLITE images of the humiliating Israeli revenge strike on an Iranian airbase have revealed the true extent of Tel Aviv’s precision hit.
The Isfahan base, home to valuable air defence kit, was struck on Friday in an attack that seemed to scare Iran into backing down after vicious threats.
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Iran’s Isfahan airbase before the Israeli strike on Friday morningCredit: Twitter/FardadFarahzad
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The airbase after Israel’s hit – a patch of concentrated scorched earth hit the centre of the baseCredit: Twitter/FardadFarahzad
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Iran has been humiliated in Israel’s successful precision strike
And the blustering minister insisted there was no connection to Israel.
Hossein Amirabdollahian told NBC: “They’re … more like toys that our children play with, not drones.
“It has not been proved to us that there is a connection between these and Israel.”
Today Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei thanked his armies for the failed April 13 operation against Israel.
He told them to “ceaselessly pursue military innovation and learn the enemy’s tactics”.
The deluded despot claimed Iran had “demonstrated its will-power during that operation”.
A Middle East policy expert told Sky that the “Iranians are very scared” following the strike.
Despite Iran’s weak attempts to save face, the hit seems to have scared them into backing down after Amirabdollahian appeared to put the tit-for-tat exchanges to bed.
Amirabdollahian said that if Israel were to hit out at the country then Iran’s response would be fierce and immediate.
He added: “But if not, then we are done. We are concluded.”
By not naming Israel as its attacker in the Isfahan hit – as reports say – Iran is avoiding a push to live up to promises of more revenge strikes.
Iran’s aerial attack on Israel
IRAN launched an unprecedented aerial barrage on Israel overnight on Saturday April 13.
BY ELLIE DOUGHTY
In the first attack of its kind, Iran hurled 110 ballistic missiles, 36 cruise missiles and 185 attack drones across Middle Eastern airspace.
Between Israel’s impressive Iron Dome air defence system and allied efforts from the UK and US, Tehran’s attack was largely thwarted.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog described the ambush as a “declaration of war”.
Despite worldwide calls for cool heads to prevail, Netanyahu’s ranks repeatedly insisted that a retaliatory strike would be the only response.
IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “We cannot stand still from this kind of aggression, Iran will not get [off] scot-free with this aggression.
“We will respond in our time, in our place, in the way that we will choose.”
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council vowed to hit back against Israel if a counter-attack was launched.
US president Joe Biden, said to privately fear a catastrophic escalation in the Middle East, pushed Netanyahu to call off an immediate retaliation on Saturday night.
The question now is whether each side’s imperatives to demonstrate deterrence and to save face have been satisfied – or whether the enemies are destined to enter a new cycle of escalation that could make the crisis even more perilous.
Most immediately, the ball is in Iran’s court after Israel conducted strikes near the city of Isfahan early Friday.
Initial reports suggest that the action was limited and, according to US officials, did not target Iranian nuclear sites in the area. Instead, it may have been intended to demonstrate Israeli capacity to penetrate deep into Iran following Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel last weekend, which was largely thwarted.
Still, the fact that Israel chose a target inside Iran rather than confining its response to Iranian proxies in Syria or Iraq, for instance, significantly ups the ante in the confrontation and raises the possibility that the showdown could quickly get out of control.
The Israeli action last weekend that was largely repulsed by Israeli, US and allied defensive systems followed an Israeli strike on Iranian consular buildings in Damascus, Syria, that killed two senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.
With the latest twist of the crisis, Israel’s strikes appeared to be trying to thread a needle in demonstrating that it can evade Iranian defenses at will – and in the vicinity of Iranian nuclear facilities – while not creating a situation that would oblige Iran to respond with another escalation that could push the rivals toward all-out war.
The risk in trying to navigate this narrow path is that the region is so on edge six months into Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and the political tensions are so acute inside both countries that it is hard for each side to accurately assess exactly how the other might react.
Hours before the Israeli strikes, for instance, Iran had warned that any Israeli attack would be met with a robust response. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told CNN that such action would be “immediate and at a maximum level.”
Still, early indications were on Friday that Iran is prepared to end this particular phase of escalation without stepping up another rung on the confrontational ladder and that Israel – while rebuffing international calls for restraint – may still have taken US and Western concerns about the possibility of sparking a major regional war into account.
Iranian official media and government officials were downplaying the attack on Friday. And a regional intelligence source with knowledge of Iran’s potential reaction to Friday’s strike said that direct state-to-state strikes between the two enemies were “over.” The source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told CNN that, to his knowledge, Iran was not expected to respond to the strikes — but did not give a reason.
If subsequent events bear this out, Israel may succeed in fulfilling a strategic maxim laid out by President John Kennedy in 1963 as he reflected upon the Cuban missile crisis the previous year when he said that statesmanship must aim to “avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.” The danger was not a nuclear war in this case but a tit-for-tat climb into a major conventional conflict that could have consumed the entire region and killed many Iranians, Israelis and people in neighboring countries. As it stands, neither Iran nor Israel have been forced into a humiliating retreat – and that may be the key to containing the situation.
Netanyahu defies Biden again
Israel’s attack on Iran also represents a rebuff by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of President Joe Biden’s advice to treat the successful interception of nearly all the drones and missiles directed at Israel as a victory. The president had argued that the massive defensive operation proved Iran couldn’t pose a threat to Israel’s security and that further retaliation was not required.
While there does seem to have been an effort by Israel to consider US and Western anxieties about a wider war, Netanyahu has repeatedly ignored Biden’s entreaties — including months of US complaints about the Israeli conduct of the war in Gaza and its toll on Palestinian civilians following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. The president, though getting increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu, has not been willing to lay down red lines for the Israeli prime minister or to condition the use of US arms shipments in Gaza.
But Biden also came up against the reality that Israel is a sovereign state, and while strongly reliant on the United States, was unlikely ever to allow a mass air attack directed at its territory to go unanswered. In the aftermath of latest developments, Washington is concentrating on a new effort to stop tensions from rising further while distancing itself from the Israeli action.
“What we’re focused on, what the G7 is focused on, and again, it’s reflected in our statement and in our conversation, is our work to de-escalate tensions,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a conference of foreign ministers from industrialized nations in Italy.
The White House did make clear in recent days that it would not join any Israeli offensive actions against Iran. But US military forces will almost certainly be called upon to defend Israel again in the event of a major Iranian retaliation. Biden thus could get dragged ever deeper into a military conflict in the region that he has repeatedly tried and failed to stop. The political consequences would be grave for the president in November as presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump warns the world is spinning out of control on his watch. Biden has already paid a heavy price among progressive, young and Arab American voters over his support for Israel, which could have serious implications for his performance in swing states that will decide the presidential election. And any spike in oil prices caused by uncertainty in the Middle East ahead of the election could push up the cost of gasoline and exact a painful political price on the president.
A chilling geopolitical picture emerges
Israel, for all its military prowess, is in a deeply vulnerable position. It is now effectively fighting on three fronts — against Hamas in Gaza; another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, in a simmering conflict over the Lebanon border; and directly against Iran itself.
The threat from Hezbollah is especially acute since the radical group has tens of thousands of missiles that could cause carnage in Israeli cities far greater than the threat posed by Hamas rockets at the start of the Gaza war. A full-scale entry by Hezbollah into the conflict to support Iran would be certain to trigger a massive Israeli response. That would bring war back to Lebanon, a nation already cursed by a desperate modern history and home to the Iran-backed militia.
Events of the last few days mean that even if the region doesn’t tip into a large-scale war immediately, previous assumptions that Iran would never openly attack Israel and Israel would not strike at Iranian soil have been shattered.
“Even if you get through this phase without a major Iranian retaliation, the reality is that Israel and Iran are going to be locked in this competitive struggle,” Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East peace negotiator for Republicans and Democratic presidents, told CNN. “There is no solution to the problem of Iranian proxies. There’s no solution to the fact that Iran is a nuclear weapons threshold state. And this relationship is going to be hanging over the region and perhaps the international community like some sword of Damocles.”
Israel faced intense pressure to show restraint not just from the United States but also from European and Arab powers, several of which joined the US and Israeli operation to shoot down Iran’s drones and missiles last weekend. While US support for Israel is assured, the reaction of those other countries will be critical now that Netanyahu decided to ignore advice from Israel’s defenders. One argument for Israel not retaliating against Iran had been that it could benefit from a wave of sympathy and support and begin to repair ties with allies that fervently criticized its conduct of the war in Gaza. That opportunity might already have been squandered.
Israel, however, regards itself as locked in an existential battle with Iran, one that played out until now in covert and cyber-attacks on its nuclear program, scientists and military and intelligence infrastructure. History shows that when Israeli leaders feel their country’s survival is threatened, they often act unilaterally even when the United States counsels restraint. Such a doctrine led to previous Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria.
By striking back at Israel after the Damascus attack, Iran was making an implicit statement that Israel could not escape paying a price for such attacks anymore and that they’d be met by a direct response.
For Israel’s war cabinet, which mulled for days its response to the airborne Iranian barrage, the idea that Iran enjoyed the advantage in their geopolitical game of chicken would have been untenable.
Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told CNN’s Michael Holmes that the latest actions did set the stage for a long-term escalatory cycle that generates from instability in the region. But the apparent Israeli capacity to elude Iran’s air defenses may also reestablish Israel’s strategic edge. “I do think it sends a message to Tehran that really they are more vulnerable to Israeli strikes than they would like to admit,” Davis said.
Some experts worry that the new reality of direct exchanges with Israel may prompt Iran – which is estimated by experts to be only weeks away from being able to produce its own nuclear weapon – to rush across the nuclear threshold. That would be a situation that neither Israel – nor probably the United States – could accept, so the rising danger of recent days may only be a taste of what is to come.
Iran launched drones and missiles at Israel on April 13, but subsequent claims about Russia’s support for the Islamic Republic don’t reflect news reports about the attack.
“BREAKING: Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that RUSSIA will SUPPORT IRAN if the United States attacks Iran’s soil in support of Israel,” read the text in an April 13 Facebook post, above an image of Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi smiling and shaking hands.
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
We found no credible news reports that Putin made such a declaration.
Rather, on April 16, Putin’s first public comments about the attack called for a ceasefire and urged “all sides” in the Middle East to “show reasonable restraint and prevent a new round of confrontation fraught with catastrophic consequences for the entire region,” according to the Kremlin.
Iranian state media, meanwhile, quoted Putin as saying Tehran’s response to Israel was the best way to punish the country, Reuters reported.
The photo of Putin and Raisi predates Iran’s attack on Israel. It was taken in December, when the two presidents met in Moscow.
We rate the claim that Putin has declared that Russia “will support Iran if the United States attacks Iran’s soil in support of Israel” False.
Police set up a security cordon in Paris’ wealthy 16th arrondissement Friday amid reports that a man was threatening to detonate an alleged explosive belt at an Iranian consulate. The Paris police would say only that an intervention was underway on the street where the consulate is located, but French media soon reported that the suspect had been taken into custody.
The Reuters news agency said the man was not found to have any explosives.
Le Parisien newspaper quoted police sources as saying an eyewitness had seen a man present himself at the door of the consulate before opening his coat to reveal what looked like a homemade explosive belt.
French police, including special forces, secure the area near an Iranian consulate in Paris, where a man was reportedly threatening to blow himself up, April 19, 2024.
Benoit Tessier/REUTERS
The newspaper cited several eyewitnesses who saw the man place flags on the floor of the consulate. They recounted that he said he wanted to avenge the death of his brother. Police, including SWAT teams, were called to the scene to investigate and urged the public to avoid the area.
Metro traffic was halted between local stations during the operation.
Elaine Cobbe is a CBS News correspondent based in Paris. A veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering international events, Cobbe reports for CBS News’ television, radio and digital platforms.
