AIRSTRIKES pounded Tehran on Tuesday, and Iranian officials urged young people to form human chains to protect power plants, hours before the expiration of US President Donald Trump’s latest deadline for the Islamic Republic to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz or face punishing strikes on its infrastructure. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said 14 million people, including himself, have volunteered to fight. While Iran cannot match the sophistication of US and Israeli weaponry or their dominance in the air, its chokehold on the strait is causing major damage to the world economy and raising the pressure on US President Donald Trump both at home and abroad to find a way out of the stand-off.

 

Officials involved in diplomatic efforts said talks were ongoing - but Iran has rejected the latest American proposal, and it was unclear if a deal would come in time to head off Trump’s threatened attacks. World leaders and experts warned that strikes as destructive as those Trump threatened could constitute a war crime. Meanwhile, a wave of strikes hit Iran, including in residential areas of Tehran, killing nearly three dozen people. Iran fired on Israel and Saudi Arabia, prompting the temporary closure of a major bridge.

 

Another strike hit the Khorramabad International Airport in western Iran, and an attack on an unidentified target in Alborz province, northwest of Tehran, killed 18 people, according to state media. Nine people were killed in the city of Shahriar and six more in Pardis in other airstrikes, Iranian media reported. In response, to Trump’s warning, Iran called on “all young people, athletes, artists, students, university students and their professors” to form human chains around power plants. “Power plants that are our national assets and capital,” Alireza Rahimi, identified by Iranian state television as the secretary of the Supreme Council of Youth and Adolescents, said in a video statement. Iranians have formed human chains in the past around nuclear sites at times of heightened tensions with the West. President Masoud Pezeshkian posted on X that 14 million Iranians had answered state media and text message campaigns urging people to volunteer to fight.

 

“I, too, have been, am, and will remain ready to give my life for Iran,” Pezeshkian wrote. A Revolutionary Guard general also urged parents to send their children to man checkpoints, which have been repeatedly targeted in airstrikes. Over 10,000 flights to West Asia cancelled since war began: MoCA official: OVER 10,000 flights by Indian carriers to West Asia have been cancelled since the war broke out in the region, a senior Civil Aviation Ministry official said on Tuesday. Indian carriers used to operate 300-350 daily flights to West Asia and the number has come down to 80-90, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation, Asangba Chuba Ao, told reporters during a media briefing. The war in West Asia broke out on February 28 when the US and Israel attacked Iran, and the latter retaliated.