Israel-Iran War: Timeline & Latest Developments

The Israel-Iran war opened on February 28, 2026, when Israeli Air Force jets struck roughly 500 military and nuclear-linked targets across Iran in a single 24-hour campaign, the largest combat sortie in Israeli history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spent the prior day lobbying President Trump for a joint operation aimed squarely at Iran’s leadership, not just its missile and nuclear infrastructure, and Israel’s own strikes, which it codenamed Operation Roaring Lion, ran alongside a broader US-Israeli effort reported in wire coverage as Operation Epic Fury. The opening wave killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with the IRGC’s top commander, Iran’s defense minister, and several senior intelligence officials, according to Israeli and US officials cited by The Jerusalem Post. Iran confirmed Khamenei’s death the next day, declared 40 days of mourning, and named his son Mojtaba as the new Supreme Leader.

Iran’s response arrived within hours and did not let up for weeks. Ballistic missiles and drones hit Tel Aviv the same day Israel struck, and the following morning a missile tore through a synagogue and homes in Beit Shemesh, killing nine people in the deadliest single strike on Israeli soil in the war’s opening stretch. Iran labeled its broader retaliatory campaign Operation True Promise IV, claiming roughly 500 ballistic missiles and more than 2,000 drones fired at Israel and Gulf states over four days, a figure that comes from Iranian state media and has not been independently confirmed. What is better documented is the pattern that followed through March: near-daily missile salvos on Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and a recurring use of cluster munitions in populated areas that killed civilians in Yehud, near Tel Aviv, and eventually in Bnei Brak, where an 11-year-old girl wounded on April 1 died of her injuries three weeks later. Israel’s layered air defenses, Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and the Arrow family, absorbed most of the fire, but not all of it: on March 21, David’s Sling, built for shorter-range threats, failed to stop several longer-range missiles aimed at Dimona and Arad, injuring more than 100 people combined.

Israel’s own campaign inside Iran did not stop after the opening wave, either. An Israeli F-35I reportedly shot down an Iranian jet over Tehran on March 4, though the IDF’s account of that claimed kill has not been independently verified, and on the night of March 16 to 17 an Israeli strike killed Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and by most accounts the country’s most powerful official after Khamenei, along with his son and a separately targeted Basij militia commander. Independent monitors have not been able to cleanly separate Iranian casualties caused by these ongoing Israeli strikes from those caused by the coordinated US campaign: HRANA, an independent Iran-focused human rights group, documented 3,636 deaths and 15,000 to 26,500 wounded inside Iran as of April 7, a toll it attributes to combined “U.S. and Israeli attacks” rather than to either country individually, while Iran’s own Foundation of Martyrs reported a lower confirmed count and US and Israeli estimates ran higher still. That ambiguity is itself informative: the two militaries struck jointly and continuously enough through the war’s first six weeks that even careful trackers on the ground could not, or did not, disaggregate the toll by attacker.

Iran-backed Hezbollah is the one proxy actor genuinely inseparable from this bilateral story, since Israel’s parallel campaign against it in Lebanon repeatedly bled into the Iran ceasefire’s terms and timing. When a two-week US-Israel-Iran truce took effect on April 8 after 40 days of fighting, brokered on a Pakistani-mediated framework that also reopened the Strait of Hormuz, Netanyahu insisted the deal did not cover Israel’s Hezbollah operations, a reading Iran and its mediators rejected. Follow-on talks in Islamabad meant to lock in a durable settlement collapsed within days. Through May, Israel found itself pushing for renewed strikes on Iran even as Washington pursued its own ceasefire diplomacy, and Israeli officials, with limited unilateral options, instead quietly extended Iron Dome coverage to the UAE, sending batteries and crews to help an ally absorb Iranian fire the Gulf state could not intercept on its own.

The truce broke for real in June. An Israeli strike on Hezbollah targets in Beirut on June 7 drew Iran’s first direct missile fire at Israel since April, and Israel struck back inside Iran itself the next morning, hitting a drone-production facility in Isfahan, an aerospace university and Basij positions in Tehran, and a petrochemical plant near Ahvaz; the IRGC said it answered with a further missile wave at Israel’s Tel Nof and Nevatim airbases, an Iranian claim Israel has not confirmed. Iran’s Foreign Ministry described its own June strikes as lawful self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, citing what it called Israel’s “persistent breaches of the April 8 ceasefire” and the Beirut strikes specifically, a characterization that is Iran’s own and not independently adjudicated. A further round of Israeli strikes near Beirut on June 14 nearly triggered another Iranian response before US intervention held it off, clearing the way for Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to sign a memorandum at the Palace of Versailles on June 17 aimed at ending the broader war, with a separate Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire reaffirmed two days later.

That memorandum has not translated into a settled peace on the Israel-Iran track specifically. The active fighting that resumed after a related US-Iran ceasefire collapsed on July 8 has centered on American and Gulf-state targets rather than renewed direct Israeli strikes, but Israel has not stood down. Khamenei’s body was only returned for burial in Qom on July 7, more than four months after his death, and his son and successor has stayed out of public view for weeks, which Iranian officials attribute partly to continuing Israeli threats. Most consequentially, satellite imagery from late June and early July shows apparent reconstruction work at the Taleghan 2 facility inside Iran’s Parchin complex, a site tied to nuclear-weapons-relevant components. If that rebuilding continues, it is the clearest available trigger for Israel to resume the strikes that opened this war in the first place. As of mid-July, roughly 69 people have been killed and more than 9,240 wounded on Israeli soil since February 28, while independent monitors put Iran’s death toll from the joint US-Israeli campaign at 3,636 or more with tens of thousands wounded, a figure Tehran’s own count places somewhat lower and that no tracker, Iranian or otherwise, has broken out by attacking country. No side has declared, or shown, that the underlying dispute between Israel and Iran is actually resolved.