Saudi-led coalition says it intercepted Houthi ballistic missile over Riyadh
Saudi Arabia’s air defenses intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile launched by Yemen’s Houthis toward Riyadh early Saturday, the Saudi-led coalition said, hours after an air attack set fire to jet-fuel storage at the capital’s main airport.
Coalition spokesperson Turki al-Maliki said Houthi attempts to target civilian areas in Bisha, Taif, Farasan and Yanbu had also been thwarted by Saudi air defenses, according to a statement issued by the coalition.
The statement did not say whether the intercepted missile was linked to the Houthi attack against the King Khalid International Airport, where black smoke and flames were seen earlier Saturday.
Al-Maliki accused the Houthis of deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and said the coalition reserved the right to take what it considered appropriate measures to deter further attacks.
File photo: Mohsen Rezaei attends a farewell ceremony for Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on February 28 during Israeli and U.S. airstrikes on Iran, for international delegates at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla in Tehran, Iran, July 3, 2026.
Iran has conveyed seven conditions to Washington for the start of any negotiations, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei said Saturday, as President Donald Trump weighs whether to resume major attacks on Iran.
“The United States, if it wants to extricate itself from the predicament it has created, must accept Iran’s rights and conditions,” Rezaei wrote on X, saying the seven demands had been communicated to Washington.
He did not spell out all seven in the post. Earlier Saturday, however, Rezaei told Al Jazeera that Tehran was demanding an end to the war “on all fronts,” the release of frozen Iranian assets and an end to the US naval blockade as conditions for a settlement.
He said a Qatari mediator had conveyed Iran’s terms to Washington and that Tehran was awaiting Trump’s response.
Iran and the United States have remained engaged in indirect diplomacy throughout months of fighting and since the collapse of the Islamabad memorandum of understanding.
The memorandum, signed in June after Pakistan-hosted talks, was intended to halt the fighting and pave the way for a broader agreement. Both sides later accused the other of violations, and it expired in August without producing a lasting settlement.
Trump told Axios on Thursday that he had a “big decision” coming over whether to resume large-scale attacks on Iran, while saying Tehran remained in direct contact with Washington and wanted a deal. He is due to discuss the war with leaders of six Persian Gulf states in New York next week.
Pakistan, another key intermediary, is sending Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi to Tehran on Sunday. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the visit was focused on bilateral ties and previous agreements between the two countries and that he was not aware of any specific US message or proposal due to be conveyed.
Baghaei acknowledged Pakistan’s continuing mediation role, saying it was natural for Islamabad to pursue diplomatic efforts, but said he had no information about any particular initiative attached to the visit.
Rezaei meanwhile struck a harder military tone, saying Iran had changed its strategy toward Washington after the United States withdrew from the memorandum. He said Tehran had recently tested an anti-ship missile near a US aircraft carrier and claimed Iran was better prepared to confront American air attacks after identifying weaknesses in the US military.
Nuclear pressure
On nuclear policy, Rezaei said Tehran remained committed to the late supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons and had not changed its nuclear doctrine, though he added that “we do not know what will happen in the future.”
He said Israeli and US actions already provided grounds for Iran to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but Tehran had not made such a decision and any move would depend on Washington’s conduct.
Rezaei told the state TV Washington had demonstrated that adherence to the global nuclear non-proliferation system offered countries little protection from military attack.
Saudi-Yemen escalation
In his Saturday interview, Rezaei also said Iran wanted the fighting between Saudi Arabia and Yemen to end and believed the Yemeni side also sought an agreement with Riyadh.
Hours earlier, an air attack struck a jet-fuel storage facility at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, marking the first direct assault on the Saudi capital in months, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Houthis later claimed two operations using missiles and drones, saying they struck “sensitive and important” targets in Riyadh and Saudi Aramco facilities in Yanbu. Military spokesman Yahya Saree did not explicitly identify the airport as a target.
Iran has executed a man it accused of passing information about missile sites in Isfahan to Israel's Mossad, the judiciary said on Saturday, the latest in a series of espionage executions that rights groups say rest on confessions extracted in detention.
The judiciary's news agency, Mizan, identified him as Hossein Pedaran and said he had been convicted of espionage and intelligence cooperation with Israel and sentenced to death, with the sentence upheld by the Supreme Court. He had been arrested in Isfahan on charges related to the war.
Mizan published a long account of what it described as Pedaran's confessions. According to that account, he first messaged the CIA offering to cooperate and received no reply, then contacted Mossad and was answered days later by an officer who introduced himself as "Ben" using a Dutch WhatsApp number.
The agency said he sent encrypted reports on military facilities and on staff who worked at them, including personal details and their spouses' phone numbers, used numerous SIM cards registered to others, and was given a remote-control device capable of taking hidden photographs.
It said he was paid in euros collected from a magnetic box behind a guardrail near a Tehran bridge and, on another occasion, from a coffee shop bathroom, and that a notebook on missile subjects marked "highly confidential" was found at his home.
Mizan said Pedaran had cut contact before the war and tried to reach Mossad again by Telegram once it began, and was arrested. It said he had a lawyer, that a forensic examination found no impairment of his judgment, and that the court held his information had contributed to strikes in which personnel were killed or wounded.
None of these claims can be independently verified, and Mizan did not provide any evidence for the allegations.
Iran's espionage cases are heard by Revolutionary Courts, which operate without public scrutiny of the evidence, and the state routinely broadcasts and publishes confessions that defendants and their families have later said were obtained through torture, prolonged solitary confinement and threats against relatives.
Rights organizations have documented the pattern for years, and have recorded cases in which people detained during protests were subsequently charged with working for Israel.
Iran has executed at least a dozen people on espionage or Mossad-collaboration charges since the June 2025 war with Israel, according to human rights groups, and the pace has increased since the recent war began in February.
Those executed this year include Ali Ardestani in January, Mehdi Farid, a former employee of the atomic energy organization, in April, and Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat in August. Iran Human Rights recorded at least 1,639 executions in the country in 2025, the highest annual total since 1989.
Twin sisters: one sentenced to death, the other to decades in prison in Iran.
An Iranian woman sentenced to death over January’s anti-government protests is struggling to walk but has been denied hospital treatment despite a prison doctor saying she urgently needs an MRI, her family told Iran International.
Taraneh Rahimi, 20, is being held alongside her twin sister Romina at Dowlatabad Prison in Isfahan. Their cousin, Masoud Nourmohammadi, told Iran International’s Eye for Iran that Taraneh’s condition has deteriorated as her lawyers race to appeal her death sentence.
“Taraneh could not walk,” Nourmohammadi said. “The (hospital) doctor says you have to go to the hospital and be hospitalized and get an MRI to see what’s going on with your leg because it is in bad shape,” he said.
Nourmohammadi said the doctor considered the treatment urgent, but prison authorities refused to allow Taraneh to leave for hospital.
Her family also purchased medical equipment and medication for her and brought the supplies to the prison, he said, but authorities did not allow them to reach her.
The allegations come days after Nourmohammadi told Iran International that prison authorities had stopped providing Taraneh with food, forcing her to rely on leftovers shared by other prisoners.
“They stopped giving Taraneh food a few days back,” he said. “They ask her to use other people’s leftovers and eat those. Who does that?”
‘If you don’t confess, we’re going to rape your sister’
The new allegations come as lawyers for the twins have finally been given access to their case file after months of waiting, according to Nourmohammadi.
He said the lawyers found no substantive evidence tying Taraneh or Romina to violence during the January protests and are now preparing an appeal.
“Their consensus is that there’s no evidence against those two girls in the case,” he said. “The only thing that is left … is basically their confession.”
The family says those confessions were obtained through torture and threats of sexual violence.
“They told Taraneh, ‘If you don’t confess, we’re going to rape your sister in front of you,’” Nourmohammadi said.
He said lawyers are also filing a complaint over the alleged torture and sexual abuse of the sisters while in custody.
Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran have documented allegations of torture, coerced confessions and serious due-process violations involving defendants in the Shohada Square case.
Taraneh and Romina were among 16 defendants prosecuted over events surrounding protests in Isfahan in January. Ten of the defendants, including Taraneh, received death sentences, while Romina was sentenced to decades in prison.
The defendants faced charges including moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” destruction of public property, assembly and collusion against national security and propaganda against the state.
Rights groups have said none of the 16 defendants was charged with murder, despite prosecutors linking the case to incidents in which two people died.
‘A few days left’ to appeal
Nourmohammadi said the family believes only days remain in the formal window for lawyers to appeal Taraneh’s death sentence, adding that the family remains deeply concerned that authorities could move more quickly.
“You never know with that regime,” he said. “Anything can happen. It’s unpredictable.”
The sisters were 19 when security forces arrested them separately on January 24, weeks after they joined demonstrations around Isfahan’s Shohada Square. They have since turned 20 in prison.
Before her arrest, Taraneh was an equestrian and horse trainer. She had previously undergone surgery on her leg following a riding injury, according to her family.
Nourmohammadi alleges interrogators knew about the injury and deliberately targeted the same leg during torture.
When the twins’ mother was eventually permitted to see her daughters after roughly three months without knowing where they were being held, Nourmohammadi said Taraneh was already limping.
He said she also had broken fingers and knuckles and alleged that both sisters had lost much of their hair after being dragged between cells by their hair.
‘She wanted a life for her kids’
The twins’ mother raised Taraneh and Romina as a single parent.
For roughly three months after their arrests, she did not know where her daughters were being held. Family members searched hospitals, courthouses and prisons, at times waiting outside detention facilities seeking information.
When their mother was eventually allowed to see them, Nourmohammadi said the twins had swollen faces, bruises and significant hair loss.
After Taraneh was sentenced to death, he said his aunt was so devastated that she has barely been able to speak.
Instead, she wrote a message about raising her daughters and working to give them a future.
“She was a single mom. She worked really hard for her kids,” Nourmohammadi said. “She wanted a life for her kids. She didn’t want a prison or execution and a rope around their neck.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi meets with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in Beijing, China, September 16, 2026.
Iranian officials and media are increasingly looking to China as a possible diplomatic bridge to Washington, as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s second wartime visit to Beijing coincides with preparations for President Xi Jinping’s talks with Donald Trump next week.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Araghchi on Wednesday that Beijing was ready to play a “constructive role” in resolving international disputes and urged Iran and the United States to rebuild their negotiating mechanism and hold substantive consultations on unresolved issues.
Araghchi appeared to attach considerable weight to the talks, writing on X afterwards that decisions made in consultation with Chinese partners would “decide future strategic balance in the region, with immeasurable knock-on effects.”
His visit came ahead of Xi’s planned meeting with Trump in Washington on September 24, where the Iran war and China’s economic ties with Tehran are expected to be among the issues discussed.
China has not publicly offered to mediate directly between Tehran and Washington. But its diplomatic weight, relations with both countries and ties across the Middle East have prompted growing speculation in Iran that Beijing could assume a larger role.
China also has experience mediating between Iran and a major regional rival. In 2023, Beijing brokered an agreement that restored diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia after years of hostility.
Ahmad Bakhshayesh-Ardestani, a member of parliament’s National Security Committee, told Fararu that previous mediators such as Qatar and Pakistan had not been completely neutral and had been influenced by Washington. China, he argued, carried greater political weight and could provide stronger guarantees.
Beijing, he said, “can play a different role from previous mediators.”
Moderate daily Shargh made a similar argument, pointing to China’s position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and its extensive economic relations with Arab states as well as close ties with Tehran.
“This multilayered network of relations allows Beijing to pursue the Hormuz issue on two levels: dialogue with Tehran on the one hand, and engagement with the United States and other powers influencing regional security on the other,” Shargh wrote. “This is the difference that separates Araghchi’s visit to Beijing from an ordinary diplomatic trip.”
Nour News, which is close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran supported regional peace initiatives involving countries ranging from Pakistan and Qatar to China and Russia, while insisting that such diplomacy did not mean abandoning what it described as Iran’s right to defend itself.
The outlet argued that Beijing, conscious of the Strait of Hormuz’s geopolitical importance, was seeking to improve conditions for diplomacy rather than pressing Tehran to abandon its positions.
Some Iranian media and analysts have suggested China could also help bring Iran and Arab states into a broader regional arrangement rather than confining its role to US-Iran diplomacy.
Wang said Wednesday that China supported dialogue between Iran and regional countries based on respect for territorial sovereignty and national security. He also said the existing Middle East security architecture needed to be reformed and strengthened.
Farda News, which is close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, interpreted Wang’s remarks as an attempt to link the immediate security crisis to a broader mechanism for dialogue between Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Jalal Sadatian, a former director general of the Foreign Ministry’s East Asia Department, told Khabar Online that Tehran should seek Beijing’s help in persuading Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to participate in a wider regional agreement involving the Strait of Hormuz.
International affairs analyst Sabah Zanganeh similarly told ILNA that China could broaden existing diplomatic efforts to include Iran, Iraq and GCC states, rather than limiting them to temporary arrangements between individual countries.
“Such an action is necessary and must certainly go beyond a temporary action between two countries,” he said.
Beijing’s diplomatic backing for Tehran was also visible at the United Nations on Thursday, when China and Russia vetoed a US-backed resolution that would have extended the mandate of a panel of experts monitoring sanctions on Iran. The resolution received 11 votes in favour, two against and two abstentions.
Iranian conservatives portrayed the veto as evidence of a changing international order. Rouydad24, however, cautioned against equating the end of the monitoring mechanism with the lifting of sanctions, noting that Washington retains extensive economic pressure tools outside the UN framework.
For now, Beijing’s public position remains more cautious than some of the expectations being voiced in Iran: China has offered to play a constructive role in diplomacy, but has stopped short of announcing itself as a mediator between Tehran and Washington.
he current price of gasoline at a filling station in San Diego, California, U.S., August 19, 2026.
Democrats are intensifying attacks on President Donald Trump over the Iran war as the midterm elections approach, seeking to tie the six-month conflict to an issue closer to American voters’ wallets: the rising cost of gasoline and everyday goods.
Democratic lawmakers have increasingly portrayed the war not simply as a foreign-policy dispute but as a contributor to the cost-of-living pressures weighing on American households.
“There’s no plan. No strategy,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado said. “The President started a war with Iran that he doesn’t know how to win or get us out of. Americans are paying the price every day.”
The argument comes as disruptions to oil supplies and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have pushed energy prices sharply higher, making gasoline an increasingly prominent political issue ahead of the November elections.
Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut sought to connect those costs directly to the war, saying commuters were paying nearly $1 million more a day for gasoline than in July.
“This is a crisis that is only beginning,” she said. “We are about to enter a winter where millions of Americans will experience the disastrous effects of Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”
Public opinion suggests widespread concern over both the war and energy costs.
A Marquette Law School national poll conducted September 2-9 found that 80% of adults said gasoline prices had risen over the previous six months, including 55% who said they had risen “a lot.”
Only 20% approved of Trump’s handling of gasoline prices, while 80% disapproved. On Iran, 26% approved of his handling of the conflict and 73% disapproved, while 79% said the war had not been worth its cost.
Trump has continued to defend his approach while suggesting an end to the conflict may be approaching. He said this week that Iran wanted an agreement and that “hopefully we're toward the end of the war,” though negotiations remain stalled.
Vice President JD Vance has argued that ending US involvement could itself carry severe economic consequences, saying this week that leaving the region while Iran continued attacking shipping would risk a worldwide energy crisis.
Democrats, however, are increasingly trying to make the economic consequences of the war part of their argument to voters.
Representative Ro Khanna of California on Friday introduced what he called the Illegal War Refund Act, proposing $1,700 payments to taxpayers funded from the Defense Department budget.
“Trump’s illegal war in Iran has cost Americans in food and gas prices an estimated $230 billion,” Khanna said. “Today, I introduced the Illegal War Refund Act to put that money back in the pockets of Americans.”
The conflict continues more than six months after US and Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28. The US naval blockade has sharply restricted Iranian oil exports, while attacks on shipping and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have added pressure to global energy markets.
For Democrats, the prolonged war abroad and higher prices at home are increasingly becoming a single argument as the midterms approach.
