A US fighter jet has been shot down over Iran and a search and rescue operation was under way for any survivors, a US official said on Friday, in the first such known incident since the the war began on Feb 28.
Iran reportedly deployed troops and offered a bounty as it launched a hunt for the crew whose jet Iranian media said had been downed by the Islamic republic’s air defence systems.
The Pentagon and US Central Command did not respond to requests for comment.
The prospect of US pilots being alive and on the run inside Iran during an ongoing conflict greatly raises the stakes for the United States in the conflict. Iranian officials called on civilians to be on the lookout for survivors.
The governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province said that whomever captured or killed the crew “would be specially commended”, according to the semi-official Iranian news agency ISNA.
“Military forces have launched a search operation to find the American fighter pilot who was hit earlier today,” the Fars news agency said.
“Dear and honourable people of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, if you capture the enemy pilot or pilots alive and hand them over to the police and military forces, you will receive a valuable reward and bonus,” said an Iranian television reporter on the official local channel.
The report of the downed jet came as fresh strikes hit Israel, Iran and Gulf countries. Large blasts rocked northern Tehran on Friday afternoon, witnesses said. It was not immediately clear what was hit.
Earlier, Israel’s military reported a new missile salvo from Iran, activating its air defences.
The war started more than a month ago with US-Israeli strikes on Iran, triggering retaliation that spread the conflict throughout the Middle East, convulsing the global economy and impacting millions of people worldwide.
More economic sites targeted
Strikes by all sides have increasingly targeted economic and industrial sites, raising fears of wider disruption to global energy supplies and deepening the conflict’s impact beyond the battlefield.
The United States on Thursday struck Iran’s tallest bridge, and US President Donald Trump said there was more to come.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, he said the US military “hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!”
About 70% of Iran’s steel production capacity is disabled, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday, after Iran’s two largest steel plants earlier this week said they were forced out of action by several waves of US and Israeli air attacks.
Elsewhere, Iran’s former top diplomat said Tehran should make a deal with Washington to end the war by offering to curb its nuclear programme and reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief.
Tehran could “declare victory and make a deal that both ends this conflict and prevents the next one”, Mohammad Javad Zarif, foreign minister from 2013 to 2021, wrote in the US journal Foreign Affairs.
Iran has virtually blocked the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, where in peace time one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas passes through. As a result, fuel prices have skyrocketed worldwide.
Of the few ships that have managed to cross, most have had links to Iran, with 60% of commodity-bearing ships crossing the strait either coming from Iran or heading there, an AFP analysis of maritime data showed.
In the first known transit by a major European shipping group since March 1, the Maltese-flagged Kribi, belonging to the French maritime transport group CMA CGM, crossed the strait to exit the Gulf on Thursday.
Iran hits back
Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari warned that in response to Trump’s threats to attack infrastructure, Iran would increase its own attacks on energy sites in the region.
A drone attack on a refinery owned by Kuwait’s national oil company on Friday sparked fires at several of its units, state media said.
Later, an Iranian attack damaged a power and desalination complex, Kuwait’s water and electricity ministry said.
In Abu Dhabi, a gas complex shut after a fire broke out, following an attack the resulted in “falling debris” upon interception, the government media office said.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Friday it had struck more than 3,500 targets across Lebanon in the month since fighting with the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.
It added that it would attack two bridges in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa region “in order to prevent the transfer of reinforcements and military equipment”.
Lebanon’s health ministry said on Thursday that 1,345 people had been killed and 4,040 wounded since the start of the war, including 1,129 men, 91 women and 125 children.
Hezbollah has so far not announced its losses.
