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The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets.

(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne’s new novel “All The Broken Places,” a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior.

“I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas,” she says.

The woman, Gretel, quickly realizes her mistake: that “this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me.” She clarifies that she is referring to “the uniforms. … You know the ones I mean.”

Boyne’s readers are, in fact, likely to know what Gretel means, as “All The Broken Places” is a sequel to Boyne’s 2006 international bestseller “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” At a time when other Holocaust books intended for young readers have been challenged or removed from some American schools, the enduring popularity of “Striped Pajamas” has conjured up love and loathing in equal measure for its depiction of Nazi and Jewish youths during the Holocaust. It has sold 11 million copies, appeared in 58 languages and in major motion picture form, and been the only assigned reading about Jews or the Holocaust for countless schoolchildren, mostly in Britain. Yet Holocaust scholars have warned against it, panning it as inaccurate and trafficking in dangerous stereotypes about Jewish weakness.

Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his Dublin home on Tuesday, the day “All the Broken Places” hit U.S. shelves, Boyne said he hoped readers would take his new book on its own terms — as a more sophisticated meditation on guilt, culpability and evil, for an adult audience rather than children this time. But he also wants to defend the original work that made him famous.

“I do feel it’s a positive contribution to the world and to Holocaust studies,” said Boyne, who estimates that he has personally spoken to between 500 and 600 schools about “Striped Pajamas.”

Not everyone agrees. A 2016 study published by the Centre for Holocaust Education, a British organization housed at University College London, found that 35% of British teachers used his book in their Holocaust lesson plans, and that 85% of students who had consumed any kind of media related to the Holocaust had either read the book or seen its movie adaptation.

That level of widespread familiarity with the book led many students to inaccurate conclusions about the Holocaust, such as that the Nazis were “victims too” and that most Germans were unaware of the horrors being visited upon the Jewish people, the study found.

A promotional image from the 2008 film adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” (Miramax)

As overall awareness of the Holocaust has decreased among young people especially, Boyne’s novel has become a casualty of its own success. Holocaust scholars in the United Kingdom and United States have decried the book, with historian David Cesarani calling it “a travesty of facts” and “a distortion of history,” and the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre in London publishing a long takedown of the book’s inaccuracies and “stereotypes.”

“With the rise in antisemitism, such as it is in this country, and that so often manifests through trivialisation, distortion and denial of the Holocaust, this book could potentially do more harm than good,” Centre for Holocaust Education researcher Ruth-Anne Lenga concluded at the end of her 2016 study.

Boyne came to the Holocaust as subject matter purely on his own, having never been taught about the history growing up in Ireland. (He attended a Catholic school, where, as he has recounted publicly, he was physically and sexually abused by his teachers.) Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as a teenager, Boyne said, “made me want to understand more.”

He would read many more Holocaust books during his twenties, from Primo Levi to Anne Frank to “Sophie’s Choice,” fascinated by the sheer recency of the atrocity. “How could something that seems like it should have happened, say, 1,000 years ago — because the death count is so enormous and so horrifying — how could that happen so close to the time that I’m alive in?” he thought. “And if it could, then what’s to stop it happening again?”

That fascination led to the publication, when Boyne was 33, of “Striped Pajamas,” which he’d always conceived of as a children’s story. In the book, Bruno, the 9-year-old son of a Nazi commandant, befriends Shmuel, a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner of the same age; it ends with Bruno donning the “striped pajamas” and following his friend into the gas chambers. Further driving home the fable conceit, an initial draft included a framing device of Boyne as a character reading the story to an audience of children, before an editor advised him to cut it.

During his writing process, Boyne said he was concerned with “the emotional truth of the novel” as opposed to holding to historical accuracy, and defended much of the book’s ahistorical details — such as moving the Auschwitz guards’ living quarters to outside the camp, and putting no armed guards or electric fences between Bruno and Shmuel — as creative license. A common critique of the book, that the climax encourages the reader to mourn the death of Bruno over that of Shmuel and the other Jews in the camps, makes no sense to Boyne: “I struggle to understand somebody who would reach the end of that book and only feel sympathy for Bruno. I think then if somebody does, I think that says more, frankly, about their antisemitism than anything else.”

He also justified his decisions by reasoning that a novel like his shouldn’t be the basis for Holocaust instruction.

“I don’t think that it’s my responsibility, as a novelist who didn’t write a school book, to justify its use in education when I never asked for that to happen,” he said. “If [teachers] make the choice to use a novel in their classrooms, it’s their responsibility to make sure the children know that there is a difference between what happens in this novel and what happened in real life.”

Boyne added that he was “appalled” by a recent JTA report about a Tennessee school district removing Art Spiegelman’s graphic Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum. If teachers are choosing between teaching the two books, he said, “‘Maus’ is better, no question about that. And a much more important book.” (Earlier this year, Spiegelman himself took a swipe at “Striped Pajamas” by telling a Tennessee audience that no schools should read Boyne’s novel because “that guy didn’t do any research whatsoever.”)

“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” John Boyne’s 2006 bestseller, has been critiqued for the way it presented the Holocaust to children. (Illustration by Grace Yagel)

For the first decade of his book’s release, Boyne would frequently receive invites to speak at Jewish community centers and Holocaust museums. He met with survivors who shared their stories with him.

Over the years, more research has been published about the book’s popularity in the classroom, which has led to more scrutiny of its factual inaccuracies. Other authors, Holocaust researchers and some educators have come out forcefully against the book’s use in the classroom. At the same time, Boyne said, his invitations to Jewish venues dried up.

The author has also been known to exacerbate the issue by sparring with his critics, even when they are respected institutions. Most infamously, in 2020, Boyne got into a Twitter feud with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, which said his Auschwitz-set book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust.”

The back-and-forth was provoked after Boyne criticized what he saw as the crassness of more recent Holocaust novels, such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by Heather Morris. Reflecting on the spat, Boyne said of the Auschwitz memorial, “I hope that they do understand that, whether my book is a masterpiece or a travesty, that I came at it with the very best intentions.”

Boyne conceived of the sequel shortly after finishing “Striped Pajamas.” It follows Bruno’s older sister Gretel as she lives in hiding after the war and successfully conceals her Nazi upbringing all the way into the present day. A preteen during the Holocaust, Gretel becomes gradually more aware of its horrors after seeing newspaper articles and documentaries and encountering former Resistance members and Jewish descendants of survivors (including one, David, who becomes her lover without knowing her true background).

Unlike “Striped Pajamas,” “All the Broken Places” is intended for adults. It’s filled with sex, violence, suicide attempts and bad language — and also some of the details of the Holocaust that were omitted from the first book. It mentions the Sobibor death camp by name, for example, and also takes the time to correct Bruno’s childish assumptions about the death camps being a “farm.”

But it tells the story from the perspective of a German who was directly implicated in the Holocaust. Throughout, Gretel reflects on her complicity in the Nazi regime, and her self-interest in hiding from authorities in the following years rather than trying to bring people like her father to justice. Missing from the book is any serious discussion of antisemitism as an ideology, and to what extent Gretel ascribes to it — though there is plenty of hand-wringing over postwar anti-German sentiment. In one shocking moment, a former S.S. lieutenant in hiding presents Gretel with a pair of Hitler’s eyeglasses and urges her to try them on; she is terrified to discover that this excites her.

The book’s reception has been mixed. While praised by publications including Kirkus Reviews (“a complex, thoughtful character study”) and the Guardian (“a defense of literature’s need to shine a light on the darkest aspects of human nature”), the New Statesman took Boyne to task for writing an “immoral” and “shameless sequel” that further erodes the “Jewishness” of the Holocaust.

At the behest of his publisher, Boyne has included an author’s note with “All The Broken Places” alluding to criticisms of “Striped Pajamas.” “Writing about the Holocaust is a fraught business and any novelist approaching it takes on an enormous burden of responsibility,” he tells the reader. “The story of every person who died in the Holocaust is one that is worth telling. I believe that Gretel’s story is also worth telling.”

Still, “Striped Pajamas” has its Jewish defenders. One, the 24-year-old composer Noah Max, is behind a new opera adaptation of the book, to be titled “The Child in the Striped Pyjamas.” It will debut in London in January; a recent story by the U.K. Jewish Chronicle helped convince the film’s rights holder Miramax to waive a $1 million licensing fee for the project.

A great-grandson of Jews who fled Vienna when the Nazis arrived, Max told JTA he’d initially read the book “years before I was capable of absorbing testimony,” and that it inspired him to seek out actual survivor testimonies and to begin composing the opera at the age of 19. He compared its message to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ writings on moral relativism.

“Ultimately, the book motivated me to write an opera about the Shoah and integrate Holocaust education into my music,” Max said. “Any book capable of that is worthy of attention.”

Composer Noah Max (center) rehearses for his upcoming opera adaptation of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” to premiere in January 2023. (Courtesy of Noah Max)

Max’s passion for “Striped Pajamas” inspired at least one Holocaust group to change its mind about its educational merits. The Holocaust Educational Trust, a London-based group that advocates British educators on how to teach the Holocaust, had as recently as 2020 declared that “we advise against using” the book in the classroom.

But following what Max described as “richly fulfilling conversations” about “the story’s symbolic and artistic worth,” the trust fully endorsed the opera and, he said, has begun to rethink its view of the book. (The group did not respond to a JTA request for comment.)

Even with 16 years of hindsight and the chance to rethink his bestseller, Boyne said he wouldn’t change anything. Reflecting on his youthful audience, he said, “If they weren’t reading ‘Striped Pajamas,’ it’s more likely they would be reading something that has no relevance to this subject at all.”


The post The sequel to the Holocaust novel ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’ is here. Its author has no regrets. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades

In the 1950s, Younes Dardashti, a Jewish man from Tehran’s Jewish ghetto, became one of Iran’s most celebrated singers. As the country underwent rapid secularization under the Shah, Jewish communities that had long been pushed to the margins found new opportunities. Dardashti’s piercing, unmistakable voice filled Iranian airwaves, exclusive concert halls and the Shah’s palace, earning him the title “Nightingale of Iran.”

Years after Younes Dardashti’s death, his granddaughter Galeet is still singing with him in New York.

Using archival recordings of her grandfather’s voice, Galeet Dardashti created her album Monajat — meaning an intimate conversation with God — layering her vocals over decades-old tapes of him singing Selihot, religious poetry chanted nightly before the Jewish New Year.

Galeet Dardashti and her grandfather, Younes Dardashti Courtesy of Galeet Dardashti

Across the country in Los Angeles, Cantor Jacqueline Rafii is also trying to preserve her Iranian grandfather’s traditional Jewish Persian music.

While in cantorial school, Rafii rediscovered cassette tapes made of her grandfather leading a Passover seder in Tehran. When her family was forced to flee the country following the Islamic Revolution in 1979, they brought that cassette tape with them.

“It was like a time capsule,” said Rafii.

She realized that those grainy and distorted recordings captured a Persian Jewish musical tradition that had only ever been passed down orally from generation to generation. In the diaspora, Rafii worried, they might disappear.

​​So Rafii sat at the piano with her father to turn what she heard on those old cassette tapes into sheet music so that others might replicate the music Iranian Jews have been singing for centuries.

“We were trying to take this distorted tape from the ’70s and plunk out the notes,” she said. “To write something that had never been written before.”

What began with a single tape became a larger project. Rafii set out to collect and notate as many Persian Jewish melodies as she could. She put out a call on social media to try to find people who remembered Jewish prayers from Iran. Eventually, she found Dardashti, who taught Rafii her grandfather’s Yom Kippur melody for “El Nora Alila.” 

A transcription challenge

According to Dardashti, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and specializes in Mizrahi culture and music, Jews have played an important role in Persian musical life for centuries.

After the 7th century, when Muslim forces conquered Persia, there were periods during which non-religious music was restricted under Islamic law. Because Jews were classified as najis, or “impure,” they faced limitations on the types of occupations they could legally pursue. Music, being a marginalized and often stigmatized profession, was typically avoided by Muslims. This made it a particularly viable livelihood for Jews who often performed the jobs that were restricted to Muslims.

Because of this, religious minorities, namely Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians, were responsible for sustaining Persian musical traditions when Muslims could not.

Classical Persian music often features singers interpreting the poetry of figures like Hafez or Rumi. One of its defining features is tahrir, a rapid oscillation in the voice that can sound like a controlled break or yodel, used to convey emotional intensity.

The music relies on modal systems and tonal structures distinct from Western scales. It also includes microtones — notes that fall between the pitches used in Western scales and cannot be easily represented on a standard musical staff. To make the melodies accessible, Rafii notates them “in a format that would be compatible with Western music,” eliminating some (but not all) of those microtones, adding chords to mimic their sound, and establishing a regular meter.

Persian Jewish music draws directly from this tradition, applying its musical forms to Jewish liturgy — Torah chanting, High Holiday prayers, and religious poetry — as well as to songs about daily life written in Judeo-Persian.

“It’s really about interpreting a text,” Dardashti said. “Just as a Persian classical singer would interpret a poem, in Persian Jewish music you’re interpreting Hebrew liturgy in a very similar way.”

For centuries, this music was transmitted entirely orally, passed down from generation to generation, with each singer adding their own interpretation and stylistic flair. During the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from the 1940s through 1979, Jews enjoyed a golden age in Iran. Jewish musicians, who often came from lineages of family members who had been making music for centuries, moved to the fore and became nationally recognized stars. Dardashti’s grandfather was perhaps the most prominent. Because Israel and Iran had good relations at the time, he frequently traveled between the two countries to share his talents.

Younes Dardashti became a cantor at synagogues across Tehran. Because his chanting was done in a musical style Iranians of all faiths were used to hearing on the radio, Galeet Dardashti says, non-Jews would press their ears to the doors of the synagogue to hear her grandfather’s voice.

A tradition passed down by men

Traditionally, Persian Jewish liturgical music was preserved and performed almost exclusively by men because of Jewish religious norms that limited women’s public singing. Now in the diaspora, that chain of transmission has begun to break down, with fewer and fewer Iranian Jews learning the songs their parents and grandparents once sang.

Rafii says she has faced obstacles in “expressing her cantorial pursuits” to more traditional members of the Persian community in the U.S., where women’s singing is still not embraced. And while she is unsure whether she will “ever in her lifetime … share these melodies personally in such communities,” she remains “hopeful that her work may be useful” to those seeking to transmit Persian Jewish music to the next generation.

For Dardashti, singing Persian Jewish music as a woman is just another layer of the reinvention that has been a feature of Persian Jewish music for generations. Though she too does not perform her music in Orthodox Iranian Jewish settings, she embraces the unique role she can play in leading services for Reform and Conservative Iranian Jews, for whom Ashkenazi-style music is often the default.

“I feel like right now this community needs me; there aren’t many people who can do this work and are willing to do it in an egalitarian setting,” said Dardashti. For the last few years, she has led high holiday services in the traditional Persian style at Kanisse, an egalitarian Jewish community for Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in New York City.

Though both Rafii and Dardashti are Iranian, neither grew up immersed in Persian Jewish musical traditions.

Like many Iranian Jews who came to the United States after the revolution, their families entered a Jewish landscape dominated by Ashkenazi practice. Dardashti’s father, himself a cantor, trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where the focus was almost entirely Ashkenazi. “I grew up the daughter of a Persian cantor who was singing Ashkenazi music,” Dardashti said.

“In order to learn Persian Jewish music, I had to start from scratch,” she added. “I knew nothing.”

She turned to her father, asking him to teach her the melodies he had grown up with in Iran but had not performed formally since coming to the U.S.

Her work, while rooted in a desire to preserve Persian Jewish music, is not without experimentation. Dardashti adds her own flair to her grandfather’s music, laying his vocals over her band and arrangement. “I’m also reinventing, because music isn’t static. Cultural transmission is messy — everyone changes things. So I lean into that messiness.”

Connecting cantors across cultures

Rafii is also continuing to transmit Persian Jewish music in an unconventional way by bringing it to Ashkenazi audiences.

When she entered cantorial school, she said, there were no formal pathways to train in non-European musical traditions. Now, she says cantors from across the country — “in particular, Ashkenazic cantors” — have reached out to her for Persian Jewish sheet music and guidance on incorporating these melodies into their services.

“They want to share how diverse the Jewish family is,” she said. “Now that there’s sheet music for Persian Jewish music, it’s accessible, and they can offer it to their community.”

Dozens of non-Persian cantors have already begun including these melodies in their services.

At Valley Beth Shalom, a largely Ashkenazi congregation in Los Angeles, Rafii regularly weaves her grandfather’s Persian tunes into worship and teaches them to the synagogue’s youth choir.

“I like to include them as part of an everyday service,” she said. “Why don’t we just combine the melodies and make this part of the American Jewish experience?”

 

The post Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades appeared first on The Forward.

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Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew

At our campus Seder this week, I found myself talking to a student about Passover as a holiday of memory. She seemed puzzled and asked me to explain. The Seder plate, the ritual of reclining, and the talk of freedom, I told her, were all meant as reminders of enslavement in Egypt. Of course, she knew that. But I told her that even before the Jews cross the Red Sea to escape bondage, the Torah says something like “you better remember this!” Just after the final plagues — the killing of the first born — are visited upon the Egyptians, but before the Israelites escape from slavery, God tells Moses how the Passover holiday will be a commemoration of the events about to take place!

This day shall be to you one of remembrance: you shall celebrate it as a festival to GOD throughout the ages; you shall celebrate it as an institution for all time. Ex 12:14

You shall observe the [Feast of] Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day throughout the ages as an institution for all time. Ex 12:17

The commemoration of liberation, and the memory of bondage, are given sacred status — and even prior to the liberation itself. The festive meal, the Passover Seder, is a communal insistence on memory. And this insistence is not restricted to what happened to other people in the distant past. The Torah’s word for remembering here is zakhor, which means something closer to “reliving” than to what we usually think of historical recollection. We are slaves in Egypt, just as we are at the foot of Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments.

As it so happens, during Pesach this year I am also working at Wesleyan University on a national program to encourage college students to protect our democracy by participating in it. Inspired by the students who went to Mississippi in 1964 to register Black voters in the face of violent suppression, we launched Democracy Summer 2026, a nonpartisan call to young people to strengthen their democratic muscles by using them. We are mindful of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as we build programs along with colleges and universities across the country that aim to remind our fellow citizens of the importance of exercising our powers as constituents of this constitutional republic. The mission statements of educational institutions — from small private religious schools to large public universities — express an obligation to contribute to the public sphere. When we do contribute, we are participating in history, learning about ourselves and the world around us; we contribute to our institutions and to the country whose freedoms allow them to fulfill their purposes.

As part of this work, I’ve been rereading Danielle Allen’s wonderful Our Declaration (2015), a book that helps us through a slow reading of a core founding document. Allen describes teaching the Declaration of Independence to a group of working adults in a night class in Chicago and how by doing so she came to appreciate its famous words more profoundly than ever: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She came to see these words (and the Declaration as a whole) as aimed at her and her students — that they were part of that “WE,” members of the political community that recognized the power of these truths. This realization didn’t happen right away. At first her students thought that the Declaration represented “institutions and power, everything that solidified a world that had, as life turned out, delivered them so much grief, so much to overcome.” They had to make the document their own to see themselves as participants in its legacy.

These students “regifted” the Declaration to Allen by helping her see its argument for political equality as her own political patrimony. The founding fathers would not have seen it this way: Allen is a Black woman whom they would not have recognized as a citizen. But by reading the text slowly and carefully with her students, she and they claimed it as their rightful inheritance: “an understanding of freedom and equality, and of the value of finding the right words.”

In Torah study, I strive for something similar to this claiming of an inheritance. Such a  claim, I find, is also what we are meant to feel when we read the Haggadah at our Seders. I study not to acquire expertise about holy texts but to participate in an ongoing conversation about enduring questions. Through the teaching that we were slaves in Egypt, we are meant to feel how it is to be oppressed and to consider our obligation to claim our freedoms, an essential step in developing a people. And we are also meant to help other groups escape oppression, make good on claims for liberation that resonate with our story. This is not only for the week of Passover. Rashi teaches that we must make mention of the exodus from Egypt every day. Every day we must claim our freedom and, we might add, find the right words for others to do so.

This is also the message of our summer call to action this year. As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, let us claim our political patrimony, our rightful inheritance. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: it is our republic so let us keep it!

The post Passover liberation and US liberty both summon us to remember and renew appeared first on The Forward.

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Downed Planes Raise New Perils for Trump as Tehran Hunts for Missing US Pilot

Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Two US warplanes were downed over Iran and the Gulf, Iranian and US officials said on Friday, with two pilots rescued and a third still missing and being hunted by Tehran’s forces.

The incidents show the risks still faced by US and Israeli aircraft over Iran despite assertions from US President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that their forces had total control of the skies.

The first plane, a two-seat US F-15E jet, was shot down by Iranian fire, officials in both countries said.

The second plane, an A-10 Warthog fighter aircraft, was hit by Iranian fire and crashed over Kuwait, with the pilot ejecting, two US officials said.

Two Blackhawk helicopters involved in the search effort for the missing pilot were hit by Iranian fire but made it out of Iranian airspace, the two US officials told Reuters.

The degree of injuries among the crew of the aircraft remained unclear. The status and whereabouts of the missing F-15E crew member was not publicly known.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it was combing an area near where the pilot’s plane came down in southwestern Iran and the regional governor promised a commendation for anyone who captured or killed “forces of the hostile enemy.”

Iranians, who have been pummeled by American air power for weeks, posted gleeful messages celebrating the plane downings. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the U.S. and Israel’s war had been “downgraded from regime change” to a hunt for their pilots.

Trump has been in the White House receiving updates on the search-and-rescue operation, a senior administration official told Reuters. The Pentagon and US Central Command did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

NO SIGN OF END TO WAR

The prospect of a US service person being alive and on the run inside Iran raises the stakes for Washington in a conflict with low public support and no sign of an imminent end.

Iran has officially told mediators it is not prepared to meet with US officials in Islamabad in coming days and that efforts to produce a ceasefire, led by Pakistan, have reached a dead end, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The US and Israel opened the campaign with a wave of strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. The war has killed thousands and threatened lasting damage to the global economy.

So far, 13 US military service members have been killed in the conflict and more than 300 have been wounded, according to the US Central Command.

Iran has rained down drones and missiles on Israel. It has also taken aim at Gulf countries allied to the US, which have so far held back from joining the war directly for fear of further escalation.

In a security alert on Friday, the US embassy in Beirut said Iran and its aligned armed groups may target universities in Lebanon and urged US citizens in the country to leave while commercial flights are still available.

Israel has been waging a parallel campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon after the militant group fired at Israel in support of Iran.

TRUMP THREAT TO STRIKE BRIDGES, POWER PLANTS

On Friday, as Trump threatened to hit its bridges and power plants, Iran struck a power and water plant in Kuwait, underlining the vulnerability of Gulf states that rely heavily on desalination plants for drinking water.

On Thursday, Trump posted footage on social media showing dust and smoke billowing up as US strikes hit the newly constructed B1 bridge between Tehran and nearby Karaj, which was due to open this year, and said more attacks would follow.

“Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) anywhere in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he wrote in a subsequent post.

On Friday, a drone hit a Red Crescent relief warehouse in the Choghadak area of Iran’s southern Bushehr province.

Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery had been hit by drones. Other attacks were also reported to have been intercepted in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi. Missile debris landed near the Israeli port of Haifa, site of a major oil refinery.

Oil markets were closed after benchmark U.S. crude prices gained 11% on Thursday following a speech by Trump that offered no clear sign of an imminent end to the war.

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