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At least 10 people, including two children, were killed and 10 injured in Kharkiv after Russia attacked Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones overnight, officials said.

A countrywide air raid alert was issued at around 3am local time to warn people against incoming Russian projectiles.

Kharkiv oblast governor Oleh Syniehubov said fires were reported as a result of a ballistic missile attack, which killed four civilians and injured 10, including two children.

Explosions were first reported in Kyiv at around 1.30am local time, the Kyiv Independent reported, followed by more blasts at around 1.40am local time.

The attack came hours after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he had visited the eastern front on Friday.

Zelensky said he gave awards to soldiers defending positions near Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka in the eastern Donetsk region where Russian forces were concentrated in preparation for a spring offensive.

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In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that he launched the war because Iran was “going to attack first,” calling it a “big lie.”

“There was no intention on the part of Iran to attack the United States,” he said. “They claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Baghaei added. “Did we come to the Gulf of Mexico to target Los Angeles and other U.S. cities? Or did they come 6,500 miles away to Iranian shores?”

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. decided to preemptively attack Iran because the White House knew Israel was going to begin bombing Iran and that Iran would strike back. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

On Tuesday, Trump sought to recast the U.S. rationale and said that he believed Iran was going to launch an attack first. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first—I felt strongly about that,” Trump said, charging that the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others.”

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Israel closed all crossings into Gaza indefinitely when it attacked Iran, imposing a siege that has already pushed up food prices and threatens to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis.

After more than two years of war, and with Israeli forces in control of about 60% of the territory, almost all of Gaza’s food must be brought in.

Humanitarian groups feeding much of the population say the supplies they had on Saturday, when the war began, will only last a few more days.

“If [the borders] stay closed, World Central Kitchen will run out of food this week,” said the organisation’s founder and chief, José Andrés, in a post on social media.

“We are cooking 1m hot meals every day. We need food deliveries every single day.”

One international food security expert said there was just a week’s supply of fresh food in Gaza.

Community bakeries that supply some of the most vulnerable people have only enough flour for about 10 days of bread, and there are about two weeks’ supply of aid parcels.

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza last spring followed by extreme restrictions on food shipments. Together they caused a famine last summer.

Hundreds of people were also killed trying to reach the food distribution points of a new logistics organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which only operated in Israeli-controlled areas.

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US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.

“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.

“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.

Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.

In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.

Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.

“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”

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The search for the dead in the apparent U.S. or Israeli missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh all-girls elementary school in Iran has officially ended.

But the questions surrounding the attack that killed at least 175 people have just begun, as international condemnation and calls for investigations – and accountability – were amplified March 2.

“All alleged violations − including indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, deliberate targeting of civilians or civilian infrastructure, and attacks on medical facilities and schools − must be promptly, independently, and transparently investigated,” one of the world’s oldest human rights organizations, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), said in a statement.

“Where evidence of war crimes or other serious violations is found,” it added, “those responsible, regardless of rank or official capacity, must be held accountable in accordance with international law.”

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Cuba’s communist government is facing a breaking point in its battle for survival under pressure from President Trump, whose energy quarantine against the country is aimed at collapsing the regime.

The consequences are hitting the population of 10 million people hard, with the U.S. fuel blockade exacerbating a decades-long economic crisis, disrupting access to water and worsening food and medicine shortages.

“There’s a number of epidemics rippling through the population right now, repression is increasing as the regime feels cornered, and they are not signaling any willingness to negotiate with the United States,” said Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

“These people are really, really bad guys, and they have shown this capacity to survive difficult crises,” he added. “I don’t think they can survive this one.”

Trump on Friday suggested the U.S. could achieve a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, perhaps mirroring America’s approach to Venezuela, where the military took out its leaders but kept the regime largely in place while demanding greater economic cooperation.

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