Emergency workers respond to a ballistic missile attack in which a couple in their 70s were killed, according to published reports, in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, Israel.

• Iran fired missiles toward Israel.
• A drone also caused damage at a Saudi Arabian oil refinery.
• Kataeb Hezbollah said it would conditionally pause attacks on the US embassy in Iraq.

An AFP journalist heard three blasts over the Tel Aviv area on Thursday, after the Israeli military announced it had detected missiles fired from Iran.

“A short while ago, the IDF identified missiles launched from Iran toward the territory of the State of Israel. Defensive systems are operating to intercept the threat,” the military said.

A drone crashed into the Saudi oil refinery Samref in the industrial zone of the Red Sea port of Yanbu, the defence ministry said, adding that a damage assessment was underway.

Earlier on Thursday, the ministry said on X that it had intercepted a ballistic missile targeting the port.

The Samref refinery is owned by the Saudi state energy giant Aramco and the Mobil Yanbu Refining Company, a subsidiary of US company ExxonMobil.

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A fire erupted at a second refinery owned by Kuwait’s national oil company after a drone attack, the information ministry said.

“One of the operational units of the Mina Abdullah refinery, belonging to the Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) was targeted by a drone attack, triggering a fire at the site,” the ministry said on X.

The company’s other oil refinery, Mina Al-Ahmadi, was also struck by a drone on Thursday, sparking a small blaze.

Qatar reported “extensive” damage on Thursday to the site of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility following Iranian strikes, sparking fears for global energy supplies and fresh threats from US President Donald Trump against Iran.

Tehran carried out attacks on Qatar’s huge Ras Laffan LNG facility in retaliation for an Israeli strike on Wednesday on Iran’s South Pars gas field, part of the world’s largest natural gas reservoir.

Oil prices soared 5% and European gas jumped by 35% on Thursday on fresh concerns about the impact on energy supplies of the nearly three-week-old Middle East war.

Trump warned Iran to stop attacks on Qatar, threatening to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field”.

In a post on social media, he said Washington “knew nothing” about the Israeli attack on South Pars, saying it had “violently lashed out” in “anger”.

He said that “no more attacks will be made by Israel” on South Pars unless Iran continues to attack Qatar, in which case the US “will massively blow up the entirety” of the gas field.

A pro-Iran group in Iraq vowed on Thursday to stop attacking the US embassy for five days, but only under certain conditions, including that Israel stop strikes on an area of Lebanon where its allies hold sway.

After a wave of attacks on the US embassy in Iraq’s capital Baghdad in recent days, AFP journalists reported no drone or rocket attacks so far from late Wednesday onward.

But on Thursday, two fighters from former paramilitary coalition Hashed al-Shaabi were killed in two separate strikes targeting their positions in northern Iraq, their group said.

Iraq has been drawn into the Middle East war triggered by the US-Israel attack on its neighbour Iran on 28 February.

Strikes have targeted Iran-backed groups, which in turn have claimed near daily attacks on US interests in Iraq and across the region.

Kataeb Hezbollah said the group’s secretary-general had “issued orders to suspend operations targeting the US Embassy in Baghdad for a period of five days”.