Oil Jumps as Iran’s War Expands from the Gulf to Lebanon and Gaza

The Iran-Israel conflict demonstrated its full geographic reach over the weekend, with fighting spreading from the Gulf to Lebanon and Gaza while Iranian strikes on Israeli-targeted oil facilities in Tehran helped push global crude above $100 per barrel. The scale of the violence underscored how thoroughly the conflict had overwhelmed any remaining boundaries.
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed four people in a hotel blast in Beirut and 12 more in attacks on the country’s south. Lebanese health authorities reported at least 394 deaths since fighting began, with roughly 300,000 people displaced. In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike killed at least two people, the deadliest incident in the territory since the wider conflict began.
Israeli strikes on oil storage facilities near Tehran killed four Iranian workers and left the capital shrouded in black smoke. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threatened to push global oil to $200 per barrel and launched fresh barrages against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, killing two Saudi civilians and wounding 12 others.
A US service member died from wounds sustained in an Iranian attack in Saudi Arabia, the seventh American killed in the conflict. Reports that Russia had been providing Iran with intelligence to target US military assets raised profound concerns about the war’s expanding geopolitical dimensions.
Iran’s clerical assembly added a political dimension by appointing Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader. His selection was historic, unprecedented, and widely condemned. With fighting now spanning six territories and oil above $100, the conflict had long since ceased to be a story about two countries and had become a crisis that the entire world was being asked to absorb.