Iran strikes Israel with missiles, dead in Haifa, Ramat Gan
Iran fired ballistic missiles directly at northern Israel on the evening of June 7, the first such attack since April, killing civilians in Haifa and Ramat Gan.
- Iran fired several volleys of ballistic missiles at northern Israel on the evening of June 7, its first direct attack since the truce of April 8.
- A missile with a cluster warhead hit a building in Ramat Gan and killed two residents in their seventies.
- In Haifa, four civilians died when part of an apartment block collapsed.
- Donald Trump called on both sides to halt the escalation, while Iraq closed its airspace for 72 hours.
On the evening of Sunday, June 7, Iran struck Israel directly with ballistic missiles for the first time since the truce reached on April 8, a development that Belgrade, which follows every shift in the Middle East because it feeds through energy prices and into the work of the UN Security Council, reads as the formal end of a fragile calm. The Revolutionary Guard named the operation True Promise 5 and framed it as retaliation for an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of Beirut carried out earlier that day.
Several missile volleys hit northern and central Israel within a short window. One missile carrying a cluster warhead came down on a residential building in Ramat Gan, a city east of Tel Aviv, killing two residents in their seventies. Another volley reached the port city of Haifa, where four civilians died after part of a high-rise collapsed. The Israeli military said it had activated the Iron Dome and Arrow systems and intercepted some of the projectiles, while also warning that its defenses were not airtight and that further launches were expected.
We intercepted missiles from Iran and identified additional launches toward Israel.
The escalation came in response to an Israeli air strike on the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold, in which two people were killed and up to twenty wounded, among them women and children. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the target had been a Hezbollah command center, an attempt by Israel to cast the strike as precise rather than as retaliation against civilians.
Why does this attack mark a turning point in a fragile truce?
The April 8 truce rested on an unspoken rule that neither side would strike the other’s territory directly, with the confrontation instead playing out through proxies in Lebanon and Syria. The Iranian missile attack on Israeli cities breaks exactly that rule, because for the first time in more than two months it moves the conflict from third-party ground into the heart of Israel and onto its civilian targets.
The political weight of the attack is visible in the rhetoric from Tehran. Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that American military bases in the region were now legitimate targets, widening the conflict from a bilateral Israel-Iran frame to possible US involvement. As an early reaction to fears of a wider war, Iraq closed its airspace for 72 hours, a sign of how quickly the fallout spills over to neighbors.
Washington’s response and what comes next
US President Donald Trump called on both sides to stop, a message read in Washington as an attempt to halt the escalation before it grows into open war.
Each of them got their shot off. Israel had its strike, Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one.
For European capitals this opens a familiar dilemma: how to react when one side reads a truce as a platform for new strikes and the other as grounds for direct retaliation. The next round will play out on two tracks at once, on the battlefield and through diplomatic channels, and its outcome will decide whether June 7 remains an isolated episode or the start of a wider war in the Middle East.
Will Washington’s call to stop be enough to restore the truce, or has the conflict already passed the point of no easy return?
